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Over the last decade, there has been a surge of interest in urbanization and economic development, sparked by the realization that making urban life sustainable is one of the greatest challenges facing us in the 21st century (this is now one of the core sustainable development goals of the United Nations). This has exerted considerable pressure on researchers to come up with more scientific ways of studying urbanism and economic activity over the long run, which has resulted not only in the development of new theoretical frameworks, but also in the collection of vast amounts of data from a range of settings. This has led to the realization that, although there are significant differences between settlements in different settings, there are nonetheless important regularities and commonalities between a diverse group of settlements in range of geographical and historical contexts, including both ancient and modern ones. This suggests that a common feature of settlements is their ability to generate increased social connectivity, greater division of labour and specialization, and enhanced technological invention and innovation, albeit with costs to levels of equality, quality of life, and standards of living, as well as impacts on the environment, which cannot be separated from the emergence of confederations and states and the creation of settlement systems, hierarchies and networks. We believe that this field of enquiry now stands at a critical juncture. Although it is now feasible to talk about many aspects of ancient and modern urbanism with relative confidence, such as the numbers of cities or their sizes, much of the discussion of these themes within historical and archaeological circles has been on a discursive or qualitative level, while it is often difficult to harmonize the different models that have been applied to date into a consistent empirical and theoretical framework. A new approach to settlements throughout different contexts should now be within our grasp, however, thanks to both the ease with which information can be disseminated and the facilities that recent developments in IT offer us to model, analyse, and statistically test data.
The book describes a novel approach to early cities that is transdisciplinary, scientific, historical, and based on social-science knowledge.
Focusing on transportation systems in Etruria and Latium Italy from ca. 1000-500 BC, this book explores Rome's rise to power.
This volume fills a gap in the study of an important, yet neglected case of state formation, by taking a landscape perspective to Etruria. Simon Stoddart examines the infrastructure, hierarchy/heterarchy and spatial patterns of the Etruscans over time to investigate their political development from a new perspective. The analysis both crosses the divide from prehistory to history and applies a scaled analysis to the whole region between the Tyrrhenian Sea and the Arno and Tiber rivers, with special focus on the neglected region between Populonia on the coast and Perugia and the north Umbrian region adjoining the Apennines. Stoddart uncovers the powerful places that were in dynamic tension not only between themselves, but also with the internal structure constituted by the descent groups that peopled them. He unravels the dynamically changing landscape of changing boundaries and buffer zones which contained robust urbanism, as well as less centralized, polyfocal nucleations.
The Oxford Handbook of Pre-Roman Italy provides a comprehensive account of the many peoples who lived on the Italian peninsula during the last millennium BCE. Written by more than fifty authors, the book describes the diversity of these indigenous cultures, their languages, interactions, and reciprocal influences. It gives emphasis to Greek colonization, the rise of aristocracies, technological innovations, and the spread of literacy, which provided the urban texture that shaped the history of the Italian peninsula.
Fourteen papers take advantage of advances in archaeological methods and theory to explore the role of the built environment in expressing and shaping community organization and identity at prehistoric and historic nucleated settlements and early cities in the Old World.
This book provides a thorough discussion about fundamental questions regarding urban theories and modeling. It is a curated collection of contributions to a workshop held in Paris on October 12th and 13th 2017 at the Institute of Complex Systems by the team of ERC GeoDiverCity. There are several chapters conveying the answers given by single authors to problems of conceptualization and modeling and others in which scholars reply to their conception and question them. Even, the chapters transcribing keynote presentations were rewritten according to contributions from the respective discussions. The result is a complete “state of the art” of what is our knowledge about urban processes and their possible formalization.
This open access book is the first to systematically introduce the principles of urban informatics and its application to every aspect of the city that involves its functioning, control, management, and future planning. It introduces new models and tools being developed to understand and implement these technologies that enable cities to function more efficiently – to become ‘smart’ and ‘sustainable’. The smart city has quickly emerged as computers have become ever smaller to the point where they can be embedded into the very fabric of the city, as well as being central to new ways in which the population can communicate and act. When cities are wired in this way, they have the potential to become sentient and responsive, generating massive streams of ‘big’ data in real time as well as providing immense opportunities for extracting new forms of urban data through crowdsourcing. This book offers a comprehensive review of the methods that form the core of urban informatics from various kinds of urban remote sensing to new approaches to machine learning and statistical modelling. It provides a detailed technical introduction to the wide array of tools information scientists need to develop the key urban analytics that are fundamental to learning about the smart city, and it outlines ways in which these tools can be used to inform design and policy so that cities can become more efficient with a greater concern for environment and equity.
Urban sprawl is one of the most important types of land-use changes currently affecting Europe. It increasingly creates major impacts on the environment (via surface sealing, emissions by transport and ecosystem fragmentation); on the social structure of an area (by segregation, lifestyle changes and neglecting urban centres); and on the economy (via distributed production, land prices, and issues of scale). Urban Sprawl in Europe: landscapes, land-use change & policy explains the nature and dynamics of urban sprawl. The book is written in three parts. Part I considers contemporary definitions, theories and trends in European urban sprawl. In part II authors draw upon experiences from across Europe to consider urban sprawl from a number of perspectives: Infrastructure-related sprawl, such as can be seen around Athens; Sprawl in the post-socialist city, as typified by Warsaw, Leipzig and Ljubljana; Decline and sprawl, where a comparative analysis of Liverpool and Leipzig shows that sprawl is not confined to expanding cities; Sprawl based on the development of second homes as found in Sweden, Austria and elsewhere. In part III a formal qualitative model of sprawl is developed. Policies for the control of urban sprawl and the roles of different stakeholders are considered. Finally, a concluding chapter raises questions about the nature and dynamics of these new urban landscapes and their sustainability.
220 million Americans crowd together in the 3% of the country that is urban. 35 million people live in the vast metropolis of Tokyo, the most productive urban area in the world. The central city of Mumbai alone has 12 million people, and Shanghai almost as many. We choose to live cheek by jowl, in a planet with vast amounts of space. Yet despite all of the land available to us, we choose to live in proximity to cities. Using economics to understand this phenomenon, the urban economist uses the tools of economic theory and empirical data to explain why cities exist and to analyze urban issues such as housing, education, crime, poverty and social interaction. Drawing on the success of his Lindahl lectures, Edward Glaeser provides a rigorous account of his research and unique thinking on cities. Using a series of simple models and economic theory, Glaeser illustrates the primary features of urban economics including the concepts of spatial equilibrium and agglomeration economies. Written for a mathematically inclined audience with an interest in urban economics and cities, the book is written to be accessible to theorists and non-theorists alike and should provide a basis for further empirical work.