Lakshmi Priya Rajendran – författare

Post-pandemic, cities face new challenges in adapting to global changes, while also addressing the needs, practices, and capabilities of diverse populations. Resilience, as a key factor, enables cities to adapt and transform in response to these challenges. Development driven by resilience is crucial for urban society’s ability to adapt and evolve on multiple levels. However, in developed countries, increasingly standardised planning and development practices often hinder citizen engagement and participation, which are essential for building resilient cities.This book adopts an interdisciplinary approach to examine how diverse social and spatial behaviours within informal urban environments, particularly in developing countries, can provide fresh insights for robust urban planning and development.The book is structured in three parts: (1) North–South Relations – this part explores the global discourse on informality, highlighting its presence in both the Global North and South; (2) Grassroots – this part focusses on grassroots initiatives and community-driven resilience within urban informality; and (3) Institutional Strategies and Professional Alliances – the final part delves into the role of institutions and professional collaborations in shaping urban informality.By presenting a range of perspectives and experiences, this book contributes to a unique Southern framework that positions informality as a dialogue for enabling resilience. It will appeal to a multidisciplinary audience, including professionals from fields such as sociology, history, environmental psychology, cultural studies, human geography, urban design and planning, architecture, and anthropology.The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 International license.

Coastal cities and regions in the global south are some of the most vulnerable regions susceptible to climate change impacts. They experience escalating risks from sea-level rise, extreme weather patterns, ecosystem loss and degradation, along with sporadic urbanization. These regions range from small cities to metropolitan areas and peri-urban settlements. The climate impacts are critical to livelihood aspects, the stability of the ecosystem and the economy of the locality. However, they are often ignored in the mainstream urban environmental planning domain.Climate Adaptation in Coastal Ecosystems: Interdisciplinary Conceptualizations and Approaches from the Global South offers a group of scientific interdisciplinary chapters compiled together. The volume brings together perspectives from urban and regional planning, architecture, environmental studies, disaster management, public policy, and social sciences to explore how climate risks are reshaping coastal urban systems, governance structures, and development trajectories affecting the communities at large. The book is divided into four thematic sections: namely, marginalized communities, heritage and tourism, governance strategies, and governance policies. The compilation presents empirically grounded case studies mostly from the global south. It analyzes several themes ranging from gendered vulnerability, livelihood management, ecosystem-based planning, climate risks, economic development and institutional and governance reforms, in response to the changing climate.The book will be of interest to scholars, researchers, policymakers, and practitioners engaged in urban studies, regional planning, and climate adaptation in coastal contexts.

This book examines the emerging problems and opportunities that are posed by media innovations, spatial typologies, and cultural trends in (re)shaping identities within the fast-changing milieus of the early 21st Century.Addressing a range of social and spatial scales and using a phenomenological frame of reference, the book draws on the works of Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Don Hide to bridge the seemingly disparate, yet related theoretical perspectives across a number of disciplines. Various perspectives are put forward from media, human geography, cultural studies, technologies, urban design and architecture etc. and looked at thematically from networked culture and digital interface (and other) perspectives.The book probes the ways in which new digital media trends affect how and what we communicate, and how they drive and reshape our everyday practices. This mediatization of space, with fast evolving communication platforms and applications of digital representations, offers challenges to our notions of space, identity and culture and the book explores the diverse yet connected levels of technology and people interaction.