In their book, the authors introduce the topic of urban development from a systems (theoretical) perspective and provide explanatory approaches, tips and methodological instructions for dealing with urban complexity. Knowing full well that this sometimes amounts to squaring the circle, the authors draw on applied systemic approaches and systematically couple these with epistemological currents that can be assigned to Luhmann's systems theory. The social understanding of this theory of social systems represents a very good starting point for understanding urban development and urban complexity. From this perspective, urban development can be seen as a process in which organisations and individuals with their own expectations and perspectives are involved, in which contradictions and conflicts seem inevitable and the future cannot be clearly predicted. Decisions in cities and municipalities are therefore always associated with risks, irritations and unexpected consequences. With the Potsdam lodestar approach, Rolfes and Wilhelm present a multidimensional approach to managing urban development processes.

This book is the first to consider the roles, challenges and governance responses of secondary cities in southern Africa to changing circumstances. Among the challenges are governance under conditions of resource scarcity, managing informality, the effects and responses to climate change and the changing roles of the cities within the national space economy. It fills the gap in the literature on secondary cities with original case studies drawn from South Africa, Zimbabwe and Mozambique. The authors are all African scholars, working and living in the region with intimate knowledge of the settings they describe. The book is critical as it includes such regional case studies of different secondary cities in Southern Africa but also because of it’s multidisciplinarity: it contains substantive and pertinent issues such as climate change, disaster management, local economic development, and basic services delivery. It considers diverse environments, yet with similar challenges that could provide useful policy and governance proposals for other cities.

This book is the first comprehensive presentation of a Kaiyu Markov model with covariates and a multivariate Poisson model with competitive destinations. These two models are core techniques when the authors and colleagues conduct their Kaiyu studies. The two models are usually used to forecast the effects of specific urban redevelopment on both the number of visitors and consumer shop-around or Kaiyu movements. Their Kaiyu studies originated from the constructions of a Kaiyu Markov model and the disaggregated hierarchical decision Huff model almost simultaneously around the early 1980s. This book retrospectively reviews how these models have evolved from the start to the present state, and previews the ongoing efforts to make further extensions of these models. The extension of the Huff model started from the disaggregated hierarchical decision Huff model with shop-arounds. In retrospect, the model formulated the consumer’s simultaneous choice of destinations as a joint probability. The mechanism to determine this joint probability was a recursive conditional probability system. Now the Huff model has shifted from joint probability to multivariate frequency Poisson with competitive destinations. On the other hand, the Kaiyu Markov model started from a descriptive model. Because it cannot forecast changes in shop-arounds or consumer Kaiyu behaviors, the Kaiyu Markov model with covariates was developed in which entrance and shop-around choice probabilities are explained by the respective two logit models with covariates such as distances and shop-floor areas. The noticeable point is that it can explain consumers’ probability of quitting their shop-arounds. Thus, the model enables one to evaluate the effects of urban revitalization policy that promotes consumers’ shop-arounds or Kaiyu behaviors. Furthermore, if the Kaiyu Markov model can estimate the actual numbers of flows of consumers’ shop-arounds among shopping sites, the corresponding money flows also can be estimated as economic effects. This book discusses from scratch the evolution of all these topics. Thus this book provides the basics of the Kaiyu Markov model, a tutorial for the theory and estimation of the conditional logit model, and a chapter serving as a practical research manual for forecasting changes caused by urban development based on consumers’ Kaiyu behaviors.

This book provides a thorough guide to building resilient cities, through the use of smart solutions enabled by information and communication technologies. It introduces innovative approaches for integrating smart solutions into urban resilience planning and offers numerous global case studies to illustrate the benefits of the theories discussed.

This book presents articles from the International Conference on Sustainable Design, Engineering, Management, and Sciences (ICSDEMS 2020), held in Bali, Indonesia. It highlights recent advances in civil engineering and sustainability, bringing together researchers and professionals to address the latest, most relevant issues in these areas.