Anu Rai – författare

This volume delves into how cutting-edge geospatial tools are revolutionizing social physics—the quantitative study of human behavior and spatial dynamics. Through real-world case studies, the book demonstrates how geospatial analysis is applied to pressing social and environmental challenges, from migration flows and resource distribution to healthcare access, crime, disaster management, and urban planning. Readers will explore how these tools reveal the complexities of human movement, socio-spatial interactions, and behavioral patterns.The book is structured into five sections, each tackling key topics at the intersection of social physics and geospatial analysis:Population Dynamics and Social Behavior: Examines refugee settlements, migrations, resource allocation, and the socio-spatial impacts of political violence and the COVID-19 pandemic.Social Learning and Environmental Management: Highlights how social learning influences agriculture, healthcare, and environmental management, with geospatial techniques improving outcomes like riverbank stability and crop yields.Spatial Heterogeneity and Social Behavior: Investigates how social behavior shifts across different spatial contexts, with a focus on crime, inequality, and pandemic response, including detailed insights into Kolkata’s COVID-19 management.Social Physics and Sustainability: Demonstrates how geospatial tools can advance sustainability efforts, including waste management, transportation optimization, and urban planning for peri-urban areas.Ideal for academics, researchers, urban planners, and policymakers, this volume provides innovative methodologies to address complex social, environmental, and economic challenges. Whether examining migration trends or advancing sustainability, this book equips readers with the tools to transform how we understand human behavior and space.

This volume delves into how cutting-edge geospatial tools are revolutionizing social physics—the quantitative study of human behavior and spatial dynamics. Through real-world case studies, the book demonstrates how geospatial analysis is applied to pressing social and environmental challenges, from migration flows and resource distribution to healthcare access, crime, disaster management, and urban planning. Readers will explore how these tools reveal the complexities of human movement, socio-spatial interactions, and behavioral patterns.

The book is structured into five sections, each tackling key topics at the intersection of social physics and geospatial analysis:

Population Dynamics and Social Behavior: Examines refugee settlements, migrations, resource allocation, and the socio-spatial impacts of political violence and the COVID-19 pandemic.Social Learning and Environmental Management: Highlights how social learning influences agriculture, healthcare, and environmental management, with geospatial techniques improving outcomes like riverbank stability and crop yields.Spatial Heterogeneity and Social Behavior: Investigates how social behavior shifts across different spatial contexts, with a focus on crime, inequality, and pandemic response, including detailed insights into Kolkata’s COVID-19 management.Social Physics and Sustainability: Demonstrates how geospatial tools can advance sustainability efforts, including waste management, transportation optimization, and urban planning for peri-urban areas.

Ideal for academics, researchers, urban planners, and policymakers, this volume provides innovative methodologies to address complex social, environmental, and economic challenges. Whether examining migration trends or advancing sustainability, this book equips readers with the tools to transform how we understand human behavior and space.

This book examines the global influence and scope of medical tourism with an emphasis on the city of Kolkata in Eastern India as an emerging destination at the regional scale. Through a geographical research perspective, the book discusses the importance of the phenomenon of medical tourism including recent trends, policies, and scale studies to develop sustainable strategies for medical tourism at particular micro destinations. In nine chapters, readers will become familiar with the multi-billion dollar industry of medical tourism and the problems currently associated with medical tourism at multiple scales. The trends of medical tourism in and around the city of Kolkata are used to demonstrate the roles of infrastructure and stakeholders in implementing feasible and sustainable medical tourism in an emerging destination.The first two chapters of the book provide an introduction to medical tourism and the methodologies of this study. Then chapters three through nine focus on medical tourism in the case of Kolkata to discuss the regional applications and developments of medical tourism. Topics addressed include medical tourism facilities, stakeholders and tourists, guest-host relationships, an assessment of development versus risk, and an evaluation of strategies to manage rising medical tourism in Kolkata. The concluding chapter discusses future strategies that could be used to implement the potentialities of a metropolitan city as a medical tourism destination, based on studies done in Kolkata. Readers who will find this work of interest include students, practitioners, geographers, and researchers and policymakers engaged in the medical tourism industry.