Es Thinking

The school of thought surrounding the urban ecosystem has increasingly become in vogue among researchers worldwide. Since half of the world’s population lives in cities, urban ecosystem services have become essential to human health and wellbeing. Rapid urban growth has forced sustainable urban developers to rethink important steps by updating and, to some degree, recreating the human–ecosystem service linkage. Assessing, as well as estimating the losses of ecosystem services can denote the essential effects of urbanization and increasingly indicate where cities fall short. This book contains 13 thoroughly refereed contributions published within the Special Issue “Urban Ecosystem Services”. The book addresses topics such as nature-based solutions, green space planning, green infrastructure, rain gardens, climate change, and more. The contributions highlight new findings for landscape architects, urban planners, and policymakers. Important future cities research is considered by looking at the system connectivity between the social and ecological sphere—via varying forms of urban planning, management, and governance. The book is supported by methods and models that utilize an urban sustainability and ecosystem service-centric focus by adding knowledge-base and real-world solutions into the urbanization phenomenon.

Arne Grøn’s reading of Søren Kierkegaard’s authorship revolves around existential challenges of human identity. The 35 essays that constitute this book are written over three decades and are characterized by combining careful attention to the augmentative detail of Kierkegaard’s text with a constant focus on issues in contemporary philosophy. Contrary to many approaches to Kierkegaard’s authorship, Grøn does not read Kierkegaard in opposition to Hegel. The work of the Danish thinker is read as a critical development of Hegelian phenomenology with particular attention to existential aspects of human experience. Anxiety and despair are the primary existential phenomena that Kierkegaard examines throughout his authorship, and Grøn uses these negative phenomena to argue for the basically ethical aim of Kierkegaard’s work. In Grøn’s reading, Kierkegaard conceives human selfhood not merely as relational, but also a process of becoming the self that one is through the otherness of self-experience, that is, the body, the world, other people, and God. This book should be of interest to philosophers, theologians, literary studies scholars, and anyone with an interest not only in Kierkegaard, but also in human identity.

Barry Buzan proposes a new approach to making International Relations a truly global discipline that transcends both Eurocentrism and comparative civilisations. He narrates the story of humankind as a whole across three eras, using its material conditions and social structures to show how global society has evolved. Deploying the English School's idea of primary institutions and setting their story across three domains - interpolity, transnational and interhuman - this book conveys a living historical sense of the human story whilst avoiding the overabstraction of many social science grand theories. Buzan sharpens the familiar story of three main eras in human history with the novel idea that these eras are separated by turbulent periods of transition. This device enables a radical retelling of how modernity emerged from the late 18th century. He shows how the concept of 'global society' can build bridges connecting International Relations, Global Historical Sociology and Global/World History.

In this novel you read something about the longing of the planet earth with its plant world and its animal world to lead a peaceful and prosperous life, as the spiritual being, embedded in the spiri-tual energy, made development process possible. Planet Earth, a small planet on the edge of a galaxy, is doing well. What one cannot say about one's thinking corporeal living beings of the higher spiritual order, i.e. humans. They pull together, are greedy to the point and ultimately cruelly kill each other. What causes the human species in particular to constantly get involved with inhuman character traits?

The world is increasingly turbulent and complex, awash with disruptions, tipping points and knock-on effects. These range from the impacts of warfare in the Middle East on energy futures, investment and global currencies to the vast and unpredictable impacts of climate change. All this threatens established strategic planning methods. This book is for business and organizational leaders who want and need to think through how best to deal with increasing turbulence, and with the complexity and uncertainty that come with it. The authors explain in clear language how future orientation and, specifically, modern scenario techniques help to address these conditions. They draw on examples from a wide variety of international settings and circumstances including large corporations, inter-governmental organizations, small firms and municipalities. Readers will be inspired to try out scenario approaches themselves to better address the turbulence that affects them and others with whom they work, live and do business. A key feature of the book is the exchange of insights across the academic-practitioner divide. Scholars of scenario thinking and organizational environments will appreciate the authors' conceptual and methodological advances. What has previously remained jargon only accessible to the highest level of corporate and government futures planners here becomes comprehensible to a wider business and practitioner community.