This volume focuses on the close relationship between geomorphology and environmental impact assessment, and provides a wide-ranging overview of this topic. It includes several case studies covering a variety of environmental impacts derived from human activities (quarrying, communication infrastructure etc.) on different geomorphologic components (landforms, soil, landscapes etc.) and environments (glacial, fluvial, coastal etc.) The case studies presented offer a methodological guide from the most traditional geomorphological approaches through to the use of spatial data analysis and GIS tools and techniques. Environmental Impact Assessment is a relatively new scientific branch in which a wide variety of specialists are increasingly becoming involved. This volume will be of interest to geomorphologists, biologists, geographers, architects and engineers.
Every 20 years since 1920, Madrid has undergone an urban planning cycle in which a city plan was prepared, adopted by law, and implemented by a new institution. This preparation-adoption-institutionalization sequence, along with the institution's structures and procedures, have persisted - with some exceptions - despite frequent upheavals in society. The planning institution itself played a lead role in maintaining continuity, traumatic history notwithstanding. Why and how was this the case? Madrid's planners, who had mostly trained as architects, invented new images for the city and metro region: images of urban space that were social constructs, the products of planning processes. These images were tools that coordinated planning and urban policy. In a complex, fragmented institutional milieu in which scores of organized interests competed in overlapping policy arenas, images were a cohesive force around which plans, policies, and investments were shaped. Planners in Madrid also used their images to build new institutions. Images began as city or metropolitan designs or as a metaphor capturing a new vision. New political regimes injected their principles and beliefs into the governing institution via images and metaphors. These images went a long way in constituting the new institution, and in helping realize each regime's goals. This empirically-based life cycle theory of institutional evolution suggests that the constitutional image sustaining the institution undergoes a change or is replaced by a new image, leading to a new or reformed institution. A life cycle typology of institutional transformation is formulated with four variables: type of change, stimulus for change, type of constitutional image, and outcome of the transformation. By linking the life cycle hypothesis with cognitive theories of image formation, and then situating their synthesis within a frame of cognition as a means of structuring the institution, this book arrives at a new theory
The Entec Directory of Environmental Technology, European Edition is the only comprehensive reference to cover producers and users of goods and services in these areas of environmental concern: Water Air Solid waste Hazardous waste Noise vibration Energy Information, including up-to-date names and addresses, is featured for more than 20,000 companies from the 20 countries of Western Europe. Thousands of products, processes, and services have been categorized under 865 specific products and service groups. Never before has such a massive reference to European environmental goods and services been compiled. The book will be invaluable to anyone in government, industry, science and education, or the professional arena who would like to utilize European environmental technology.
Spatial planning is a significant part of geosciences that is developing very rapidly. Many new methods and modeling techniques like GIS (Geographical Information Systems), GPS (Global Positioning Systems) or remote sensing techniques have been developed and applied in various aspects of spatial planning. The chapters collected in this book present an excellent profile of the current state of theories, data, analysis methods and modeling techniques used in several case studies. The book is divided into three main parts (Theoretical aspects of spatial planning, Quantitative and computer spatial planning methods and Practical applications of spatial planning) that cover the latest advances in urban, city and spatial planning. The book also shows different aspects of spatial planning and different approaches to case studies in several countries.
This text illustrates the range of environmental geoscience mapping presently carried out around the world. Specialists in several countries have contributed a number of subdisciplinary and thematic topics including volcanic hazards, landslides, dolines, tsunamis, radon potential, medical geology, rainfall erosion, engineering geology, borehole stratigraphy, lake sediment geochemistry, aggregate resources and remote sensing. The collection, analysis and interpretation of data by geologists, geographers and engineers typically involves the presentation of information in map form, which can range from black/white to colour, 2-D to 3-D and paper copy to digital format illustrations. This volume reaffirms the global need for mapping geoscientific data.
This book presents a new approach to heritage, linking it to territory and sustainable development. This new approach entails a broader, integrated view of heritage values on the one hand, and on the other a shift in emphasis from their protection to their valorisation. In short, it provides a view of the joint workings of natural and cultural resources, and, as a consequence, moving away from a protection point of view in favour of a perspective on their suitable sustainable valorisation. In the viewpoint taken here, sustainability is understood as the balance and long-term preservation and enhancement of such natural and cultural resources and processes in a given territory. Territorial Heritage and Development includes contributions from different disciplines (geography, architecture, planning, sociology, environmental studies and archaeology) and case studies drawn from three continents, broaching both analytical and conceptual developments, and a range of initiatives for engaging in territorial heritage as an instrument of sustainable development. The book takes a pioneering and relevant approach to the breadth and complexity of the issue which can be valuable to academics and policy-makers in Geography, Architecture, Planning and Sociology.
The book aims at understanding the current distribution and use of powers over the environment among various layers of government and their consequences on environmental protection, comparing federal, regional and unitary State models and drawing theoretical and practical consequences.
The Future of the Past is a biennial conference generally carried out during the commemoration date of the incorporation of Santa Ana de Los Ríos de Cuenca Ecuador as a World Heritage Site (WHS). It initiated in 2014, organized by the City Preservation Management research project (CPM) of the University of Cuenca, to create a space for dialoguing among interested actors in the cultural heritage field. Since then, this space has served to exchange initiatives and to promote coordinated actions based on shared responsibility, in the local context. The third edition of this conference took place in the context of the 20th anniversary of being listed as WHS and a decade of CPM as the Southern host of the PRECOM3OS UNESCO Chair (Preventive Conservation, Maintenance and Monitoring of Monuments and Sites). For the very first time, and thanks to the collaboration with the Raymond Lemaire International Centre for Conservation of the University of Leuven (Belgium), the conference expanded its local scope. On this occasion, contributions reflected round a worldwide challenge in the cultural field: revealing the paths towards participatory governance of cultural heritage. Participatory governance is understood as institutional decision-making structures supported by shared responsibilities and rights among diverse actors.
