deCoding Asian Urbanism explores the current discourse and creation of innovative architecture and urban interventions that are effectively transforming the spatial and operational landscape of the complex Asian city. The book highlights efforts that strategically embrace the rapid growth and the cultural and physical complexity of the built environment in Asia. While the scale and pace of 21st-century urbanization are staggering and unprecedented, new urban development in Asia alone in the next two decades will likely exceed the urban growth worldwide of the last two hundred years. While Asian cities have historically drawn on their history and regional culture, this critical assimilation has been vastly superseded by the sheer velocity of urban growth inspired by external/global/western models.The phenomenal growth of Asian cities remains a challenge to their infrastructure, existing resources, and the roles that have traditionally constituted city-making in the broadest sense. Essays by some of the most prominent architects, historians, sociologists, urban designers, and activists across the globe provide unique perspectives on the diverse complexity of the Asian city. The book is extensively illustrated with project images, analytical diagrams, maps, and selected photographs. The essays and illustrations complement transcripts and images of spirited panel discussions from a symposium at Harvard University's South Asia Institute that reveal contemporary thinking and practice of design and planning in Asian cities.deCoding Asian Urbanism focuses on those critical interventions that go beyond globalization to achieve a substantive systemic innovation in the Asian City. The book is organized into three sections: Decoding the City, Mediating the City, and Transforming the City. These sections present the context, consider a strategic approach, and present transformational projects that revitalize, renew, and transform the complex urban environment and illustrate their key principles. The urban condition, the historical context, the proposed program, and the stated objectives of stakeholders are considered elements that inform and guide the formal and spatial responses.

DeCoding Asian Urbanism explores those urban interventions that are crucial in shaping the physical and spatial environment of the Asian city. The book showcases interventions that are innovative and transformational in their ability to revitalize, renew and transform the urban environment. Through appropriate interventions in their evolving trajectories, the revitalization of our cities will embrace the vast majority of its citizens to benefit from the wide range of dynamics at these strategic global nodes.

The MIT based SENSEable City Lab under Carlo Ratti is one of the research centers that deal with the flow of people and goods, but also of refuse that moves around the world. Experience with large-scale infrastructure projects suggest that more complex and above all flexible answers must be sought to questions of transportation or disposal. This edition, edited by Dietmar Offenhuber and Carlo Ratti, shows how Big Data change reality and, hence, the way we deal with the city. It discusses the impact of real-time data on architecture and urban planning, using examples developed in the SENSEable City Lab. They demonstrate how the Lab interprets digital data as material that can be used for the formulation of a different urban future. It also looks at the negative aspects of the city-related data acquisition and control. The authors address issues with which urban planning disciplines will work intensively in the future: questions that not only radically and critically review, but also change fundamentally, the existing tasks and how the professions view their own roles.

This book brings together James C. Scott's most important work on peasant religion and ideology; everyday forms of peasant resistance; and state technologies of personal identification. In a collection of interrelated essays Scott introduces the major concepts that lie at the core of his work and illustrates, through ethnographic and historical work how they can be understood through practical examples.

"There is growing consensus that sustainability, as an imperative, compels us to rethink what we design. How this in turn affects process and approach, the question of how we design, remains unclear. This is true in education as it is in practice. Educators struggle to reconcile the dissonance between conventions of pedagogy and emerging tools and metrics of sustainability; practitioners fall back on industry checklists for green building certification. It does not help that 'sustainability' is hard to pin down. The people-profit-planet principle -- useful as classroom rhetoric -- sheds no light on process. We are left with elemental knowledge, without tactical knowhow. This book presents the work of students and their teachers across three studios of the Master of Science, Integrated Sustainable Design (MSc ISD) programme at the School of Design and Environment, National University of Singapore. The students -- from varied backgrounds and disciplines -- were assigned a large site in Singapore which they had to reimagine for a distant future. Each studio began with research and mapping, culminating in a masterplan that linked multiple parts of each site into an integrated, yet differentiated, whole. The title of this book, SG3, speaks to the cumulative impact of these interventions, which is more than the sum of three sites. Each site amplifies the other, resulting in a new way of thinking and acting. The pages ahead are organised according to the stages of the studio process, prefaced by a discussion on why Dr. Nirmal Kishnani -- who taught all three studios -- offers an educator's perspective, asking what the outcome says about the teaching of sustainable design. Asma Khawatmi -- who co-taught the first studio, and helped frame a direction that was applied to all three -- examines when and how principles known to urban designers in practice are adapted to emerging imperatives of sustainability. Deepshi Bhogal and Mayank Kaushal were both students of the programme, and are now successful practitioners in Singapore with a deep interest in sustainability. In the epilogue, they reflect on how their time in the studio shaped later decisions at the practitioner's drawing board."--Page 7.

The author outlines the major ideas and issues that have emerged in the growing movement of green architecture and sustainable design over the last thirty years. The book asks individuals to understand how the philosophy of sustainable design can affect their own work.

For centuries, our ancestors carefully observed the movements of the heavens and wove that astronomical knowledge into their city planning, architecture, mythology, paintings, sculpture, and poetry. This book uncovers the hidden messages and advanced science encoded within these sacred spaces, showing how the rhythmic motions of the night sky played a central role across many different cultures. Our astronomical tour transports readers through time and space, from prehistoric megaliths to Renaissance paintings, Greco-Roman temples to Inca architecture. Along the way, you will investigate unexpected findings at Lascaux, Delphi, Petra, Angkor Wat, Borobudur, and many more archaeological sites both famous and little known. Through these vivid examples, you will come to appreciate the masterful ways that astronomical knowledge was incorporated into each society’s religion and mythology, then translated into their physical surroundings. The latest archaeoastronomical studies and discoveries are recounted through a poetic and nontechnical narrative, revealing how many longstanding beliefs about our ancestors are being overturned. Through this celestial journey, readers of all backgrounds will learn the basics about this exciting field and share in the wonders of cultural astronomy.