Smart Futures, Challenges of Urbanisation, and Social Sustainability

This book tackles the challenges posed by accelerating urbanization, and demystifies Social Sustainability, the least understood of all the different areas of sustainable development. The volume’s twin focus on these profoundly intertwined topics creates a nuanced and vitally important resource. Large migrations from rural areas to cities without appropriate planning and infrastructure improvements, including housing, education and health care optimization, have created significant challenges across the globe. The authors suggest technology-rich strategies to meet these challenges by careful application of data on population growth and movement to the planning, design, and construction of operational infrastructures that can sustainably support our increasingly rapid population growth.

Part I.Urbanisations and Social Sustainability.- Chapter 1.Introduction: Paris Climate Agenda and  Serious Challenges to our Sustainable Development.- Chapter 2.Urban Planning and City Futures: Planning for Cities in the 21st Century.- Chapter 3.Urbanisation & Entrepreneurship in Development: Like a Horse and Carriage?.- Chapter 4.Social Sustainability, Housing and Alienation.- Chapter 5.The Misalignment of Policy and Practice in Sustainable Urban Design.- Chapter 6.Reporting Corporate Sustainability: The Challenges of Organisational and Political Rhetoric.- Part II.Case Studies.- Chapter 7.A Social-environmental Interface of Sustainable Development: A case study of Ghadames, Libya.- Chapter 8.The Under-valuation, but Extreme Importance of Social Sustainability in South Africa.- Chapter 9.Smart Eco Cities are Managing Information Flow in an Integrated Way: The Example of Water, Electricity and Solid Waste.- Chapter 10.. Reimagining Resources to Build Smart Futures: An Agritec Case Study of Aeroponics.- Chapter 11.Buildings that Perform: Thermal Performance and Comfort.- Chapter 12.Maintaining Excellence and Expertise within Medical Imaging: A Sustainable Practice?.- Chapter 13.Safety and Cyber Security in a Digital Age.- Chapter 14. A Sustainable Education Sector: The Place for Mature and Part-time Students.

Prof. Mohammad Dastbaz is the Deputy Vice Chancellor at University of Suffolk. Professor Dastbaz’s research work over recent years has been focused on the use and impact of emerging technologies in society, particularly learning, training and the development of “eGovernment.” Dr. Dastbaz has led EU and UK based funded research projects and has been the Symposium Chair of Multimedia Systems in IEEE’s Information Visualisation (IV) conference since 2002. He has over 50 refereed publications, including numerous journal paper articles, conference papers, book chapters and books on e-learning, eGovernment and the design and development of Multimedia Systems. Professor Dastbaz is a Fellow of the British Computer Society,  UK’s Higher Education Academy, and the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce  as well as the professional member of ACM and IEEE’s computer society.