By Marion Roberts, Adam Eldridge

ISBN: 9780415436175

Published June 26 2009 by Routledge.

By Richard John Huggett

Physical Geography: The Key Concepts is a thought-provoking and up-to-date introduction to the central ideas and debates within the field. It provides extended definitions of terms that are fundamental to physical geography and its many branches, covering topics such as:

• biogeography
• ecology
• climatology
• meteorology
• geomorphology
• hydrology
• pedology

Complete with informative tables, diagrams, and suggestions for further reading, this is a highly accessible guide for those studying physical geography and related courses.

ISBN: 9780415452076

Published June 26 2009 by Routledge.

Critical Studies of Masculinities and the Migration Experience

Edited by Mike Donaldson, Raymond Hibbins, Richard Howson, Bob Pease

This edited volume contributes an important collection of chapters to the growing theoretical and empirical work being undertaken at the international level on men and migration. The chapters presented here focus on what we might call ‘migratory masculinities': the experiences men have of masculinity upon immigration into another national, ethnic, and cultural context. How do these men (re)construct their conceptions of masculinity? Where are the points of tension, ambivalence or assimilation in this process? Featuring interviews and data drawn from migrants working and living in Australia, this book explores how the gender identity of men from non-English-speaking backgrounds is influenced by the experiences of migration and settlement in an English-speaking culture, across various cultural spheres such as work, leisure, family life and religion.

ISBN: 9780415994859

Published June 26 2009 by Routledge.

By Manohar S. Pawar

There is a tremendous need for community development practice in the Asia-Pacific region due to its size and prevailing diverse socio-economic, political and cultural needs and issues. Both developed and developing countries have been reemphasizing the importance of community development and have introduced several schemes or programs for overall development. Manohar Pawar familiarizes readers with the region, presents the major social, economic and political issues, looks at values and principles, and critically analyses challenges and shows opportunities for community development practice in the region. This book will allow for anyone interested in community development both at local and global levels – scholars, non-government organizations (NGOs), government organisations, international aid agencies – to gain a broad understating of community development trends in the Asia-Pacific region.

ISBN: 9780415998741

Published June 26 2009 by Routledge.

By Jo Beall, Sean Fox

By 2030 more than 60% of the world's population will live in urban areas, with most of the world’s population growth over the next 25 years being absorbed by cities and towns in low and middle income countries. What are the consequences of this shift? Demographic pressure already strains the capacity of local and national governments to manage urban change. Today, nearly one billion people live in slums, and in the absence of significant intervention that number is set to double in the next two decades. Will our future be dominated by mega-cities of poverty and despair, or can urbanization be harnessed to advance human and economic development?

Cities and Development provides a critical exploration of the dynamic relationship between urbanism and development. Highlighting both the challenges and opportunities associated with rapid urban change, the book surveys: the historical relationship between urbanization and development; the role cities play in fostering economic growth in a globalizing world; the unique characteristics of urban poverty and the poor record of interventions designed to tackle it; the complexities of managing urban environments; issues of urban crime, violence, war and terrorism in contemporary cities; and the importance of urban planning, governance and politics in shaping city futures.

This book brings into conversation debates from urban and development studies and highlights the strengths and weakness of current policy and planning responses to the contemporary urban challenge. It includes research orientated supplements in the form of summaries, boxed case studies, development questions and further reading. The book is intended for senior undergraduate and graduate students interested in urban, international and development studies, as well as policy makers and planners concerned with equitable and sustainable urban development.

ISBN: 9780415390989

Published June 23 2009 by Routledge.

Experiences, Datasets, and Prospects

Edited by Paolo Gamba, Martin Herold

The use of remote sensors for human settlement mapping and monitoring holds great promise for numerous fields of study, including urban planning and global environmental change and sustainability. While the potential for this technology is difficult to measure, achieving useful results at a regional or global level is but a recent accomplishment. Global Mapping of Human Settlement is the first book to provide a comprehensive overview of the methodologies, datasets, and approaches related to the use of remotely sensed data to map human settlements at the global scale, as well as the experiences encountered with their application.

Valuable to a broad range of researchers, the book begins by analyzing the requirements for global and regional urban remote sensing. To this end, it provides a general background of global urban issues, outlines observation and assessment requirements, and looks at how these relate to current initiatives on international policy and strategic levels. The contributors, an international group of pioneering experts, describe the characteristics of human settlements as seen and mapped from remote sensors, either at the regional or global scale. They also discuss the spectral variety, special scales, and nighttime appearance as key remote sensing indicators of these environments.

The text explores some of the most acclaimed and important projects and programs previously carried out or in current use for urban mapping and monitoring. These chapters highlight the impressive amount of information available and the processing and analysis techniques used to extract such data from several data sources, including satellite imagery. The book also explores some of the future challenges and makes recommendations regarding areas of research that should be actively pursued.

DVD Included to Complement the Text

To provide readers with the opportunity to experience the latest tools, the editors supplement the text with a DVD that provides samples of the latest products. These will assist readers in testing approaches proposed in the book.

ISBN: 9781420083392

Published June 23 2009 by CRC Press.

From Process to Decisions

Edited by Rodolphe Devillers, Helen Goodchild

This book provides an up-to-date overview of research being done in the field of spatial data quality, which looks at understanding, measuring, describing, and communicating information about the imperfections of geographic data used by GIS and other mapping software. It presents results from a number of current research projects in this area, from the assessment of data accuracy to legal aspects relating to the quality of geographic information. The international contributors focus on the relationship between the quality of geographic data and the quality of decisions based on such data.

ISBN: 9781439810125

Published June 23 2009 by CRC Press.

Edited by Klaus Schubert, Simon Hegelich, Ursula Bazant

This book provides the first comprehensive information and detailed data on the welfare systems of all 27 EU member states and offers the reader an invaluable introduction and basis for comparative welfare research. The introductory chapter summarizes the actual debate about welfare states and welfare (state) regimes, gives an overview on current welfare (state) research and analyses the main recent developments necessitating a new focus on European Welfare Systems. The 27 chapters on the welfare systems of the member states are written on the basis of a common structure by experts from the individual states. An additional chapter analyses the current social and welfare policies of the EU and focuses on the interplay and limits between European and national social policies. Two concluding chapters provide (a) a first comparative analysis on the basis of all 27 European Welfare Systems and (b) a theoretical reflection both arguing for and venturing the idea of politically limited pluralism in European welfare politics.

ISBN: 9780415482752

Published June 19 2009 by Routledge.

By Peter Roberts, Joe Ravetz, Clive George

‘Cities’ are now home for over half the world’s population – the hubs and gateways for capital, innovation, markets, resources and migration. On current trends the future may be a ‘planet of slums’ – many cities are places of poverty, crime and struggles for resources, where the ‘environment’ is polluted and hazardous. Other cities are sites of conspicuous consumption, where the ‘environment’ is a commodity seen from a car or hotel window. But even such extreme cases are inter-dependent and connected in a global system of power and money, resource flows and ideology.

Environment and the City is an introduction to the many layers of the ‘human urban environment’. It examines the full range of issues and elements that make-up the urban environment, including the consumption of resources, population pressures, and the pattern of urban development. These different issues and elements are examined through adopting an inter-disciplinary perspective, drawing equally on geography, sociology, economics and political science, as well as the environmental and resource sciences. As a consequence, the book is able to focus on the key debates that are of critical importance for the cities of both the developed and less-developed nations. The result is not a simple, single solution, rather the book offers a set of directions and tools of enquiry that provide a realistic and practical approach to understanding and managing sustainable cities and regions.

This book is a concise and accessible guide for all students interested in the environmental issues emanating from our urban societies. Primarily written to aid student understanding, the easily navigable text features boxed practical examples, discussion points, signposts to reading and websites and a glossary. Nevertheless the book will also be useful to policy-makers and practitioners in geography and environmental studies, urban planning and development, urban politics and sociology, and others who think the future of our urban civilization and its impact on the environment is pertinent.

ISBN: 9780415302463

Published June 19 2009 by Routledge.

Edited by Waquar Ahmed, Amitabh Kundu, Richard Peet

Conventional interpretations of the New Economic Policy introduced in India in 1991 see this program of economic liberalization as transforming the Indian economy and leading to a substantial increase in the rate of India’s economic growth. But in a country like India, growth is not enough. Who benefits from the new growth regime, and can it significantly improve the conditions of livelihood for India’s 800 million people with incomes below $2.00 a day? This edited volume looks at international policy regimes and their national adoption under strategic conditions of economic crisis and coercion, and within longer-term structural changes in the power calculus of global capitalism. The contributors examine long-term growth tendencies, poverty and employment rates at the national level, regional level and local levels in India; the main growth centers; the areas and people left out; the advantages and deficiencies of the existing policy regime, and alternative economic policies for India. Bringing together the leading figures in the discussion on India’s economic policy, this volume is the authoritative critical study of India’s New Economic Policy.

ISBN: 9780415801881

Published June 15 2009 by Routledge.