A lucidly written analysis of urban literature and evolving residential architecture.

ABOUT THE BOOK Staycations may not be a new concept, but they are quickly becoming a trendy alternative to spending time off work in hotels, cabins or on the road. A staycation, at the heart, is a vacation held in your home. You may indulge in restaurant fare, visit local tourist attractions or simply lounge around resting and reading books, but you do it in the comfort of your own house. Thousands of American families are giving up on the idea of driving or flying to faraway locations to take their annual vacation. Between busy family schedules and the state of the economy, more and more families are opting to spend their time off work at home, exploring the sites nearby and simply relaxing in their own house and yard. While economics is the main reason many of these families opt for a staycation, you save a number of other things by staying home instead of going on the road. Physically, it may be more comfortable to spend your vacation time at home. You can sleep in your own bed, cook your own food or eat at familiar restaurants and avoid the germs from thousands of people who you might otherwise meet at a crowded vacation spot. EXCERPT FROM THE BOOK Every time you travel on vacation, your carbon footprint increases dramatically. Using transportation often can't be helped during your average work week, but you can completely avoid having a damaging impact on the environment while on vacation by indulging in a staycation instead of going out-of-town. Restricting travel reduces carbon dioxide emissions as well as fuel consumption, two critical areas where environmentalists are concerned. Carbon Dioxide Emissions Driving a car adds to the excess carbon dioxide in the air, adding to the greenhouse effect. Every time you make an unnecessary trip in your car, you're damaging the environment when you didn't need to. If the emissions from automobile exhaust are bad, airplane trips are even worse. According to a study by The Babcock School, the average airplane gives off one pound of carbon dioxide per mile for every passenger on board. When you consider the hundreds of miles each plane flies and the hundreds of passengers in the average commercial flight, you can begin to see the problem with unneeded plane flights going across the country every single day... Buy a copy to keep reading!

Rapid urbanization represents major threats and challenges to personal and public health. The World Health Organisation identifies the ‘urban health threat’ as three-fold: infectious diseases, non-communicable diseases; and violence and injury from, amongst other things, road traffic. Within this tripartite structure of health issues in the built environment, there are multiple individual issues affecting both the developed and the developing worlds and the global north and south. Reflecting on a broad set of interrelated concerns about health and the design of the places we inhabit, this book seeks to better understand the interconnectedness and potential solutions to the problems associated with health and the built environment. Divided into three key themes: home, city, and society, each section presents a number of research chapters that explore global processes, transformative praxis and emergent trends in architecture, urban design and healthy city research. Drawing together practicing architects, academics, scholars, public health professional and activists from around the world to provide perspectives on design for health, this book includes emerging research on: healthy homes, walkable cities, design for ageing, dementia and the built environment, health equality and urban poverty, community health services, neighbourhood support and wellbeing, urban sanitation and communicable disease, the role of transport infrastructures and government policy, and the cost implications of ‘unhealthy’ cities etc. To that end, this book examines alternative and radical ways of practicing architecture and the re-imagining of the profession of architecture through a lens of human health.

This is not a story. This is a collection of some ideas what may be developed in the near future to improve our quality of life, or to make our life more comfortable, or healthier. This Volume is about home, city and transport. This includes some ideas how our home entertainment will look like in the future, how our Home Computer will manage all home appliances, mostly kitchen appliances and what can be improved in city transport and travels. This may be useful for people that use to say "everything is already invented, what more can be done?" The future looks interesting and somehow different from today, even better. There always will be a question if the computer serves us more than we serve the computer, and another question: what we shall do without computers? And the answer is: We shall be lost. This series is about how to become more dependent on computers, or how to take advantage of computers for making our live easier, better, safer and more enjoyable. Next Volumes of this series will be about environment and public administration. Also there is a lot to do. This collection of ideas is for all ages.

This book explores the relationships between home, work and migration among Vietnamese people in East London, demonstrating the diversity of home-making practices and forms of belonging in relation to the dwelling, workplace and wider city. Engaging with wider scholarship on transnationalism, urban mobilities and the geopolitical dimensions of home among migrants and diasporic communities, the author draws on ethnographic work to examine the experiences of people who migrated from Vietnam to London at different times and in diverse circumstances, including individuals who arrived as refugees in the 1970s, as well as those who have migrated for work or education in recent years. Migration, Work and Home-Making in the City thus sheds new light on the social, material and spiritual practices through which people create senses of home that connect them with their country of origin, and reveals how home-making is constrained by immigration policies, insecure housing and precarious work, thus highlighting the barriers to belonging in the city.