The smart city movement, during the last decade and a half, advocated the built environment and digital technology convergence with the backing of institutional capital and government support. The commitment of a significant number of local governments across the globe, in terms of official smart city policies and initiatives, along with the constant push of global technology giants, has reinforced the popularity of this movement. This two-volume treatment on smart cities thoroughly explores and sheds light on the prominent elements of the smart city phenomenon and generates a smart city blueprint.

The first volume, with its 12 chapters, provides a sound understanding on the key foundations and growth directions of smart city frameworks, technologies, and platforms, with theoretical expansions, practical implications, and real-world case study lessons. The second companion volume offers sophisticated perspectives on the key foundations and directions of smart city policies, communities, and urban futures, with theoretical expansions, practical implications, and real-world case study lessons.

These volumes offer an invaluable reference source for urban policymakers, managers, planners, practitioners, and many others, particularly to benefit from it when tackling key urban and societal issues and planning for and delivering smart city solutions. Moreover, the book is also a rich and important repository for scholars and research and undergraduate students.

Based on the spatial perspective, this book takes the urban area of Xi'an, China, as the main research region and studies the balance of resource allocation, focusing on educational resources and school layout.

The author constructs a mathematical model to measure the level and types of resource allocation and regional differences in primary schools, and uses GIS spatial analysis to explore the efficiency and fairness of school spatial layout. The book suggests a better way for the balanced development of basic education in Xi'an city. It also provides theoretical foundations, analytical methods and empirical support for the study of balanced public resource management in public service, urban planning and urban geography.

This book is suitable for students and scholars of tourism management, regional planning, facilities and urban management, and those interested in resource allocation in Chinese urban areas in general.

Drawing on studies in environmental and sustainability education, this book brings together new work that has explored the research-policy interface in varied contexts and from diverse perspectives.It will be beneficial to those interested in understanding the interface between research and policy.

The relationship between research and policy has become an increasing focus for theoretical inquiry, empirical investigation, and practical development across many different fields. This volume highlights new empirical insights, theoretical ideas, practical examples, and methodological approaches for understanding, navigating, and developing more productive research-policy relationships.

This book will be beneficial to anyone who is interested in understanding the interface between research and policy. The chapters in this book were originally published in the journal Environmental Education Research.

This book focuses on women's important contribution to Sufism by analyzing the lives and seminal contributions of six mystic Sufi women to Islamic spirituality.

To help reverse the sidelining of Sufi women in the recorded academic literature, the author has selected a representative sample of figures from diverse Islamic dynasties with varying backgrounds, social status, and devotional contributions. Taking a historical approach attentive to specific political contexts, readers will be introduced to the contributions of Umm Ali al-Balkhi and Fatima of Nishapur in the ninth-century Khurasan, Aisha al-Mannubiyya of the Hafsid dynasty in Ifriqya, Aisha al-Ba'uniyya of the Mamluk dynasties of Egypt and Syria, the Mughal princess Jahan Ara Begum, and the daughter of the Caliph of Sokoto, Nana Asma'u. It is argued that these ascetic and Sufi women were recognized by their male and female peers, became political leaders in their communities, and were honored as examples of sanctity and erudition. Their works influenced mystical discourse, hagiographical writings, religious language, and models of religious authority to secure legacies of Islamic orthopraxis.

The book will appeal to anyone interested in Sufism and Sufi history, as well as to those wishing to delve into the understudied topic of Muslim women's spirituality.

This book probes the intersection of the beautiful and the ugly, offering a systematic framework to understand, interpret, and evaluate how ugliness can contribute to beautiful art.

Many great artworks include elements of ugliness: repugnant content, disproportionate forms, unresolved dissonance, and unintegrated parts. Mark William Roche's authoritative monograph Beautiful Ugliness: Christianity, Modernity, and the Arts challenges current practices of the dominant aesthetic schools by exploring the role of ugliness in art and literature. Roche offers a comprehensive and unique framework that integrates philosophical and theological reflection, intellectual-historical analysis, and interpretations of a large number of works from the arts. The study is driven by the recognition that, though ugliness is usually understood as the opposite of beauty, ugliness nonetheless contributes significantly to the beauty of many artworks.

Roche's analysis unfolds in three parts. The first offers a refreshing conceptual analysis of ugliness in art. The second considers the history of ugliness in art and literature, with special attention to its role in Christian art and its central place in modern and contemporary art. The third synthesizes earlier material, offering a taxonomy of beautiful ugliness derived from Hegelian philosophical categories. Roche mesmerizes the reader with an extraordinary range of literary scholarship and expertise, with a particular focus on English, Latin, and German literature, and with a broad range of analyzed phenomena, including fine arts, architecture, and music.

Including 63 color illustrations, Beautiful Ugliness will draw in readers from multiple disciplines as well as those from beyond the academy who wish to make sense of today's complex art world.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.

This book integrates the science of spatial cognition and the science of team cognition to explore the social, psychological, and behavioral phenomenon of spatial cognition as it occurs in human collectives such as dyads and work teams.

It represents the culmination of a process of outlining and defining a growing field of research termed Collective Spatial Cognition. It engages contributions from an international and multi-disciplinary community of scholars, who have collaborated to provide a foundation for knowledge discovery regarding how groups of people of varying size acquire information and solve problems involving spatiality as a key component, leading to action that incorporates the spatial information and problem-solving collectively achieved. The collectives under study can be as small as dyads (teams of two) to large teams-of-teams who are working alongside each other to complete a mutual goal. The book lays the foundation for multi- and interdisciplinary work regarding Collective Spatial Cognition in the years to come, and this book documents that foundation.

This book will be of interest to those researching spatial, behavioural, cognitive, and information sciences in the fields of human geography, sociology, psychology, and computer science.

This handbook is a one-stop, comprehensive guide to global initiatives for climate action. It examines policies to tackle climate change and the critical role various organizations play.

The volume:

• Includes in-depth discussion of individual issues related to the environment
• Highlights global initiatives, negotiations, and international organizations responsible for climate action, protecting marine and freshwater environment, protecting atmosphere and climate, conserving biological diversity, chemicals and wastes management, environmental governance, safeguarding against warfare and disasters
• Debates on-ground implications of the international policies for the Global South
• Brings together case studies from across the world
• Presents a toolkit for environment practitioners to seek sustainable and practicable solutions to problems
• Includes suggested readings for researchers
• Brings together primary documents, supportive illustrations, graphs, and maps

The handbook will be an essential reference for scholars and researchers of environmental studies, environmental policy and governance, sustainability and resilience. It will also be indispensable for policy makers, think tanks and NGOs.

Emphasizing the voices of activists, this book's diverse contributors examine communities' common experiences with environmental injustice, how they organize to address it, and the ways in which their campaigns intersect with related movements such as Black Lives Matter and Indigenous sovereignty.

The global COVID-19 pandemic exposed the ways in which BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) communities and white working-class communities have suffered disproportionately from the crisis due to sustained exposure to toxic land, air, and water, creating a new urgency for addressing underlying conditions of systemic racism and poverty in North America. In addition to exploring the historical roots of the Environmental Justice movement in the 1980s and 1990s, the volume offers coverage of recent events such as the DAPL pipeline controversy, the Flint water crisis, and the rise of climate justice. The collection incorporates the experiences of rural and urban communities, Alaska Natives, Native Hawaiians, Puerto Ricans, and Indigenous peoples in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico.

The chapters offer instructors, undergraduate and graduate students, and general readers a range of accessible case studies that create opportunities for comparative and intersectional analysis across geographical and ethnic boundaries.

Regional policy is an essential in any government's toolkit for promoting socioeconomic prosperity. It comes in many forms and can be used to target the development of weak and stronger regions. This textbook provides comprehensive and systematic coverage of regional policy, dealing with core theories and looking at contemporary challenges in practice, addressing regional policy across the world.

Structured in four parts, the book opens with an exploration of regional policy's characterisation, aims and rationale. The second part is devoted to issues of implementation and the instruments available to policymakers for intervention. The third part addresses regional policy evaluation, as well as statistics and modelling in policymaking. Finally, the book discusses how regional policy is applied in different contexts. Each chapter contains real-life examples of a regional policy topic in action and highlights supplementary topics for advanced readers.

With its broad coverage of the subject, Regional Policy: Theory and Practice will prove a valuable resource for advanced students, researchers and practitioners in regional policy, regional economics, economic geography, planning and public policy.

Can people use new participatory spaces to reclaim their rights as citizens and challenge structures of political power? This book carefully examines the constraints and possibilities for participatory governance under capitalism.

To understand what is at stake in the politics of participation, we need to look beyond the values commonly associated with it. Citizens face a dilemma: should they participate, even if this helps to sustain an unjust system, or not participate, thereby turning down rare opportunities to make a difference? By examining the rationale behind democratic innovation and the reasons people have for getting involved, this book provides a theory of how citizens can use new democratic spaces to challenge political boundaries. Connecting numerous international case studies and presenting original research from Rosario, Argentina, this book offers a crucial corrective to previous research. What matters most is not the design of new models of participation nor is it the supposed radical imagination of political leaders. It is whether people use new spaces for participation to renegotiate what democracy means in practice.

Bridging critical urban studies and democratic theory, this book will be of interest to researchers and students in the fields of democratic innovations, political economy and urban planning. It will also provide activists and practitioners of participatory democracy with important tools to expand spaces of grassroots democracy.

The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a CC BY Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 International license.

The Interior Urbanism Theory Reader expands our understanding of urbanism, interiority, and publicness from a global perspective across time and cultures.

From ancient origins to speculative futures, this book explores the rich complexities of interior urbanism as an interstitial socio-spatial condition. Employing an interdisciplinary lens, it examines the intersectional characteristics that define interior urbanism. Fifty chapters investigate the topic in relation to architecture, planning, urban design, interior architecture, interior design, archaeology, engineering, sociology, psychology, and geography. Individual essays reveal the historical, typological, and morphological origins of interior urbanism, as well as its diverse scales, occupancies, and atmospheres.

The Interior Urbanism Theory Reader will appeal to scholars, practitioners, students, and enthusiasts of urbanism, architecture, planning, interiors, and the social sciences.

A panoramic account of the urban politics and deep social divisions that gave rise to Uber

The first city to fight back against Uber, Washington, D.C., was also the first city where such resistance was defeated. It was here that the company created a playbook for how to deal with intransigent regulators and to win in the realm of local politics. The city already serves as the nation's capital. Now, D.C. is also the blueprint for how Uber conquered cities around the world-and explains why so many embraced the company with open arms.

Drawing on interviews with gig workers, policymakers, Uber lobbyists, and community organizers, Disrupting D.C. demonstrates that many share the blame for lowering the nation's hopes and dreams for what its cities could be. In a sea of broken transit, underemployment, and racial polarization, Uber offered a lifeline. But at what cost?

This is not the story of one company and one city. Instead, Disrupting D.C. offers a 360-degree view of an urban America in crisis. Uber arrived promising a new future for workers, residents, policymakers, and others. Ultimately, Uber's success and growth was never a sign of urban strength or innovation but a sign of urban weakness and low expectations about what city politics can achieve. Understanding why Uber rose reveals just how far the rest of us have fallen.

The smart city movement, during the last decade and a half, advocated the built environment and digital technology convergence with the backing of institutional capital and government support. The commitment of a significant number of local governments across the globe, in terms of official smart city policies and initiatives, along with the constant push of global technology giants, has reinforced the popularity of this movement. This two-volume treatment on smart cities thoroughly explores and sheds light on the prominent elements of the smart city phenomenon and generates a smart city blueprint.

This first volume, with its 12 chapters, provides a sound understanding on the key foundations and growth directions of smart city frameworks, technologies, and platforms, with theoretical expansions, practical implications, and real-world case study lessons.

The second companion volume offers sophisticated perspectives on the key foundations and directions of smart city policies, communities, and urban futures, with theoretical expansions, practical implications, and real-world case study lessons.

This book is an invaluable reference source for urban policymakers, managers, planners, practitioners, and many others, particularly to benefit from it when tackling key urban and societal issues and planning for and delivering smart city solutions. Moreover, the book is also a rich and important repository for scholars and research and undergraduate students as it communicates the complex smart city phenomenon in an easy to digest form, by providing both the big picture view and specifics of each component of that view. It also appeals to local government agencies and smart city practitioners.

A much-needed text that takes stock of issues of ethnicity and race in communication studies, this book presents an overview of the most cutting-edge research, theory, and methods in the subject and advocates for centering ethnicity and race in the communication studies discipline.

This handbook brings together a diverse group of both senior and up-and-coming scholars to offer original scholarship in race and ethnicity in communication studies, emphasizing various analytical perspectives including, but not limited to, global, transnational, diasporic, feminist, queer, trans, and disability approaches. While centering ethnicity and race, contributors also take an intersectional perspective in their approach to their topics and chapters. The book features examination of specific subfields, like Whiteness studies, Latina/o/x communication studies, Asian/Pacific American communication studies, African American communication and culture, and Middle East and North African communication studies.

The text is oriented to graduate students and researchers within communication studies as well as media studies, cultural studies, critical race and ethnic studies, American studies, sociology, and education, while still being accessible to upper-level undergraduate students.

The communities, congregations, and faith-based coalitions that have been working for racial justice over the past fifty years

Have progressive religious organizations been missing in action in recent struggles for racial justice? In Faith Communities and the Fight for Racial Justice, Robert Wuthnow shows that, contrary to activists' accusations of complacency, Black and White faith leaders have fought steadily for racial and social justice since the end of the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Wuthnow introduces us to the communities, congregations, and faith-based coalitions that have worked on fair housing, school desegregation, affirmative action, criminal justice, and other issues over many years. Often overshadowed by the Religious Right, these progressive faith-based racial justice advocates kept up the fight even as media attention shifted elsewhere.

Wuthnow tells the stories of the faith-based affordable housing project in St. Louis that sparked controversy in the Nixon White House; a pastor's lawsuit in North Carolina that launched the nation's first busing program for school desegregation; the faith outreach initiative for Barack Obama's presidential campaign; and church-mobilized protests following the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Freddie Gray, and George Floyd. Drawing on extensive materials from denominations, journalists, and social scientists, Wuthnow offers a detailed and frank discussion of both the achievements and the limitations of faith leaders' roles. He focuses on different issues that emerged at different times, tracing the efforts of Black and White faith leaders who sometimes worked cooperatively and more often tackled problems in complementary ways. Taken together, these stories provide lessons in what faith communities have done and how they can better advocate for racial justice in the years ahead.

How our reliance on Child Protective Services makes motherhood precarious for those already marginalized

It's the knock on the door that many mothers fear: a visit from Child Protective Services (CPS), the state agency with the power to take their children away. Over the last half-century, these encounters have become an all-too-common way of trying to address family poverty and adversity. One in three children nationwide-and half of Black children-now encounter CPS during childhood.

In Investigating Families, Kelley Fong provides an unprecedented look at the inner workings of CPS and the experiences of families pulled into its orbit. Drawing on firsthand observations of CPS investigations and hundreds of interviews with those involved, Fong traces the implications of invoking CPS as a "first responder" to family misfortune and hardship. She shows how relying on CPS-an entity fundamentally oriented around parental wrongdoing and empowered to separate families-organizes the response to adversity around surveilling, assessing, and correcting marginalized mothers. The agency's far-reaching investigative apparatus undermines mothers' sense of security and shapes how they marshal resources for their families, reinforcing existing inequalities. And even before CPS comes knocking, mothers feel vulnerable to a system that jeopardizes their parenthood. Countering the usual narratives of punitive villains and hapless victims, Fong's unique, behind-the-scenes account tells a revealing story of how we try to protect children by threatening mothers-and points the way to a more productive path for families facing adversity.

This book aims to extend and deepen conversations among scholars, policymakers, and practitioners about the role of sport in relation to contexts and issues of forced migration.

The chapters in this volume critically analyse and interrogate the implications of existing approaches, practices, and research around sport and forced migration across five themes: 1) participatory methodologies, power, voice and ethics; 2) emotions and embodiment; 3) gendered, socio-ecological and intersectional perspectives; 4) critical perspectives on integration and intercultural communication; and 5) fandom and media representations of forced migrants in elite sport. It does so by engaging with complex, yet necessary, dialogues and perspectives that cross disciplinary boundaries, and by not shying away from conceptual and ethical tensions that interrogate concepts, methodologies, policies, and forms of representation regarding forced migrants' experiences and contributions to global sporting cultures.

The book provides key contributions to advance critical scholarly analyses and inform applied interventions on the ground and will be beneficial to researchers and advanced students of Sports, Sociology and Politics. This book was originally published as a special issue of Sport in Society.

In the present age of the digital era, the terms digitalization, emerging technologies, and social media have become buzzwords. Among all the innovations in our history, digital technology has advanced the fastest. With the freedom of digitalization, emerging technologies, and high-speed internet, computing devices may now work remotely. Every industry, including banking and finance, healthcare, agriculture, logistics, academia, government sectors, and businesses, has recognized the need for innovative digital technologies for their development, boosting efficiency and speed and cutting costs. Digitalization has also converted non-digital applications into digital ones to make things easier for people, at the same time that social media has an increasingly significant impact on human lives and industries. Consequently, the primary goal of this book is to explain to readers how newly emerging digital technologies and social media have significantly altered and aided in the growth of today's organizations and how the freedom of using these technologies has proved to be beneficial, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic that has affected the entire world.

This book demonstrates its argument by providing real-world cases from both developed and developing nations, particularly India. The book also investigates how digital transformation may help every industry and organization be more agile and efficient. Readers will learn about the main goals of digital initiatives that have been launched to create a digitally empowered society worldwide. In this book, the benefits and challenges of digitization, digital tools, and other technologies in diverse fields are also examined.

It's closing time for an alarming number of gay bars in cities around the globe-but it's definitely not the last dance

In this exhilarating journey into underground parties, pulsating with life and limitless possibility, acclaimed author Amin Ghaziani unveils the unexpected revolution revitalizing urban nightlife.

Far from the gay bar with its largely white, gay male clientele, here is a dazzling scene of secret parties-club nights-wherein culture creatives, many of whom are queer, trans, and racial minorities, reclaim the night in the name of those too long left out. Episodic, nomadic, and radically inclusive, club nights are refashioning queer nightlife in boundlessly imaginative and powerfully defiant ways.

Drawing on Ghaziani's immersive encounters at underground parties in London and more than one hundred riveting interviews with everyone from bar owners to party producers, revelers to rabble-rousers, Long Live Queer Nightlife showcases a spectacular, if seldom-seen, vision of a queer world shimmering with self-empowerment, inventiveness, and joy.

Examining the four main single player games in the franchise and its related spinoff games, this book explores the world of the popular role-playing video game, Fallout.

Kenton Taylor Howard examines the maps of the games, the design of their worlds, and how the franchise has been expanded through fan-created video game modifications and tabletop games. This book highlights the importance of worldbuilding in the Fallout franchise, examining the extensive alternate history the game creates - diverging from real-world history in the early 1900s and resulting in a world that is destroyed by nuclear apocalypse in 2077 - and exploring how the series builds this detailed world over the course of many games. The book also examines how the franchise has served as an extended commentary on American militarism and expansionism. The series is closely examined through the lens of critical media studies, as well as relying on theoretical frameworks relating to video game design and world design.

This book will be of interest to students, scholars, and enthusiasts of video game studies, video game design, media fandom and fan studies, transmedia studies, and imaginary worlds.

This book advances the view that concentrated black power is the backbone of the Democratic Party and, as such, black empowerment represents the last hope for the US both domestically and internationally. Through analyses of secondary data, historical archives, and a variety of political and economic statistical indicators, it examines the relationship between black empowerment and America's global stature across its history, exploring the socio-historical context in which obstacles to black empowerment have occurred and the strategies that have been adopted across time for its realization. An examination of what Black political, legal, economic and cultural power looks like, The Fight for Black Empowerment in the USA makes an urgent call for the up-lift and empowerment of the black population, without which the nation faces irreversible political and economic dysfunction domestically, and a loss of its status as a global superpower. As such, it will appeal to scholars across the social sciences with interests in racial and ethnic inequalities and contemporary American society.