designated areas

Charles Hoch, Professor Emeritus of urban planning and policy at the University of Illinois, talks about the challenges of regional planning in the United States. As opposed to Europe where spatial planning prevails, the notion of urban planning is more dominant here, and Hoch uses the Chicago region as a case study.

Belinda Yuen, a town planner and expert in mass housing, presents an account of Singapore’s public housing, the evolution of concepts and strategies for high-rise urban planning, and the diverse common spaces that have been designed for a higher quality of life.

This study focuses on the social conflict arisen from the use of camera traps for conservation practices and the “human bycatch,” namely captured images of people occurring mostly unintentionally. The authors argue for the necessity of policy guidelines to counter possible repercussion on the use of the camera trap, which is recognized as a resourceful tool for wildlife monitoring and photography.

In this special issue on Disempowering Democracies, Manali Baruah scrutinizes elite formation and elite capture through the case of a Community Resource Management Area (CREMA) in western Ghana.

El-Hajj Rita, Khater Carla, Tatoni Thierry, Ali Adam and Vela Errol present a review of ecological and socioeconomic indicators globally used to orient conservation planning on the global and national levels. Their paper suggests a set of suitable, relevant, and practical set of indicators, adapted to Mediterranean-type continental environments.

Amitangshu Acharya and Alison Ormsby explore devithans—Nepali sacred groves—in the eastern Himalayan state of Sikkim, India. Given that historically the Buddhist Lepcha-Bhutias’ cultural association with Sikkim’s sacred landscape has been celebrated, while that of Nepali ethnic groups has been largely invisibilized, they argue that devithans have emerged as a potential political instrument for the latter to validate political and cultural claims to Sikkim’s sacred landscape.

This film displays ideas and experiments in art and architecture to design and dwell in portable, flexible, environmentally-friendly off-grid and compact homes.

This film criticizes America’s suburban sprawl and its dependence on oil as being unsustainable for the future.

This film criticizes the twentieth-century urban planning model of megacities and argues for a return to a human scale of design.