An ethnography examining how indigenous residents of crime-ridden, marginalized neighborhoods in Cochabamba, Bolivia, struggle to balance human rights with their need for safety and security.

By the dawn of the 21st century, more than half of the world's population was living in urban areas. This volume explores the implications of this unprecedented expansion in the world's most urbanized region, Latin America, exploring the new urban reality, and the consequences for both Latin America and the rest of the developing world.

Recent global appropriations of public spaces through urban activism, public uprising, and political protest have brought back democratic values, beliefs, and practices that have been historically associated with cities. Given the aggressive commodification of public re- sources, public space is critically important due to its capacity to enable forms of public dis- course and social practice which are fundamental for the well-being of democratic societies. Public Space Reader brings together public space scholarship by a cross-disciplinary group of academics and specialists whose essays consider fundamental questions: What is public space and how does it manifest larger cultural, social, and political processes? How are public spaces designed, socially and materially produced, and managed? How does this impact the nature and character of public experience? What roles does it play in the struggles for the just city, and the Right to The City? What critical participatory approaches can be employed to create inclusive public spaces that respond to the diverse needs, desires, and aspirations of individuals and communities alike? What are the critical global and comparative perspectives on public space that can enable further scholarly and professional work? And, what are the futures of public space in the face of global pandemics, such as COVID-19? The readers of this volume will be rewarded with an impressive array of perspectives that are bound to expand critical understanding of public space.

Urban areas produce a series of environmental problems arising from the consumption of natural resources and the consequent generation of waste and pollution. These problems contribute to the development of social and economic imbalances. All these problems, which continue to grow in our society, require new solutions. This book addresses the many inter-related aspects of the urban environment from transport and mobility to social exclusion and crime prevention. Publishing papers from the Fourth International Conference on Urban Regeneration and Sustainability, the volume includes topics such as: Strategy and Development; Planning; Development and Management; Environmental Management; Planning Issues; Socio-economic Issues; The community and the City; Cultural Heritage; Architectural Issues; Traffic and Transportation; Land Use and Management; Public Safety; Conservation of Resources; Sustainable Transportation and Transport Integration; Depleted Ecological Resources; Environmental Pollution; Energy Resources Systems.

We are living in a critical moment, a reality marked by environmental and socio-economic limits that requires innovative and realistic forms of action and planning. This is what regenerative urbanism proposes, a new approach based on utopian pragmatism that seeks to restore balance to the urban territory by designing systems that allow it to adapt and transform. It is a methodology that defines models that do not consume available resources, but rather generate new ones that ensure compatibility between economic and social prosperity and nature. Santander, Hábitat Futuro (Santander, Future Habitat) is the city model created from this methodology, a proposal for the transformation of this city for the year 2055. It is an open model based on innovation and citizen participation that prepares and adapts the territory for the different scenarios to come. Santander, Habitat Futuro is a guide that directs the commitment of the different social, economic and political agents towards a common goal: to achieve a circular, sustainable, resilient, vertebrate, prosperous, vital and inclusive city. A model that, due to its innovative nature, can serve as an example to other intermediate cities around the world.

This book aims to provide bases for reasoning on what challenges urban-architectural design for vulnerable communities will face in the coming years. Several issues, such as technological development, climate change, political crisis and economic uncertainties show as traditional strategies and methodologies are not sufficient to deeply solve the problems of these complex realities. These new changes, which are studied in different fields of knowledge, highlight the fact that the development of effective solutions must be characterized by multidisciplinary approaches and must be based on strategies promoted by different disciplines. For this reason, this contributed volume collects contributions and considerations from experts in various fields of knowledge working in different parts of the world, such as the Americas, Europe and Asia. The goal is precisely to provide the reader with multidisciplinary knowledge and methodologies in order to better reflect and analyze the challenges that designing for vulnerable communities will face in the next few years. These multidisciplinary studies are organized into five sections: Sustainability and Vulnerabilities in Time of the Anthropocene Approaches, Principles and Paradigms to Contemporary Research and Practice for Vulnerable Communities Designing for Vulnerabilities: Applications and Actions Social Engagement in Vulnerable Communities Between Digital and Humanist Visions Vulnerabilities in Context: Analysis and Projects in the U.S.-Mexico Border Region Design for Vulnerable Communities will be of interest primarily to researchers and professionals in the field of urban-architectural design, but it will also be a useful tool to policy makers and members of civil society at large interested in making cities more inclusive.