Circular Ecologies
Circular Ecologies

Author: Amy Zhang

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2024-07-09

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 1503639304

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After four decades of reform and development, China is confronting a domestic waste crisis. As the world's largest waste-generating nation, the World Economic Forum projects that by 2030, the volume of household waste in China will be double that of the United States. Starting in the early 2000s, Chinese policymakers came to see waste management as an object of environmental governance central to the creation of "modern" cities, and experimented with the circular economy, in which technology and policy could convert all forms of waste back into resources. Based on long-term research in Guangzhou, Circular Ecologies critically analyzes the implementation of technologies and infrastructures to modernize a mega-city's waste management system, and the grassroots ecological politics that emerged in response. In Guangzhou, waste's transformation revealed uncomfortable truths about China's environmental governance: a preference for technology over labor, the aestheticization of order, and the expropriation of value in service of an ecological vision. Amy Zhang argues that in post-reform China, waste—the material vestige of decades of growth and increasing consumption—is a systemic irritant that troubles China's technocratic governance. Waste provoked an unlikely coalition of urban communities, from the middle class to precarious migrant workers, that came to constitute a nascent, bottom-up environmental politics, and offers a model for conceptualizing ecological action under authoritarian conditions.

Handbook of the Circular Economy
Handbook of the Circular Economy

Author: Miguel Brandão

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

Published: 2020-12-25

Total Pages: 544

ISBN-13: 1788972724

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This crucial Handbook brings together the latest thinking on the circular economy, an area that has increasingly caught global attention. Contributors explore a broad range of themes such as recycling systems and new business models, as well as consolidating the many ways in which the topic has been dealt with in research, business and policy-making. The Handbook of the Circular Economy is not only relevant, but also essential for students, academics, and policy-makers trying to make sense of the plethora of ways in which the term has been applied and interpreted.

Infrastructural Ecologies
Infrastructural Ecologies

Author: Hillary Brown

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2017-07-07

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 0262036339

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An integrated, holistic model for infrastructure planning and design in developing countries. Many emerging nations, particularly those least developed, lack basic critical infrastructural services—affordable energy, clean drinking water, dependable sanitation, and effective public transportation, along with reliable food systems. Many of these countries cannot afford the complex and resource-intensive systems based on Western, single-sector, industrialized models. In this book, Hillary Brown and Byron Stigge propose an alternate model for planning and designing infrastructural services in the emerging market context. This new model is holistic and integrated, resilient and sustainable, economical and equitable, creating an infrastructural ecology that is more analogous to the functioning of natural ecosystems. Brown and Stigge identify five strategic infrastructure objectives and illustrate each with examples of successful projects from across the developing world. Each chapter also highlights exemplary preindustrial systems, demonstrating the long history of resilient, sustainable infrastructure. The case studies describe the use of single solutions to solve multiple problems, creating hybridized and reciprocal systems; “soft path” models for water management, including water reuse and nutrient recovery; post carbon infrastructures for power, heat, and transportation such as rural microhydro and solar-powered rickshaws; climate adaptation systems, including a multi-purpose tunnel and a “floating city”; and the need for community-based, equitable, and culturally appropriate projects.

Ecologies of Inception
Ecologies of Inception

Author: Simone Ferracina

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-05-31

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 1000543269

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Responding to increasing levels of planetary pollution, waste generation, carbon dioxide emission and environmental collapse, Ecologies of Inception re-thinks potentiality—an object’s ability to change—in architecture and design. The book problematizes the still-prevailing modern paradigm of design practice: the technical tabula rasa, a tendency to begin from scratch and use raw, amorphous, and obedient materials that can be easily and effectively manipulated, facilitating a seamless and faithful embodiment of intentions. Instead, the philosophy of design developed in the text prompts—through a variety of case studies, thinkers, and disciplines—a collective reconsideration of value, dissociating it from the projects and signatures of any one author or generation. Whereas the merits of up-cycling and circular design are canonically defined vis-à-vis status-quo economic and socio-cultural orthodoxies, this project unpacks the theoretical assumptions that underpin these practices, showing that they perpetuate the same biases and exclusions that generate waste in the first place. As an alternative, the book introduces a nodal and exaptive paradigm for design: a conceptual and methodological toolset for engaging the durational and anthropocenic materiality of the third millennium, and for radically prioritizing practices of maintenance, reuse, care, and co-option. This approach, which is inspired by (and builds upon) evolutionary biology, technological disobedience, queer use, adaptive reuse, experimental preservation, and improvisational practices such as collage, adhocism, bricolage, and kit-bashing, refuses to reduce pre-existing material substrates to abstract lists of properties or featureless lumps, encountering them on their own terms—as situated individuals and co-authors. Ecologies of Inception will appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students, educators, and professional architects and designers interested in sustainable design and seeking to develop conceptual and design tools commensurate with the magnitude and urgency of the climate emergency.

The Circular Economy in Europe
The Circular Economy in Europe

Author: Roger Strand

Publisher:

Published: 2019-12-12

Total Pages: 194

ISBN-13: 9780429061028

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"The Circular Economy in Europe presents an overview and a critical discussion on how circularity is conceived, imagined and enacted in current EU policy-making. In 2013, the idea of a circular economy entered the stage of European policy-making in the efforts to reconcile environmental and economic policy objectives. In 2019 the European Commission declared in a press release that the Circular Economy Action Plan has been delivered. The level of circularity in the European economy, however, has remained the same. Bringing together perspectives from social sciences, environmental economics and policy analysis, The Circular Economy in Europe provides a critical analysis of policies and promises of the next panacea for growth and sustainability. The authors provide a theoretical and empirical basis to discuss how contemporary societies conceive their need to re-organise production and consumption and explores the messy assemblage of institutions, actors, waste streams, biophysical flows, policy objectives, scientific disciplines, values, expectations, promises and aspirations involved. This book is essential reading for all those interested in understanding how ideas about the circular economy emerged historically, how they gained traction and are used in policy processes, and what the practical challenges in implementing this policy are"--

Ecologies of Participation
Ecologies of Participation

Author: Zayin Cabot

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2018-04-30

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 1498568165

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In this daring debut, Zayin Cabot challenges the wise homebodies of academia. A profoundly interdisciplinary approach to comparative scholarship, Ecologies of Participation offers a methodology whereby we can face our shared planetary predicament. It is grounded in process philosophy, and asserts the importance of a new ontology of agency. It traces the importance of Lévy-Bruhl and Lévi-Strauss’s early work, while offering new insight into the ontological turn in anthropology. This book sets out to destabilize modern reductionist trends toward scientific materialism, without falling into postmodern cultural constructivism. It does not assume the givenness of nature or culture. By advancing a multi-ontology approach, this work offers robust interventions into decolonial and critical studies. Cabot takes contemporary scholarship in new and exciting directions—offering an unstable ground from which to examine our shared worlds, both human and other. Throughout the last chapters of the book, these threads are illuminated through a detailed ethics of comparison and participation.

Three Cultural Ecologies
Three Cultural Ecologies

Author: David Leatherbarrow

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-08-23

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 1317094743

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Three Cultural Ecologies reverses common conceptions of modern architecture. It reveals how selected works of two modern architects, Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright, embraced environmental and cultural conditions as reciprocal and complementary. A basic premise of this book’s arguments is that cultural patterns cannot be adequately conceptualized in the terms that typically define ecology today. Instead, studies based on the natural sciences must be complemented by descriptions and interpretations of historical narratives, cultural norms, and individual expressions. Previously unpublished images and new interpretations will allow readers to rediscover works they thought they knew; Villa Savoye, Taliesin, La Tourette, and Ocatilla; as well as projects that are less well known: by Wright, the House on the Mesa and the City Residential Plan, and by Le Corbusier, the Immeuble-villas and Ilôt Insalubre projects. More broadly, this study of cultural ecology at three scales – domestic, monastic, and urban – reconsiders the history of modern architecture. The conditions brought about by societal and technological modernization and confronted by modern architecture have not disappeared in our time, but have intensified, making the task of imagining how some measure of equilibrium between culture and ecology might be achieved even more pressing.

Ecologies and Politics of Health
Ecologies and Politics of Health

Author: Brian King

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-05-07

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 1136295534

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Human health exists at the interface of environment and society. Decades of work by researchers, practitioners, and policy-makers has shown that health is shaped by a myriad of factors, including the biophysical environment, climate, political economy, gender, social networks, culture, and infrastructure. Yet while there is emerging interest within the natural and social sciences on the social and ecological dimensions of human disease and health, there have been few studies that address them in an integrated manner. Ecologies and Politics of Health brings together contributions from the natural and social sciences to examine three key themes: the ecological dimensions of health and vulnerability, the socio-political dimensions of human health, and the intersections between the ecological and social dimensions of health. The thirteen case study chapters collectively present results from Africa, Asia, Latin America, the United States, Australia, and global cities. Section one interrogates the utility of several theoretical frameworks and conventions for understanding health within complex social and ecological systems. Section two concentrates upon empirically grounded and quantitative work that collectively redefines health in a more expansive way that extends beyond the absence of disease. Section three examines the role of the state and management interventions through historically rich approaches centering on both disease- and non-disease-related examples from Latin America, Eastern Africa, and the United States. Finally, Section four highlights how health vulnerabilities are differentially constructed with concomitant impacts for disease management and policy interventions. This timely volume advances knowledge on health-environment interactions, disease vulnerabilities, global development, and political ecology. It offers theoretical and methodological contributions which will be a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners in geography, public health, biology, anthropology, sociology, and ecology.

Structures and Architecture - Bridging the Gap and Crossing Borders
Structures and Architecture - Bridging the Gap and Crossing Borders

Author: Paulo J.S. Cruz

Publisher: CRC Press

Published: 2019-07-08

Total Pages: 1223

ISBN-13: 1351858157

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Structures and Architecture – Bridging the Gap and Crossing Borders contains the lectures and papers presented at the Fourth International Conference on Structures and Architecture (ICSA2019) that was held in Lisbon, Portugal, in July 2019. It also contains a multimedia device with the full texts of the lectures presented at the conference, including the 5 keynote lectures, and almost 150 selected contributions. The contributions on creative and scientific aspects in the conception and construction of structures, on advanced technologies and on complex architectural and structural applications represent a fine blend of scientific, technical and practical novelties in both fields. ICSA2019 covered all major aspects of structures and architecture, including: building envelopes/façades; comprehension of complex forms; computer and experimental methods; futuristic structures; concrete and masonry structures; educating architects and structural engineers; emerging technologies; glass structures; innovative architectural and structural design; lightweight and membrane structures; special structures; steel and composite structures; structural design challenges; tall buildings; the borderline between architecture and structural engineering; the history of the relationship between architects and structural engineers; the tectonic of architectural solutions; the use of new materials; timber structures, among others. This set of book and multimedia device is intended for a global readership of researchers and practitioners, including architects, structural and construction engineers, builders and building consultants, constructors, material suppliers and product manufacturers, and other professionals involved in the design and realization of architectural, structural and infrastructural projects.

Digital Media Ecologies
Digital Media Ecologies

Author: Sy Taffel

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2019-10-31

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 1501349260

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Our digital world is often described using terms such as immateriality and virtuality. The discourse of cloud computing is the latest in a long line of nebulous, dematerialising tropes which have come to dominate how we think about information and communication technologies. Digital Media Ecologies argues that such rhetoric is highly misleading, and that engaging with the key cultural, agential, ethical and political impacts of contemporary media requires that we do not just engage with the surface level of content encountered by the end users of digital media, but that we must additionally consider the affordances of software and hardware. Whilst numerous existing approaches explore content, software and hardware individually, Digital Media Ecologies provides a critical intervention by insisting that addressing contemporary technoculture requires a synthetic approach that traverses these three registers. Digital Media Ecologies re-envisions the methodological approach of media ecology to go beyond the metaphor of a symbolic information environment that exists alongside a material world of tantalum, turtles and tornados. It illustrates the social, cultural, political and environmental impacts of contemporary media assemblages through examples that include mining conflict-sustaining minerals, climate change blogging, iOS jailbreaking, and the ecological footprint of contemporary computing infrastructures. Alongside foregrounding the deleterious social and environmental impacts of digital technologies, the book considers numerous ways that these issues are being tackled by a heterogeneous array of activists, academics, hackers, scientists and citizens using the same technological assemblages that ostensibly cause these problems.