This innovative edited volume places global urbanism in the context of the phenomenal growth of cities of the South, investigating their colonial contentiousness and asking how their history plays out in the twenty-first-century phenomenon of urbanisation.

Inspired by Antonio Gramsci's reflections on the problem of the South, it shows that the question of southern urbanism is about the anomalies and growth of southern cities, the histories of struggles, technological and logistical reorientations, new zoning practices of neoliberal capitalism and the remaking of urban geographies towards a possible urban future that aims to be just. Crucially, it asks whether today's city is a seamless formation of several overlapping phases of growth or if there is a decisive break today, marked by the hyper growth of these cities. To understand the implications of these questions for visions of an urban future, this volume takes a number of southern cities of Asia and Europe as case studies, including Kolkata, Mumbai, Chittagong, Beirut, Athens, Naples and Marseille. It shows how these cities are paradoxically marked by both fractured geographies and new types of popular mobilisations, solidarities and an ethic of protection and care, showing this to be the core of the Southern question, constituting the urban experience of our time.

It will appeal to advanced-level students and scholars with interests in urban sociology, Southern urbanisation, postcolonial studies, political science, political economy and urban geography.

Posturban reveals why the future cannot remain urban. Linking climate breakdown, inequality, and democratic erosion to an urban paradigm rooted in a patriarchal, discriminative divide, it calls for a radical shift towards resilient, decentralised, and ecologically rooted ways of living.

Through a transdisciplinary critique of urbanisation's ties to the Promethean foundations of capitalism, consumerism, and technocratic governance, the book shows why urban-centred solutions fail-and what can replace them. It introduces alterRural, Epimethean modernities that restore faith in nature and humanity: frameworks uniting ecological care, community autonomy, and cultural resilience into strategies for systemic change. It demonstrates how reviving peasant values and fostering a plurality of place-based communities can lead towards sustainable, equitable, and life-affirming ways to inhabit Earth.

Written for engaged citizens, activists, policymakers, and scholars interested in more equitable and sustainable ways to organise society, Posturban is for anyone ready to challenge the future of cities and explore viable, hopeful alternatives.

This book explicates Durkheim's theory of suicide, reveals its ambiguities and contradictions, and sets forward a new framework to unify its various hypotheses.

Since Durkheim never fully integrated his theory, this has led to varying interpretations of Durkheim's theories among scholars, and subsequently, this caused a failure to create a cumulative body of findings about suicide due to inconsistency. This book hopes to remedy that condition by clarifying and unifying his overall theory, so it can be understood and tested for sociological theory and thinking today. Durkheim produced his groundbreaking treatise, Suicide, establishing sociology as a distinctive field of study and demonstrating that social forces are real and can be studied scientifically. He argued that the volume, types, and patterns of suicide are a result of the social forces generated by the moral structure of each society and named these forces integration and regulation. This demonstrated that suicide is not alien to society but instead is a byproduct of the way society is organized. Though his work is over a century old, the problems it confronts, of society's inability to maintain unity and cohesion in the face of increasing diversity, are as relevant today as in Durkheim's time.

By illuminating the contours of Durkheim's famous volume and providing a critical new perspective that shows how its features work, this volume will be an essential resource for sociologists and social theorists of classical and historical sociology, as well as a key volume for courses in sociology of mental health and cultural sociology. It will also serve as an important guide for students and instructors in studying a foundational text and thinker for the discipline.

Social and cultural factors can strongly influence how we approach death and dying, including attitudes towards death, rituals and practices surrounding death, and end-of-life care.

Current knowledge in death studies tends to be influenced by Western views, which can limit its application to policy and practice. The increasing diversity and plurality of populations around the world requires further attention to be paid to diversifying evidence and knowledge to ensure that it effectively serves its beneficiaries. This book provides cutting-edge discourses and debates on death studies as a global and international field of research and practice. By hosting the space for interdisciplinary, international contributions, especially from under-represented groups, it advances our exploration of both knowledge outside of the colonised and the degree of the current knowledge's applicability in the field. Offering a truly innovative contribution to the field through its clear emphasis on decolonising methodologies and perspectives, it highlights decolonisation as a central framework, and pushes boundaries and challenges established norms, paving the way for new and transformative conversations within death studies.

Through its collaborative and interdisciplinary approach, the proposal breaks new ground by bringing together a diverse range of perspectives and voices, fostering rich dialogue and promoting inclusivity. This innovative approach promises to catalyse meaningful change and advance critical scholarship in death studies. It will be of interest to all undergraduate and postgraduate courses on death studies across both humanities and social sciences.

This book positions the Cold War as a liminal time and space that holds sway in the second quarter of the 21st century, informing a broad and deep analysis of how contemporary society was - and continues to be - fashioned by the societies of distribution found in Cold War Sociology.

As a conflict that spanned the second half of the 20th century, the influence of the Cold War continues into the second quarter of the 21st century. Its chief organizing concept was distribution, seen in the technologies and techniques that infused the time, from game theory to the Internet and artificial intelligence, to nuclear silos that projected global power. Cold War Sociology demonstrates how distribution continues to shape politics, economic and social policy and everyday life, causing unintended consequences including climate change, war and resource depletion that are increasingly difficult to address. It draws on key thinkers from the past to the present day and applies them to a series of empirical, sociological case studies including food banking, education, computer technology, conspiracy thinking and media.

This book will be of vital reading to students of sociology, anthropology, social theory and political theory, including undergraduates, postgraduates and researchers who seek to understand the genesis of the often puzzling and contrarian contemporary world, and how the unintended consequences of the Cold War contain answers to present-day problems.

This innovative textbook explores media and communication theory, and its intersections with social and political theory, through the prism of eight core dichotomies - communication/media, private/public, production/reception, material/symbolic, mainstream/alternative, abundance/scarcity, control/freedom, and virtual/real - revealing their complex interrelationships and significance in understanding contemporary media and communication landscapes.

Students will gain a nuanced understanding of media and communication theories by examining both sides of each dichotomy and their dynamic interplay. The book historicizes each concept pair, illustrates them with past and present examples, and demonstrates how competing paradigms often complement rather than contradict each other. This approach helps readers grasp theoretical complexity, recognize the democratic importance of media and communication, and develop critical thinking skills through engaging case studies and discussion questions in each chapter.

This textbook is designed for undergraduate and postgraduate students taking media and communication theory courses. Instructors teaching critical media and communication theory will find the dichotomy-based approach particularly valuable for helping students navigate complex theoretical debates and understand the field's intellectual development. It will also be useful supplementary reading for specific topics within broader media studies programs.

Multispecies Information Science offers a comprehensive overview of this subfield, shifting the focus beyond humans to explore the rich and complex realms of information and knowledge shared with animals, plants, microbes, technologies, and landscapes.

Bridging theory and practice, this volume traces the evolution of multispecies movement in information science, from Suzanne Briet's provocative question 'Is an antelope a document?' to inclusive approaches informed by posthumanism, queer studies, disability studies, and postcolonialism. Penned by information scientists from around the world, the chapters span topics from the foundations of information to its pedagogy, design, technology, and services. Their ideas will help readers to discover fresh and compassionate avenues of participation and engagement with other species in their own information practices and research. By embracing a multispecies approach, this book aims to transform readers' understanding of information and life, recognising that this perspective is fundamentally an ethical turn.

Multispecies Information Science integrates insights from areas such as documentation, information behaviour, indigenous knowledge, and information technology. It facilitates dialogue between information scientists who are interested in a multispecies perspective. This book is essential reading for researchers, practitioners, and students in Library and Information Science. It also speaks to those in anthropology, environmental humanities, animal-computer interaction, and human-animal studies.

This volume offers a fresh and timely contribution to current discussions of ornamentation, repetition, and affect in aesthetics and philosophy. It provides new insights into how ornamentation shapes artistic, philosophical, and social practices, positioning it as a dynamic force in contemporary thought.

Through interdisciplinary essays by leading scholars, the volume interrogates ornamentation's role in structuring metaphysics, aesthetics, and interspecies relations. It challenges the traditional notion that ornament is mere decoration and reframes it as a vital philosophical and cultural concept. Drawing on thinkers like Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Derrida, Deleuze, and Foucault, the contributors explore how ornamentation operates as a parergon, a site of affective repetition, or a marker of epistemological shifts. From critiques of Kantian hierarchies in craft to analyses of Baroque aesthetics and animal territoriality, the chapters reveal ornamentation as both a boundary and a bridge - simultaneously peripheral and essential to meaning-making. This volume offers new and unique perspectives on ornamentation's universal and culturally specific dimensions.

Metaphysics and Aesthetics of Decoration will appeal to scholars and advanced students interested in aesthetics, metaphysics, continental philosophy, and art theory.

This handbook provides a comprehensive understanding of theory, research, and applications of research in communication and social cognition.

Written by leading figures across an array of disciplines, chapters in this handbook explicate the interplay of communication and social cognition to form a vantage point for the study of concepts such as framing, stereotypes, social perceptions, mood and affect, intergroup conflict, media effects, decision-making, and language and thought that are widely used in the social, cognitive, and behavioral sciences. The book is divided into seven sections: the first two sections reflect basic discussions about how processes of thought and communication are related and how social realities are influenced by aspects of communication; Sections 3-6 address specified fields including interpersonal communication, communication between groups, digital communication, and communication in applied fields of marketing, media, and health; and the final section describes innovative methods to pursue the study of communication and social cognition.

This handbook integrates advances in theory and research that are rooted in and will be of interest to the fields of communication, psychology, cognitive science, media studies, linguistics, marketing, public health, management, and organizational studies.

Playing the Game uncovers the history of state and regional colleges as engines of opportunity in postwar America. By 1970, these institutions enrolled more students than elite private or flagship public universities did, and yet they remained on the margins of public attention and scholarly research. Marc A. VanOverbeke shows how these colleges fought for recognition by turning to an unlikely ally: college sports.

Drawing on extensive archival research, VanOverbeke reveals how athletics boosted institutional legitimacy and public support, while students harnessed sports to push for greater inclusion and racial justice. Black and Mexican American students, in particular, challenged segregation and discrimination on and off the field, making athletics a powerful site of protest and change.

Playing the Game reframes the role of college sports, showing how athletics helped shape not only school identity but also the national struggle for equality and educational opportunity.

Building on recent scholarship that challenges the supposed historical isolation of Eastern European art from the colonial matrix of power, this book responds to the sometimes uncritical application of established Western postcolonial and decolonial theories to the region's visual production.

Instead, it advocates for more nuanced, historically grounded methodologies sensitive to Eastern Europe's specific circumstances as a capitalist (semi)periphery and an area shaped by multiple competing empires. Moving beyond Cold War binaries, the essays collectively argue that the region's volatile historical positionalities destabilize rigid theoretical divides between colonizer and colonized, challenge normative understandings of whiteness and indigeneity, and highlight the divergent political trajectories of postsocialism and postcolonialism in artistic practice. Conceptualized as a critical intervention, the volume amplifies voices from the (semi)periphery to make a significant methodological contribution to debates in the global history of art, foregrounding the variegated nature of colonialism itself.

The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, colonialism and postcolonialism studies, and Eastern European studies.

Chapter 7 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 International license.

Focusing on masks and faces as figures and objects that carry ethical and political meanings, this volume examines the scientific, cultural, visual, and philosophical histories and traditions in which they are imbricated and which allow them to gather force and to become central to how human relationships are made.

Offering interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary perspectives on masks and faces, the book studies the prominent role they play in shaping ideals and norms of political personhood; their deployment as evidence in the creation of racist hierarchies; and their role in demarcating the human and non-human. Through historical and theoretical analyses of different case studies from around the world, the book offers a global perspective that will enable readers to reflect on the interweaving of aesthetics, ethics and politics in the making of faces and masks into figures around which the visual world is organized and valorized. Moving from past to future, from essays that examine methods for facial classification and the production of facial casts in the service of racial science, to essays that reflect on the future of the human face in light of deepfake technologies, or in relation to the posthuman turn, the collection historicizes modern Western conceptions of masks and faces, and the conceptual, ethical, and political hierarchies in which they are embedded.

This book will be an invaluable work for researchers, librarians, advanced students, and curious learned readers who are interested in philosophy, history of science, visual studies, and cultural studies. More broadly, it will appeal to those engaged with innovative approaches to the study of the relationship between aesthetics, ethics, and politics, as these are explored through the figures of masks and faces, as well as through reflections on the meaning of the face in present-day digital societies.

This book describes the home-school communication experiences of five Latino families in order to showcase the communication challenges Latino parents, and their children, encounter as they navigate the American education system.

As former PK-12 practitioners, now educator-preparation program faculty, the authors contend that there is a clear communication gap between a predominantly White teaching and leadership force-teachers, school principals, and counselors-and the Black and Brown student population. Research findings included in this book demonstrate that Latino/a students remain persistent targets of deficit-thinking beliefs, implicit bias, and low-level academic expectations in school settings, and also that positive interactions with teachers, counselors, and school leaders are connected to student cognitive development, creative thinking, and overall student success. Through the family stories and research findings included in this book, this book makes a case for the far-reaching consequences home-school relations have on the overall educational trajectory of the fastest-growing group of students in the United States-Latino/a students.

This book provides teacher educators and pre-service teachers with knowledge from the field and connections to scholarly findings so they may be in a more informed position to enact best policies and practices in order to help Latino/a students thrive.

The Heritage, Creativity and Innovation Nexus: Critical Approaches and Interdisciplinary Perspectives explores the central role that innovation and creativity play in contemporary heritage practices.

Drawing on a rich body of in-depth case studies from around the world, the editors and authors interrogate the shifting connections between heritage, creativity and innovation. Presenting cutting-edge theoretical discussions written by leading experts, the volume explores the practices and significance of the heritage, creativity, and innovation nexus from a critical, interdisciplinary perspective. It interrogates key dimensions of the nexus, such as the creative economy and new digital technologies, as well as creative uses in politics, identity construction, and framing of history. It also explores a set of connected and complementary concepts and forms of creative agency that are often taken for granted. Cross-cutting features of the book involve critical conversations about power, identity, and socio-historical context. Geographically, the book covers cases from Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.

The book is essential reading for academics and students of Heritage Studies, Museum Studies, History, Anthropology, Sociology, Urban Studies, Political Science, Archaeology, Art History, and Architecture. It will also be of interest to professional practitioners working in heritage and the creative industries.

Now in a fully revised and updated new edition, Sport and Film examines the social, cultural, historical, and ideological significance of representations of sport in film around the world. It is an essential guide for all students and enthusiasts of sport, film, media, and culture.

This book traces the history of the sports film, from the beginnings of cinema in the 1890s, its consolidation as a distinct fiction genre in the mid-1920s in Hollywood films such as Harold Lloyd's The Freshman, to its contemporary manifestation in Oscar-winning and nominated films such as Million Dollar Baby, The Fighter, and Creed. Drawing on an extensive range of films as source material, this book explores key issues in the study of sport, film, and wider society, including race, social class, gender, and national culture. It also offers an invaluable guide to 'reading' a film, to help students fully engage with their source material. This new edition also includes a new chapter on sport documentaries, a consideration of Russian sport cinema, new pedagogical features - including review questions, proposed projects, case studies, and definitions of key terms - to enhance the reader's understanding, and a consideration of the significance of sport and sport cinema with regard to the election of businessman and media personality Donald Trump as President of the United States.

Comprehensive, authoritative, and accessible, this is an essential text for any course on sport media, and invaluable reading for general courses on sport and society, film studies, or cultural studies.

A dedicated website with further resources is available at sportandfilm.eu.

Introducing the core concepts and most important techniques in qualitative research, this practical textbook is the perfect companion for anybody undertaking a research project in sport.

Full of real-world cases, data and examples and featuring the voices of researchers at all levels, from experienced professors to student researchers doing their thesis, the book introduces the reader to the qualitative methodological journey. It explains why qualitative methods are useful and important, and it guides the reader through the entire research process, from designing a research project to analysing data and writing up results. The book demystifies qualitative methods, such as interviewing, focus groups, online research and visual methods, with short, practical and digestible chapters, giving the reader all they need to know to get started. A final section explains how qualitative research skills can be an invaluable tool in building a career, whether in academic research or in working environments beyond the university.

With useful features in every chapter to help break the subject down and encourage understanding, this is an essential textbook for any student in sport, exercise or physical activity, as well as early career researchers (ECRs) and practitioners, looking to use qualitative methods in their work.

This handbook provides cutting-edge insights into the dynamic and cross-cutting field of cultural geography, arguing that this vibrant field can provide important perspectives on the most significant academic, political and creative conversations of our times.

Written by leading and emerging scholars from around the world, the 51 chapters focus on the connecting threads and imperatives which underpin work in cultural geography and allied disciplines, outlining many of the different approaches, theoretical traditions, and trajectories which push the boundaries of contemporary thinking. This innovative handbook is structured around four core sections, foregrounding a series of contemporary concerns and critical moments, lively entanglements, creative cultural practices and spaces, and imperatives which have preoccupied scholars and creative practitioners.

It acts as an essential guide for researchers, undergraduate students and postgraduate students in human geography and related fields, as well as activists and creative practitioners who practise cultural geography in a myriad of different ways.

Chapter 48 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 International license.

This book delves into the critical impact of school engagement on Black students and presents a community-centered vision of family engagement - one rooted in representation, affirmation, and connection - where Black students can thrive. Drawing from a rich store of scholarly research, Black elder wisdom, and evidence-based practices, it offers practical guidance on partnering with parents to create welcoming educational spaces that honor the cultural wealth and lived experiences of Black families. The text challenges systemic barriers, biases, and historical injustices within educational environments that detrimentally affect Black students, underscoring the urgent need for educators to build robust partnerships with Black families and communities. Grounded in the concept of hospitality, the book equips educators with tools and insights necessary for supporting the academic and personal growth of Black students by fostering healthy connections between schools, families, and communities. The book will be important reading for preservice and in-service teachers, particularly those studying or researching in Family-School-Community Interactions, Social Justice Education, Multicultural Education, Educational Leadership and Administration, Curriculum and Instruction, Sociology of Education, and African American Studies.

Mobility Injustice by Design examines the social exclusion of vulnerable people in urban spaces, revealing how millions of citizens have their 'right to roam' curbed by design and planning decisions made either intentionally to facilitate immobility or social exclusion, or because of a lack of awareness of the aggregated consequences.

Ole B. Jensen's insightful volume offers a theoretically informed framework, allowing us to 'see' mobility injustices more clearly, consider how new knowledge can mobilize design ethics, and think about how mobility justice can be brought about. It challenges us to reassess how choices of materials, design of spaces, and implementation of technologies afford or hinder particular mobilities. It explores a way of thinking about mobility and injustice that recognizes that everyone is assisted in their mobility practices and that human capacity for acting in the world is mediated by spaces, things, artifacts, and technologies. It examines not only the centrality of design but also the possibility that design may be working counter to the widespread cultural belief that design is in the service of 'the good'. It locates thinking about mobility injustice between affect, experiences, and sensations on the one hand and reason, principles, and formal rules on the other. Focusing on three realms of practice, it reveals the ways in which the design of cities and urban spaces accommodates the needs of people living as unhoused, disabled, and aged and how these groups experience mobility injustice. Crucially, it provides insight into the potential to move toward a future, more mobility-just society on a local, national, and global scale, in light of warfare, environmental, and migration crises.

Mobility Injustice by Design informs the future agenda of both critical mobilities research and the design fields and reflects on the potential for those in the arts and design to provoke public engagement in these timely issues. It is essential reading for all those concerned with the study and practice of mobilities theory, urban sociology, urban planning and design, architecture, urban geography, disability studies, and gerontology.

In Servants of God, Slaves of the Church, Lisa Kaaren Bailey uncovers the surprising intimacy between sacred devotion and coerced labor in early medieval Europe. From queens who scrubbed monastery floors to enslaved women forced into lifelong service, acts of humility and acts of subjugation often looked the same and were interpreted through the same religious lens. Drawing from sermons, letters, miracle stories, and hagiographies, Bailey shows how metaphors of service shaped not only elite piety but also the lived experience of those at the very bottom of the social order.

This is a story of lives that were often absent from the historical record: those who lit church lamps, laundered liturgical linens, and sustained Christian worship through their unseen labor. Bailey weaves together theology, cultural history, and feminist historiography to trace how Christian ideas about virtue, sin, and the will both justified unfreedom and offered tools to contest it. Her use of "critical fabulation" animates the archive without fictionalizing it, allowing glimpses of agency in places where it was rarely recorded.

By placing the metaphor of service alongside its social reality, Servants of God, Slaves of the Church reshapes how we think about labor, power, and religious meaning in the centuries after Rome. A deeply informed work of both historical scholarship and moral insight, this book gives voice to the voiceless and demands a reconsideration of what it meant to serve God.

Athlete Burnout: Recognition, Prevention, and Management provides the first contemporary account of athlete burnout. Drawing on academic literature from both inside and outside of sport, this book focuses on providing the tools necessary to understand and recognise the symptoms of athlete burnout. It also informs practice by providing evidence-based intervention strategies to aid in the prevention and management of athlete burnout.

Written in a concise, user-friendly, and accessible format for athletes and coaches, this book provides novel insights for practitioners, students, and academics alike interested in athlete health and sport psychology.

This book presents a new range of theoretical and empirical studies dedicated to Communicative Constructivism, a new approach in social theory developed from within the Sociology of Knowledge. Based on Social Constructivism and emerging from German-speaking social sciences, Communicative Constructivism integrates interpretive perspectives, poststructuralist theories, new materialism, actor network theories, and Science and Technology studies in a way which provides a systematic yet open theoretical frame for empirical studies. In doing so, it escapes the problems of postmodern arbitrariness of theoretical plurality, and of a too narrowly defined sociality. Instead, it presents clear elaborated theoretical premises and rich empirical studies, inviting an examination of relations to international research within ethnomethodology and interactionism. The theoretical chapters posit Communicative Constructivism within the field of social theories, illustrating its unique approach to subjectivity and helping to define a new field of research, while the empirical chapters ground the theoretical concepts of Communicative Constructivism in analyses across a range of fields from communicative actions, the role of violence, and religion and spirituality, to mediatization and the politics of knowledge. Providing a unique collection of the current state of the theory and serving as the first English-language publication of this kind, its foundational debates, and ongoing research in terms of theory formation and empirical analysis will appeal to scholars and researchers of sociology with interests in social theory, the sociology of knowledge, and the sociology of space. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 International license.

The book addresses long-standing geographical debates on place, place-attachment and kin/aesthetics as well as the unique spatial-temporal properties of 'journeying'. Drawing upon the author's road diaries and photographic archive dating back to the 1990s, the analysis centres on a route that runs from Scotland to Cornwall and which incorporates motorways, A-roads and unclassified country lanes. In addition to seeking to capture material evidence of change across a wide variety of road features and driving events - many of them transient, incidental and mundane - the book is also concerned with how change makes its presence known to the observer. This includes the question of how, and why, road-users sometimes develop powerful attachments for particular routes and roadside landmarks. To this end, the analysis is in conversation with recent debates in contemporary archaeology, the aesthetics of the everyday and geographical research on dis/orientation, as well as Henri Bergson's foundational work on the phenomenology of perception and memory. And yet, it is the restless, teeming life of the British roads featured in the case studies - the A30, the A82, the M5, the M6, the M74 and Cornwall's narrow, winding lanes - that makes this book memorable, especially given that, post-millennium, many of the changes to which it bears witness are epic in consequence. Congestion, electrification, automation, the arrival of SMART motorways and extreme weather events arising from climate change all feature here, alongside the disappearance of the roadside cafes, filling stations, phone boxes, lay-bys and snack bars associated with twentieth-century motoring.

This interdisciplinary exploration of Britain's changing roads and roadscapes will appeal to academics and students working in, and across, the fields of social and cultural geography, mobilities studies, cultural history, literary and cultural theory and contemporary archaeology. Its autoethnographic case studies, historical route descriptions, photographic archive and general accessibility mean that it may also be of interest to road enthusiasts and the general reader.

Artificial Intelligence in Smart Cities presents an interdisciplinary and comprehensive analysis of how AI reengineers urban life, governance, and infrastructure. The book explores key thematic areas, including smart government, economy, environment, living, people, cybersecurity, and innovation, complemented by Central European empirical case studies. Each chapter examines the impact of AI technologies-machine learning, natural language processing, and IoT integration-on augmented decision-making, sustainability, health, education, urban resilience, and social inclusiveness.

The book integrates empirical evidence, conceptual reflection, and practical deployment to illuminate how AI can be harnessed for inclusive urban growth. It guides readers through the complex landscape of ethics, economics, and privacy concerns while offering insights on algorithmic fairness, data protection, public trust, and AI innovation. This thoughtful examination advocates for a human-centered and ethical approach to Smart City development, balancing technological advancement with societal needs.

Addressed at researchers, urban planners, policymakers, technologists, and graduate students, this resource provides both policy-driven expertise and analytical capability. Readers will gain valuable perspectives on the convergence of urban futures and Artificial Intelligence, equipping them with the knowledge to navigate the challenges and opportunities of AI-enhanced urban environments while ensuring technology serves the public good.

The book provides a thorough and systematic examination of the role of AI in Smart Cities, covering its applications, benefits, and challenges in various aspects of urban development, including governance, economy, environment, mobility, living, and people.

• Offers an in-depth analysis of the key principles and technologies of AI, as well as its applications in Smart Cities, providing readers with a detailed understanding of the potential of AI to transform urban environments
• Presents case studies of successful AI implementations in Central European cities, providing practical insights and lessons learned for policymakers, urban planners, and business leaders seeking to harness the power of AI to create more liveable, sustainable, and resilient cities
• Adopts an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on insights from urban planning, computer science, engineering, economics, and social sciences to provide a comprehensive understanding of the role of AI in Smart Cities
• Provides a vision for a future where AI is used to create a better life for all citizens and inspires a new wave of innovation and collaboration in the development of Smart Cities