For cities today, the necessity of meeting the current needs of residents, as well as planning for the future, helps shape local decision making and governance structures. These decisions are rooted in the historical paths of the city, as well as in their relationships with other cities across the globe. City networks have emerged as a forum to facilitate the transfer of ideas and knowledge, and to help cities move beyond the current path they may be in, to one where a more positive future can emerge. City networks provide a place for specific projects to be transferred, and examining positive and negative examples will help with future transfers. Bogota is an example both of a city that successfully transferred a project from another city and improved it, as well as a city that is seeking to share its success through formal structures as city networks and informal means such as hosting leaders from other cities across the globe. This may currently be the exception, but the sharing of ideas between cities through city networks has the potential to become the norm.

As a result of global dynamics--the increasing interconnection of people and places--innovations in global environmental governance haved altered the role of cities in shaping the future of the planet. This book is a timely study of the importance of these social transformations in our increasingly global and increasingly urban world. Through analysis of transnational municipal networks, such as Metropolis and the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group, Sofie Bouteligier's innovative study examines theories of the network society and global cities from a global ecology perspective. Through direct observation and interviews and using two types of city networks that have been treated separately in the literature, she discovers the structure and logic pertaining to office networks of environmental non-governmental organizations and environmental consultancy firms. In doing so she incisively demonstrates the ways in which cities fulfill the role of strategic sites of global environmental governance, concentrating knowledge, infrastructure, and institutions vital to the function of transnational actors.

The importance of subnational welfare measures, and their complex embeddedness in wider multilevel governance systems, has often been underplayed in both urban studies and social policy analysis. This Handbook gives readers the analytical tools to understand urban social policies in context, and bridges the gap in research.

This book both analyzes and synthesizes new cutting-edge theories and methods for future design implementations in smart cities through interdisciplinary synergizing of architecture, technology, and the Internet of Things (IoT). Implementation of IoT enables the collection and data exchange of objects embedded with electronics, software, sensors, and network connectivity. Recently IoT practices have moved into uniquely identifiable objects that are able to transfer data directly into networks. This book features new technologically advanced ideas, highlighting properties of smart future city networks. Chapter contributors include theorists, computer scientists, mathematicians, and interdisciplinary planners, who currently work on identifying theories, essential elements, and practices where the IoT can impact the formation of smart cities and sustainability via optimization, network analyses, data mining, mathematical modeling and engineering. Moreover, this book includes research-based theories and real world practices aimed toward graduate researchers, experts, practitioners and the general public interested in architecture, engineering, mathematical modeling, industrial design, computer science technologies, and related fields.

It has become increasingly evident that effective planning for sustainable communities, environments and economies pivots on the ability of planners to see the possibilities for culture in comprehensive social, historical and environmental terms and to more fully engage with the cultural practices, processes and theorisation that comprise a social formation. More broadly, an approach to planning theory and practice that is itself formed through a close engagement with culture is required. This Research Companion brings together leading experts from around the world to map the contours of the relationship between planning and culture and to present these inextricably linked concepts and issues together in one place. By examining significant trends in varying national and international contexts, the contributors scrutinise the theories and practices of both planning and culture and explore not only their interface, but significant divergences and tensions. In doing so, this collection provides the first comprehensive overview and analysis of planning and culture, interdisciplinary and international in scope. It is comprised of six parts organised around the themes of global and historical contexts, key dimensions of planning and cultural theory and practice, and cultural and planning dynamics. Each section includes a final chapter that provides a case study lens which pulls the themes of the section together with reference to a significant planning issue or initiative.

There is now a palpable sense of optimism about the role of cities and transnational city-networks in global climate governance. Yet, amidst the euphoria, there is also a sense that the power that has been ascribed to – and frequently assumed by – cities has been overstated; that the power of cities and city-networks to make a difference in global climate politics is not what it appears. This book explores the implications of city-engagement in global climate politics, outlining a theoretical framework that can be used to understand the power of cities in relation to transnational city-networks, multinational corporations and nation-states. The book will be of interest to students and scholars of transnational governance, global environmental politics and climate change.

This report suggests that Abruzzo should focus on endogenous resources to build its long-term development strategy and, at the same time, to increase the external openness of the regional system to attract more entrepreneurs, students, foreigners and external capital.