Property Management & Built Environment books

In the complex, cash-strapped, high pressure world of modern construction, what do you do when something goes wrong? This work looks beyond the best-case scenario to give project managers, contractors, architects and engineers the tools to prepare effectively for the unexpected.  Based on the author’s more than thirty-five years of construction management experience, the book shows how to proactively mitigate a schedule. It opens with case studies of real life construction mitigation, and goes on to examine the conceptual aspects of anticipating risks and making contingency plans, technical aspects of scheduling, and essential role of communication in change management.  Working on the principle that no major project can ever quite go to plan and that “it’s not how you start, it’s how you finish,” Collaborative Risk Mitigation is the ideal complement to traditional scheduling textbooks.

Nearly every work of architecture can be characterized by specific approaches to forming and centering. An awareness of these “underpinnings” would facilitate a more informed approach to architectural design problems, as well as a deeper understanding of the central issues (and flaws) embodied by completed works of architecture. But the addressing of such topics has generally remained multifarious and diverse: more in the nature of a collection of independent issues than an overarching analytical argument. In this book, fresh looks at such issues are assembled and recast into a fully integrated narrative, based on two foundational and complementary aspects of architectural design: those that give shape and those that give focus—forming and centering.  The author uses an equally weighted interplay of discussion and diagram, with over 450 illustrations throughout the book. In addition, the text includes many links to further information online in the form of narratives, photographs, delineations, and contextual views.

This book provides an introduction to fuzzy logic and surveys emerging research trends and the application of state-of-the-art fuzzy hybrid computing techniques in the field of construction engineering and management. Authors cover the theory and implementation of fuzzy hybrid computing methodologies for arithmetic, optimization, machine learning, multi-criteria decision-making, simulation, cognitive maps and data modelling. The practical application of these techniques to solve real-world problems across a wide range of construction engineering and management issues is also demonstrated and discussed.  The completion of effectively planned, executed and controlled construction projects is dependent on numerous interacting factors and human activities, both of which introduce vagueness and subjective uncertainty into already complex processes. While expert knowledge is an essential component of effective decision-making, analysis and consideration of expert knowledge expressed in linguistic terms remains a challenging aspect of construction engineering and management.  Fuzzy logic, which has applications in many disciplines, has the potential to address certain challenges inherent in construction engineering and management, in part because of its strengths in modelling human reasoning, dealing with subjective uncertainty and computing with linguistic terms. However, fuzzy logic alone has a number of limitations that can only be overcome by its integration with other, complementary methodologies, together leading to advanced and powerful fuzzy hybrid computing techniques.  This book is of particular interest to students, researchers and practitioners who want to learn about the latest developments in fuzzy hybrid computing in construction engineering and management.

Seen as one explanation for the election of Trump, Brexit and the surge of a right-wing movement across Europe, spatial inequality has become an increasingly relevant topic. Offering in-depth perspectives on factors such as local labour markets, housing and mobility, this book investigates centralization tendencies in Scandinavia and South East Europe that help shape regional development and act as a catalyst to creating regional inequalities.  Joining scholars from four countries, this book provides a micro-examination of the development of regional inequalities in four geographically peripheral countries which represent different ends of the income spectrum, contain both EU and non-EU members and reflect differing levels of economic development. Divided into three sub-themes, the sections in turn discuss the topics of spatial divergence and labour market development, housing and institutional perspectives, and finally mobility, migration and commuting.

Lessons from the British and French New Towns: Paradise Lost? explores the evolution of the New Towns in both France and the UK from several perspectives including public policy, sociology, geography and heritage. UK and French New Towns have many similarities in terms of the role of the national state in tackling urgent problems of housing and urban growth and in promoting innovative design and architecture.  These innovative planned settlements have left a contested and complex legacy, but are once again on the political and urbanisation agenda in Europe, where a push for growth of housing and the desire for sustainability are the new drivers of urban planning and design. After years of the private development market being seen as the principal instrument of urban growth and planning, it is time to assess the urban legacy and the heritage of the UK and French New Towns. This book contrasts their evolution on both sides of the Channel and shows what can be learned about post war state planning and the future planning of new settlements.

The London Passenger Transport Board (LPTB) was a unique hybrid public body accountable only to a small number of stakeholders, yet it delivered substantial improvements in public services and provided good working conditions for its employees at the cost of its investors.   London Transport: A Hybrid in History 1905-48 innovatively combines a revisionist historical narrative with a systematic analysis of quantitative and qualitative research to explore how and why the LPTB achieved rare popularity amongst its customers. Divided into three sections, the book explores the financial operations of the Board, the Board as a system of governance and the leadership and management within the LPTB. Using the extensive Transport for London archives, James Fowler conducts a timely assessment of the public network utility that once made London transport domestically popular and internationally admired.   With debates about British transport policy ongoing, this book is an illuminating read for scholars and students researching within the areas of business management history, transport and public sector governance and administration.

Providing new knowledge on risk analysis and simulation for megaprojects, this book is essential reading for both academics and practitioners. Its focus is on technical descriptions of a newly developed dynamic systems approach to megaproject risk analysis and simulation. This is backed up by a discussion of the methodology as applied in a comprehensive case study on the Edinburgh Tram Network (ETN) project. The book informs both academic researchers and megaproject stakeholders with the latest information on risk as applied to megaprojects. As well as the complete case study, the book includes a general risk analysis framework for megaprojects, an analytic network process (ANP) method for risk quantification, a system dynamics (SD) method for risk simulation, and practical guides for the application of the dynamic systems approach in megaproject research and practice.

This book offers a cross-national perspective on contemporary urban renewal in relation to social rental housing. Social housing estates – as developed either by governments (public housing) or not-for-profit agencies – became a prominent feature of the 20th century urban landscape in Northern European cities, but also in North America and Australia. Many estates were built as part of earlier urban renewal, ‘slum clearance’ programs especially in the post-World War 2 heyday of the Keynesian welfare state. During the last three decades, however, Western governments have launched high-profile ‘new urban renewal’ programs whose aim has been to change the image and status of social housing estates away from being zones of concentrated poverty, crime and other social problems. This latest phase of urban renewal – often called ‘regeneration’ – has involved widespread demolition of social housing estates and their replacement with mixed-tenure housing developments in which poverty deconcentration, reduced territorial stigmatization, and social mixing of poor tenants and wealthy homeowners are explicit policy goals.  Academic critical urbanists, as well as housing activists, have however queried this dominant policy narrative regarding contemporary urban renewal, preferring instead to regard it as a key part of neoliberal urban restructuring and state-led gentrification which generate new socio-spatial inequalities and insecurities through displacement and exclusion processes. This book examines this debate through original, in-depth case study research on the processes and impacts of urban renewal on social housing in European, U.S. and Australian cities. The book also looks beyond the Western urban heartlands of social housing to consider how renewal is occurring, and with what effects, in countries with historically limited social housing sectors such as Japan, Chile, Turkey and South Africa.

Cities around the world are pursuing a smart cities agenda. In general, these initiatives are promoted and rolled-out by governments and corporations which enact various forms of top-down, technocratic governance and reproduce neoliberal governmentality. Despite calls for the smart city agenda to be more citizen-centric and bottom-up in nature, how this translates into policy and initiatives is still weakly articulated and practiced. Indeed, there is little meaningful engagement by key stakeholders with respect to rights, citizenship, social justice, commoning, civic participation, co-creation, and how the smart city might be productively reimagined and remade.  This book fills this lacuna by providing critical reflection on whether another smart city is possible and what such a city might look like, exploring themes such as how citizens are framed within it, the ethical implications of smart city systems, and whether injustices are embedded in city systems, infrastructures, services and their calculative practices. Contributors question whether the need for order, and the priorities of capital and property rights, trump individual and collective liberty. Ultimately considering what kind of smart city do individuals want to create, and how we create the most sustainable smart urban landscape.

In a world characterised by rapid urbanisation it is increasingly difficult to devise urban governance models which are resilient, safe and inclusive, and that also preserve the environment. This book takes Singapore, a leader in this field, as a case study, looking at its successes in urban governance and smart city planning.  Through the lens of environmental sustainability, the author examines Singapore’s recent adoption of technological tools, which have led to increased efficiency and performance, and have also supported its economic ambitions. The book unveils a unique and critical insight into Singapore’s approach. Considering the historical, political and technological context, the author shares the techniques and key projects that have contributed to the all-important improvement of liveability levels in the city state.