This book focuses on the links between population dynamics and environment. Demographic changes, e.g. population growth and decline, urbanization and migration are analyzed by researchers from different natural and social sciences, focusing on complex interactions between population dynamics and transformations of water and food supply systems. Empirical case studies in selected regions in Europe, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Africa from prehistory to present permit to identify specific problem constellations. Solutions are presented in order to enhance the capability of supply systems to adapt to demographic changes.

Could the concepts of »metropolitanism« and »thick space« aid our understanding of historical and contemporary urban change? Essays by scholars from both sides of the Atlantic provide interdisciplinary approaches to the complex dynamics of large-scale urbanization. The book opens with conceptual questions regarding the development of metropoles and metropolitan studies. The following sections provide analyses of the social, environmental, and cultural dimensions of metropolitan spaces from both a theoretical and an empirical perspective, such as the role of planning and urban parks, the impact of ethnic diversity and segregation, the place of cinematic visions or the centrality of infrastructures and architecture.

Dejan Petkov explores the tramway renaissance in Western Europe from a socio-technical standpoint and focuses on the development in Germany, France, and England. A multiple case analysis reveals the drivers, impact forces, actors and interest constellations behind the tramway renaissance in these countries and demonstrates the large variations in local systems and their style. A key finding is that there can be quite different paths to the success of tramway systems, but this success usually comes at a cost and can have a comprehensive character only if the systems are considered an integral part of the overarching strategies and concepts for urban and regional development.

City Life from Jakarta to Dakar focuses on the politics incumbent to this process – an "anticipatory politics" – that encompasses a wide range of practices, calculations and economies. As such, the book is not a collection of case studies on a specific theme, not a review of developmental problems, nor does it marshal the focal cities as evidence of particular urban trends. Rather, it examines how possibilities, perhaps inherent in these cities all along, are materialized through the everyday projects of residents situated in the city and the larger world in very different ways.

Most new urban growth takes place in the suburbs; consequently, infrastructures are in a constant state of playing catch-up, creating repeated infrastructure crises in these peripheries. However, the push to address the tensions stemming from this rapid growth also allow the suburbs to be a major source of urban innovation. Taking a critical social science perspective to identify political, economic, social, and environmental issues related to suburban infrastructures, this book highlights the similarities and differences between suburban infrastructure conditions encountered in the Global North and Global South. Adopting an international approach grounded in case studies from three continents, this book discusses infrastructure issues within different suburban and societal contexts: low-density infrastructure-rich Global North suburban areas, rapidly developing Chinese suburbs, and the deeply socially stratified suburbs of poor Global South countries. Despite stark differences between types of suburbs, there are features common to all suburban areas irrespective of their location, and similarities in the infrastructure issues confronting these different categories of suburbs.