Advances in 21st Century Human Settlements

This book discusses the production, distribution, regulatory and management frameworks that affect food in urban settings. It plugs a gap in knowledge especially in the sub-Saharan Africa region where food, despite its critical importance, has been ignored as a ‘determinant of success’ in the planning and management of cities and towns. The various chapters in the book demonstrate how urban populations in Zimbabwe and elsewhere have often devised ways to produce own food to supplement on their incomes. Food is produced largely by way of urban agriculture or imported from the countryside and sold in both formal and informal stores and stalls. The book shows how in spite of the important space food occupies in the lives of all city residents, the planning and regulatory framework does not facilitate the better performance of food systems.

Resilience has become a very topical issue transcending many spheres and sectors of sustainable urban development. This book presents a resilience framework for sustainable cities and towns in Africa. The rise in informal settlements is due to the urban planning practices in most African cities that rarely reflect the realities of urban life and environment for urban development. Aspects of places, people and process are central to the concept of urban resilience and sustainable urban growth. It stems from the observation that urban vulnerability is on the increase in Zimbabwe and beyond. In history, disasters have adversely affected nations across the world, inflicting wide ranging losses on one hand while on the other hand creating development opportunities for urban communities. Cooperation in disaster management is a strategy for minimising losses and uplifting the affected urban settlements. The significance of urban planning and design in the growth and development of sustainableurban centres is well documented. Urbanisation has brought with it challenges that most developing countries such as Zimbabwe are not equipped to handle. This has been accompanied by problems such as overpopulation, overcrowding, shortages of resources and the growth of slum settlements. There need is to seriously consider urban planning and design in order to come up with contemporary designs that are resilient to current urban challenges. There are major gaps in urban resilience building for instance in Harare and the local authority needs to prioritise investment in resilient urban infrastructure.

The book focuses on the key contemporary issue of Climate change, constructing the narrative from traditions’ of Urbanism through its Axiology and Epistemology. The book is a rich collection of seven chapters and attempts to address each of the aspects and building further for traditional Urbanism. The book further explores the synergies of traditional urbanism for Climate change through climate responsive practices with main thrust on Energy use. The said understanding is validated through the case example of walled city of Jaipur:  World Heritage Site 2019. The chapters enumerate how the traditional urbanism of Jaipur was designed that evolved as climate responsive typology for the respective geography.

This book is about containment, life, work, and restart cities affected by COVID 19, using selected empirical case studies. This book presents the spread of coronavirus spatially and temporally, analyses containment strategies and includes recommended strategies. Further, it analyses how life and work get transformed during the lockdown, and gradual opening up, and presents the future of work and life in cities impacted by COVID-19. This book discusses the concept of smart life and works in cities post-COVID-19 such that they do not reduce the quality of work and life and cannot create adverse economic and living consequences called the restart of a city after COVID-19.
Selected Cities of special interest are studied. Special interest is because Kerala and Maharashtra got the worst affected in India by COVID 19 pandemic and the book focus on that. 

This book is about containment, life, work, and restart regions affected by COVID 19, using selected empirical case studies. This book presents the spread of coronavirus spatially and temporally, analyses containment strategies and includes recommended strategies. Further, it analyses how life and work get transformed during the lockdown, and gradual opening up, and presents the future of work and life in cities impacted by COVID-19. This book discusses the concept of smart life and works in cities post-COVID-19 such that they do not reduce the quality of work and life and cannot create adverse economic and living consequences called the restart of a city after COVID-19.
Selected Regions of special interest are studied. Special interest is because Kerala and Maharashtra got the worst affected in India by COVID 19 pandemic and the book focus on that. 

This edited collection provides an alternative discourse on cities evolving with physically and virtually networked communities—the ‘digital polis’—and offers a variety of perspectives from the humanities, media studies, geography, architecture, and urban studies. As an emergent concept that encompasses research and practice, the digital polis is oriented toward a counter-mapping of the digital cityscape beyond policing and gatekeeping in physical and virtual gated communities. Considering the digital polis as offering potential for active support of socially just and politically inclusive urban circumstances in ways that mirror the Greek polis, our attention is drawn towards the interweaving of the development of digital technology, urban space, and social dynamics. The four parts of this book address the formation of technosocial subjectivity, real-and-virtual combined urbanity, the spatial dimensions of digital exclusion and inclusion, and the prospect of emancipatoryand empowering digital citizens. Individual chapters cover varied topics on digital feminism, data activism, networked individualism, digital commons, real-virtual communalism, the post-family imagination, digital fortress cities, rights to the smart city, online foodscapes, and open-source urbanism across the globe. Contributors explore the following questions: what developments can be found over recent decades in both physical and virtual communities such as cyberspace, and what will our urban future be like? What is the ‘digital polis’ and what kinds of new subjectivity does it produce? How does digital technology, as well as its virtuality, reshape the city and our spatial awareness of it? What kinds of exclusion and cooperation are at work in communities and spaces in the digital age? Each chapter responds to these questions in its own way, navigating readers through routes toward the digital polis.

Chapter "Introduction - The digital polisand its practices: Beyond gated communities" is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

This edited collection provides an alternative discourse on cities evolving with physically and virtually networked communities—the ‘digital polis’—and offers a variety of perspectives from the humanities, media studies, geography, architecture, and urban studies. As an emergent concept that encompasses research and practice, the digital polis is oriented toward a counter-mapping of the digital cityscape beyond policing and gatekeeping in physical and virtual gated communities. Considering the digital polis as offering potential for active support of socially just and politically inclusive urban circumstances in ways that mirror the Greek polis, our attention is drawn towards the interweaving of the development of digital technology, urban space, and social dynamics. The four parts of this book address the formation of technosocial subjectivity, real-and-virtual combined urbanity, the spatial dimensions of digital exclusion and inclusion, and the prospect of emancipatoryand empowering digital citizens. Individual chapters cover varied topics on digital feminism, data activism, networked individualism, digital commons, real-virtual communalism, the post-family imagination, digital fortress cities, rights to the smart city, online foodscapes, and open-source urbanism across the globe. Contributors explore the following questions: what developments can be found over recent decades in both physical and virtual communities such as cyberspace, and what will our urban future be like? What is the ‘digital polis’ and what kinds of new subjectivity does it produce? How does digital technology, as well as its virtuality, reshape the city and our spatial awareness of it? What kinds of exclusion and cooperation are at work in communities and spaces in the digital age? Each chapter responds to these questions in its own way, navigating readers through routes toward the digital polis.

Chapter "Introduction - The digital polisand its practices: Beyond gated communities" is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.