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Sanitation in unsewered urban poor areas : technology selection, quantitative microbial risk assessment and grey water treatment
The PhD Thesis covers a review of sanitation technology options for urban slums including existing technologies, their application status and the knowledge gaps. A novel method for selection of sustainable sanitation technologies in urban slums is presented as an alternative to software applications. This method promotes holder participation and ensures sustainability of the selected and implemented sanitation systems. Furthermore, this PhD research provided an insight into the genomic copy concentrations of selected waterborne viruses in a typical urban slum and the magnitude of microbial risks to human health caused by pathogens (bacteria and waterborne viruses through various exposure pathways. The results show that urban slum environments are polluted and the disease burden from each of the exposure routes. In addition, the grey water production in urban slums is more than 80% of the water consumption and the grey water pollutant loads pose potential public health and environmental impacts. The PhD thesis also covers aspects of optimisation of the filtration medium during grey water treatment by uPVC filter columns in series and parallel mode. In addition, the study demonstrated that grey water treatment using a two-step crushed lava rock filter unit at household level in an urban slum is feasible. The grey water pollutant loads reduced by 50% to 80% after grey water treatment. The main conclusions on sanitation in unsewered urban poor areas and recommendations for future research are included in this PhD thesis.
Book
Risky Cities
Over half the world’s population lives in urban regions, and increasingly disasters are of great concern to city dwellers, policymakers, and builders. However, disaster risk is also of great interest to corporations, financiers, and investors. Risky Cities is a critical examination of global urban development, capitalism, and its relationship with environmental hazards. It is about how cities live and profit from the threat of sinkholes, garbage, and fire. Risky Cities is not simply about post-catastrophe profiteering. This book focuses on the way in which disaster capitalism has figured out ways to commodify environmental bads and manage risks. Notably, capitalist city-building results in the physical transformation of nature. This necessitates risk management strategies –such as insurance, environmental assessments, and technocratic mitigation plans. As such capitalists redistribute risk relying on short-term fixes to disaster risk rather than address long-term vulnerabilities.
eBook
Urban economics and urban policy : challenging conventional policy wisdom
\"In this volume, Paul Cheshire, Max Nathan and Henry Overman illustrate the insights that recent economic research brings to our understanding of cities, and the lessons for urban policy-making. The authors present new evidence on the fundamental importance of cities to economic wellbeing and to the enrichment of our lives. They also argue that many policies have been trying to push water uphill and have done little to achieve their stated aims; or, worse, have had unintended and counterproductive consequences.\"--From the back cover.
Book
The great urban transformation : politics of land and property in China
This book emphasizes the centrality of cities in China's ongoing transformation. Based on fieldwork in twenty-four Chinese cities between 1996 and 2007, the author forwards an analysis of the relations between the city, the state, and society through two novel concepts: urbanization of the local state and civic territoriality. Urbanization of the local state is a process of state power restructuring entailing an accumulation regime based on the commodification of state-owned land, the consolidation of territorial authority through construction projects, and a policy discourse dominated by notions of urban modernity. Civic territoriality encompasses the politics of distribution engendered by urban expansionism, and social actors' territorial strategies toward self-protection. Findings are based on observations in three types of places. In the inner city of major metropolitan centers, municipal governments battle high-ranking state agencies to secure land rents from redevelopment projects, while residents mobilize to assert property and residential rights. At the urban edge, as metropolitan governments seek to extend control over their rural hinterland through massive-scale development projects, villagers strategize to profit from the encroaching property market. At the rural fringe, township leaders become brokers of power and property between the state bureaucracy and villages, while large numbers of peasants are dispossessed, dispersed, and deterritorialized; their mobilizational capacity is consequently undermined.
eBook
Grow your own : how to be an urban farmer
Urban environments require specific techniques to optimise growing conditions for plants. Two leading experts in horticulture and soil science teach the reader how to grow their own food-from the ground up-in this authoritative, accessible, generously photographed guide. Grow Your Own provides simple step-by-step methods and information enabling the average city dweller to grow food plants at whatever scale their time and resources permit and no matter their location, be it suburban backyard or apartment balcony. Some of the many topics covered include creating the best environment for growing (influenced by water/temperature/light/air quality), setting up the soil; fertilisers, compost and worm farms; choosing crops (annual/perennial/heirloom/modern); propagation, planting and maintenance; pest and disease management; seed saving; rooftop spaces and vertical gardens; and integrated urban farming including bees and poultry.
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Reconstructing modernity
Reconstructing modernity assesses the character of approaches to rebuilding British cities during the decades after the Second World War. It explores the strategies of spatial governance that sought to restructure society and looks at the cast of characters who shaped these processes. It challenges traditional views of urban modernism as moderate and humanist, shedding new light on the importance of the immediate post-war for the trajectory of urban renewal in the twentieth century. The book shows how local corporations and town planners in Manchester and Hull attempted to create order and functionality through the remaking of their decrepit Victorian cities. It looks at the motivations of national and local governments in the post-war rebuilding process and explores why and how they attempted the schemes they did. What emerges is a picture of local corporations, planners and city engineers as radical reshapers of the urban environment, not through the production of grand examples of architectural modernism, but in mundane attempts to zone cities, produce greener housing estates, control advertising or regulate air quality. Their ambition to control and shape the space of their cities was an attempt to produce urban environments that might be both more orderly and functional, but also held the potential to shape society.
eBook
Tuff City
During the 1990s, Naples' left-wing administration sought to tackle the city's infamous reputation of being poor, crime-ridden, chaotic and dirty by reclaiming the city's cultural and architectural heritage. This book examines the conflicts surrounding the reimaging and reordering of the city's historic centre through detailed case studies of two piazzas and a centro sociale, focusing on a series of issues that include decorum, security, pedestrianization, tourism, immigration and new forms of urban protest. This monograph is the first in-depth study of the complex transformations of one of Europe's most fascinating and misunderstood cities. It represents a new critical approach to the questions of public space, citizenship and urban regeneration as well as a broader methodological critique of how we write about contemporary cities.
eBook
Sustainable low-carbon city development in China
Cities contribute an estimated 70 percent of the world's energy-related greenhouse gases (GHG). Their locations, often in low-elevation coastal zones, and large populations make them particularly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. But cities often take steps, even ahead of national governments, to reduce GHG emissions. So it is with China's cities, which are well placed to chart a low-carbon growth path to help reach China's national targets for reducing the energy and carbon intensity of its economy. China's cities will need to act on multiple fronts, in some cases scaling up elements of existing good practice, in others changing established ways of doing business. Actions affecting land-use and spatial development are among the most critical to achieving low-carbon growth as carbon emissions are closely connected to urban form. Spatial development also has very strong 'lock-in' effects: once cities grow and define their urban form, it is almost impossible to retrofit them because the built environment is largely irreversible and very costly to modify. Furthermore, cities need energy-efficient buildings and industries. They need a transport system that offers alternatives to automobiles. They need to shift to efficient management of water, wastewater, and solid waste. And they need to incorporate responses to climate change in their planning, investment decisions, and emergency-preparedness plans.
eBook