This book places Australian conditions and urban planning centrally within comparative analysis of planning systems and cultures around the world to address issues including urban governance, climate change, transportation planning, regional development and migration planning. Australian urban conditions and their associated planning responses can and often have been seen as unique or exceptional. They are seldom discussed in the same breath as conditions and associated planning systems internationally. Yet, as well as being somewhat different from those elsewhere in the world, Australian urban conditions and planning responses are also somewhat similar. They are uncanny – strangely familiar yet unfamiliar. In this book, Australian urban conditions, and their planning policies and practices are informally compared and contrasted with those existing internationally. If Australian urban planning policy and practice have had limited influence internationally, the partial familiarity of challenges posed by its urban conditions ensure that Australia is a more important global reference point for scholarship and practice than commonly is appreciated. In this book the authors assert the potential and actual originality of urban planning scholarship arising from the Australian context. It will be useful for students and faculty, planners working in Australia, as well as anyone interested in international planning debates.

"For Geert Lovink, interviews are imaginative texts that help create global, networked discourses not only among different professions but also among different cultures and social groups. Conducting interviews online, over a period of weeks or months, allows the participants to compose documents of depth and breadth, rather than simply snapshots of timely references." "The interviews collected in this book are with artists, critics, and theorists who are intimately involved in building the content, interfaces, and architectures of new media. ... The topics discussed include digital aesthetics, sound art, navigating deep audio space, European media philosophy, the internet in Eastern Europe, the mixing of old and new in India, critical media studies in the Asia-Pacific, Japanese techno tribes, hybrid identities, the storage of social movements, theory of the virtual class, virtual and urban spaces, corporate takeover of the internet, and cyberspace and the rise of nongovernmental organizations."

This book crtitically examines the reciprocal relationship between creativity and the built environment and features leading voices from across the world in a debate on originating, learning, modifying, and plagiarizing creativities within the built environment. The Companion includes contributions from architecture, design, planning, construction, real estate, economics, urban studies, geography, sociology, and public policies. Contributors review the current field and proposes new conceptual frameworks, research methodologies, and directions for research, policy, and practice. Chapters are organised into five sections, each drawing on cross-disciplinary insights and debates: Section I connects creativity, productivity, and economic growth and examines how our built environment stimulates or intimidates human imaginations. Section II addresses how hard environments are fabricated with social, cultural, and institutional meanings, and how these evolve in different times and settings. Section III discusses activities that directly and indirectly shape the material development of a built environment, its environmental sustainability, space utility, and place identity. Section IV illustrates how technologies and innovations are used in building and strengthening an intelligent, real-time, responsive urban agenda. Section V examines governance opportunities and challenges at the interface between creativity and built environment. An important resource for scholars and students in the fields of urban planning and development, urban studies, environmental sustainability, human geography, sociology, and public policy.

This edited volume reviews important contemporary issues through relevant case studies and research in China and Australia, such as the challenges posed by climate change, the development of eco-urban design, research on sustainable habitats and the relationship between ecology, green architecture and city regeneration, as well as, in general, the future of the city in the new millennium. The authors represent a broad selection of international experts, young scholars and established academics who discuss themes related to urban–rural destruction and economic and spatial regeneration techniques, the sustainable reconversion of natural landscapes and eco-urban design in the context of the current evolution of architectural and urbanism practice. The book aims to explain the conditions in which the contemporary debate about urban regeneration and rural revitalisation has developed in Australia and China, presented by different theoretical and methodological perspectives. It also provides a multifaceted and critical analysis of relevant case studies and urban experiences in Australia and China, focusing on environmental disruption, resized urban interventions and the need for more efficient and sustainable forms of regeneration and urban renewal practice in urban–rural contexts. This book will be an invaluable resource for architects, planners, architectural and urban historians, geographers, and scholars interested in modern Australian and Chinese architecture and urbanism.

This authoritative Handbook provides a comprehensive overview of research into urban politics and policy in cities across the globe. Leading scholars examine the position of urban politics within political science and analyse the critical approaches and interdisciplinary pressures that are broadening the field.

Huntsmen, according to the Church, were damned, their blood unclean, unholy. Yet for Rosemary and Aaron Harker the Church was less important than being ready to stand against the Uncanny as not being prepared could lead to being dead. The year is 1913. America—and the world—trembles on the edge of a modern age. Political and social unrest shift the foundations; technology is beginning to make its mark. But in the shadows, things from the past still move. Things inhuman, uncanny. And the Uncanny are no friend to humanity. But when Aaron and Rosemary Harker go to investigate the suspicious death of a distant relative, what they discover could turn their world upside down—and change the Huntsmen forever

Certain cities—most famously New York, London, and Tokyo—have been identified as “global cities,” whose function in the world economy transcends national borders. Without the same fanfare, formerly peripheral and secondary cities have been growing in importance, emerging as global cities in their own right. The striking similarity of the skylines of Dubai, Miami, and Singapore is no coincidence: despite following different historical paths, all three have achieved newfound prominence through parallel trends. In this groundbreaking book, Alejandro Portes and Ariel C. Armony demonstrate how the rapid and unexpected rise of these three cities recasts global urban studies. They identify the constellation of factors that allow certain urban places to become “emerging global cities”—centers of commerce, finance, art, and culture for entire regions. The book traces the transformations of Dubai, Miami, and Singapore, identifying key features common to these emerging global cities. It contrasts them with “global hopefuls,” cities that, at one point or another, aspired to become global, and analyzes how Hong Kong is threatened with the loss of this status. Portes and Armony highlight the importance of climate change to the prospects of emerging global cities, showing how the same economic system that propelled their rise now imperils their future. Emerging Global Cities provides a powerful new framework for understanding the role of peripheral cities in the world economy and how they compete for and sometimes achieve global standing.