At the time of writing what is known to have been written about St. Georges, the capital of Grenada, treats mainly of its origin as a French outpost in the Caribbean about 1650, then came the wars of succession between France, England and Spain in the 17 th and 18th centuries, and much later in 1985 when Wilfred Redhead publishedA CITY ON A HILL, then George Brizans Grenada: Fortitude and Human Condition, Beverley Steeles Grenada: A HISTORY OF ITS People and Raymond Devas The History of the Island of Grenada, not forgetting the Grenada Handbook. It was also mentioned by the Georgian Society of England in the 1930s and again in the 1950s as a charming Georgian town in the Caribbean; and more recently in 2004, St. Georges-the prettiest little town in the Caribbean by George Brizan, which was a limited publication for Zublins promotional thrust for his proposed St. Georges Renaissance Project, which appears to be out of circulation. All of the above dealt mainly with its historical, political, social and cultural evolution,but in 1988, at the celebration of the 500th year of the coming of Columbus to the New World, CARIMOSthe cultural arm of the Organisation of American States (OAS), sponsored a technical report by the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Florida to mark the occasion, when St. Georges was described as a Monument of the wider Caribbean. A few years later in 1991 the Physical Planning Unit prepared the St. Georges Development Plan under the direction of the then Planning OfficerMr. Carlton Frederick, assisted by a United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Consultant. The Dynamics of Urban St. George seeks therefore to complement the technical deficitby further looking, examining and analysing the town mainly from a Architectural and Urban Planning perspective, and is therefore a document biased towards technology, which it is hoped will complement the previous publications on its historical and cultural assets, if that is at all subjectively possible while contemplating the synthesis of holistic communities. There is some confusion, misunderstanding or just mere semantics in the argument as to whether St. Georges is a town or a city; for the purpose of this discourse however, the designation is neither here nor there, what is germaine at this juncture is, that it is a relatively small urban centre with a population of about four thousand, which is rapidly declining, but with unique physical characteristics which influence the dynamics of a small Caribbean Society, within the confines of a limited land space with outstanding and dramatic natural features.

With the continuous migration of people towards metropolitan areas in search of employment, the demands for core services and energy, coupled with an increasing awareness of the impact of climate change, have placed the management and planning of global urban energy under a lot of pressure. Trends toward urban energy service transformations that offer greater affordability, reliability, efficiency and adaptability provide hope for a global sustainable future. At the same time, there are also limits to these transitions, as well as risks involved. For example, on one end of the spectrum, our urban energy future includes land use sprawl, high fossil fuel use, pollution, and unhealthy urban conditions. On the other side of this transition spectrum is more energy choices, and healthier, more livable cities, along with less energy use and fewer greenhouse gas emissions. What the future might hold for transforming the world's cities depends upon an understanding of the risks of current trajectories and the opportunities for and limitations to developing sustainable urban energy systems.This edited volume brings together leading experts on the prospects and challenges of urban energy innovation and on related-economic, social and environmental sustainability transitions. The focus of the volume is on multidisciplinary reviews, research informing technologies and policies for sustainability, and analytical insights addressing rapid urbanization and changes across a diverse typology of global cities. The volume will include an overview of the current state of urban energy systems. It will also document and evaluate urban energy prospects for a sustainable, resilient future.

Despite decades under Putin's rule, it is too simplistic to assert that authoritarianism in Russia has eliminated activism, especially in relation to everyday life. Instead, we must build an awareness of diverse efforts to mobilize citizens to better understand how activism is shaped by and, in turn, shapes the regime. Varieties of Russian Activism focuses on a broad range of collective actions addressing issues from labor organizing to housing renovation, religion, electoral politics, minority language rights, and urban planning. Contributors draw attention to significant forms of grassroots politics that have not received sufficient attention in scholarship or that deserve fresh examination. The volume shows that Russians find novel ways to redress everyday problems and demand new services. Together, these essays interrogate what kinds of practices can be defined as activism in a fast-changing, politically volatile society. An engaging collection, Varieties of Russian Activism unites leading scholars in the common aim of approaching the embeddedness of civic activism in the conditions of everyday life, connectedness, and rising society-state expectations.

Drawing on the middle chapters from the first edition of J. Barkley Rosser's seminal work, From Catastrophe to Chaos, this book presents an unusual perspective on economics and economic analysis. Current economic theory largely depends upon assuming that the world is fundamentally continuous. However, an increasing amount of economic research has been done using approaches that allow for discontinuities such as catastrophe theory, chaos theory, synergetics, and fractal geometry. The spread of such approaches across a variety of disciplines of thought has constituted a virtual intellectual revolution in recent years. This book reviews the applications of these approaches in various subdisciplines of economics and draws upon past economic thinkers to develop an integrated view of economics as a whole from the perspective of inherent discontinuity.

The contributors to this volume propose strategies of urgent and vital importance that aim to make today’s urban environments more resilient. Resilience, the ability of complex systems to adapt to changing conditions, is a key frontier in ecological research and is especially relevant in creative urban design, as urban areas exemplify complex systems. With something approaching half of the world’s population now residing in coastal urban zones, many of which are vulnerable both to floods originating inland and rising sea levels, making urban areas more robust in the face of environmental threats must be a policy ambition of the highest priority. The complexity of urban areas results from their spatial heterogeneity, their intertwined material and energy fluxes, and the integration of social and natural processes. All of these features can be altered by intentional planning and design. The complex, integrated suite of urban structures and processes together affect the adaptive resilience of urban systems, but also presupposes that planners can intervene in positive ways. As examples accumulate of linkage between sustainability and building/landscape design, such as the Shanghai Chemical Industrial Park and Toronto’s Lower Don River area, this book unites the ideas, data, and insights of ecologists and related scientists with those of urban designers. It aims to integrate a formerly atomized dialog to help both disciplines promote urban resilience.

The Dynamic Landscape advances a fusion of scientific and ecological planning design philosophy that can address the need for more sustainable designed landscapes. It is a major statement on the design, implementation and management of ecologically inspired landscape vegetation.

In a world where half of the population lives in cities and more than 90 percent of urban growth is occurring in the developing world, cities struggle to modernize without completely losing their unique character, which is embodied by their historic cores and cultural heritage assets. As countries develop, cultural heritage can provide a crucial element of continuity and stability: the past can become a foundation for the future. This book collects innovative research papers authored by leading scholars and practitioners in heritage economics, and presents the most current knowledge on how heritage assets can serve as drivers of local economic development. What this book tries to suggest is a workable approach to explicitly take into account the cultural dimensions of urban regeneration in agglomerations that have a history and possess a unique character, going beyond an approach based solely on major cultural heritage assets or landmarks. The knowledge disseminated through this book will help stakeholders involved in preparation, implementation, and supervision of development investments to better assess the values of cultural heritage assets and incorporate them in urban development policies.