The Routledge Handbook of Infrastructure Design

The Routledge Handbook of Infrastructure Design
Author: Joseph Heathcott
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 461
Release: 2022-01-31
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1000528634

The Routledge Handbook of Infrastructure Design explores the multifaceted nature of infrastructure through the global lens of architectural history. Infrastructure holds the world together. Yet even as it connects some people, it divides others, sorting access and connectivity through varied social categories such as class, race, gender, and citizenship. This collection examines themes across broad spans of time, raises questions of linkage and scale, investigates infrastructure as phenomenon and affect, and traces the interrelation of aesthetics, technology, and power. With a diverse range of contributions from 33 scholars, this volume presents new research from regions including South and East Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, South America, North America, Western Europe, the Middle East, and the former Soviet Union. This extraordinary group of authors bring close attention to the materials, functions, and aesthetics of infrastructure systems as these unfold within their cultural and political contexts. They provide not only new knowledge of specific artifacts, such as the Valens Aqueduct, the Hong Kong waterfront, and the Pan-American Highway, but also new ways of conceptualizing, studying, and understanding infrastructure as a worlding process. The Routledge Handbook of Infrastructure Design provides richly textured, thoroughly evidenced, and imaginatively drawn arguments that deepen our understanding of the role of infrastructure in creating the world in which we live. It is a must-read for academics and students.

The Dynamics of Deforestation and Economic Growth in the Brazilian Amazon

The Dynamics of Deforestation and Economic Growth in the Brazilian Amazon
Author: Lykke E. Andersen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2002-12-12
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780521811972

A multi-disciplinary team of authors analyze the economics of Brazilian deforestation using a large data set of ecological and economic variables. They survey the most up to date work in this field and present their own dynamic and spatial econometric analysis based on municipality level panel data spanning the entire Brazilian Amazon from 1970 to 1996. By observing the dynamics of land use change over such a long period the team is able to provide quantitative estimates of the long-run economic costs and benefits of both land clearing and government policies such as road building. The authors find that some government policies, such as road paving in already highly settled areas, are beneficial both for economic development and for the preservation of forest, while other policies, such as the construction of unpaved roads through virgin areas, stimulate wasteful land uses to the detriment of both economic growth and forest cover.

Balancing Agricultural Development and Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon

Balancing Agricultural Development and Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon
Author: Andrea Cattaneo
Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst
Total Pages: 166
Release: 2002
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0896291308

Since the 1970s, federal policies promoting migration and encouraging agricultural development of large farms, logging, and ranching have led to the deforestation of vast areas of the Amazon rainforest.Though these policies have largely been replaced, deforestation continues. What effects do current macroeconomic and regional policies and events have on deforestation and on the well-being of settlers on the agricultural frontier? This report identifies the links between the agriculture and logging sectors in the Amazon, economic growth, poverty alleviation, and natural resource degradation in the region and in Brazil as a whole.It considers the effects of currency devaluation, building roads and other infrastructure in the Amazon, property rights, adoption of technological change, and fiscal incentives and disincentives to deforest.The results are sometimes counterintuitive, but shed new light on why slowing deforestation is so difficult and on the trade-offs between environmental and economic goals.