The Flexible City

In Europe, the period of great economic and demographic growth is largely over. The physical growth of our urban agglomerations has come to an end. Unlike in Latin America, Asia or Africa, the boundaries of European cities are no longer moving away, but have come to a halt. The spatial assignment of the future European city will be fundamentally different. Building new space outside the city boundaries is no longer necessary. Instead, what exists should be made sustainable. The new spatial assignment involves maintaining, restructuring, densifying or diluting the existing city. This publication analyses this development and describes a toolbox that is able to turn the new assignment into a success. European cities are compared, similarities and trends are identifi ed and concrete examples are described in detail. This creates an inspiring handbook for anyone working on the future of the European city: from administrators and policymakers to developers, designers, builders and users. At temp.architecture.urbanism, Tom Bergevoet and Maarten van Tuijl work on architecture, urban planning and research with a focus on urban transformations Bron: Flaptekst, uitgeversinformatie.

In Europe, the period of great economic and demographic growth is largely over. The physical growth of our urban agglomerations has come to an end. Unlike in Latin America, Asia or Africa, the boundaries of European cities are no longer moving away, but have come to a halt. The spatial assignment of the future European city will be fundamentally different. Building new space outside the city boundaries is no longer necessary. Instead, what exists should be made sustainable. The new spatial assignment involves maintaining, restructuring, densifying or diluting the existing city. This publication analyses this development and describes a toolbox that is able to turn the new assignment into a success. European cities are compared, similarities and trends are identifi ed and concrete examples are described in detail. This creates an inspiring handbook for anyone working on the future of the European city: from administrators and policymakers to developers, designers, builders and users.

With current socio-economic development trends and changing work landscapes, modern workplaces are progressively becoming a subject of flexibilisation and hybridisation. Contemporary office environments are commonly adapting to the needs of the flexible labour markets by offering the non-territorial and rotation-based practice of allocating desks to workers on dynamic schedules. This book explores this growing trend by offering different perspectives on the benefits and challenges of the flexible workplace phenomena. Topics discussed range from defining and comparing flexible, coworking and corpoworking spaces, policies made in local environments, and the flexible working taxonomy.

The design and delivery of employment programmes are critical to the success of welfare reform and fundamental to the Government's aspiration of an 80 per cent employment rate. The new Flexible New Deal (FND) programme will be part of the revised JSA regime and will be delivered by large prime contractors who will work with subcontractors at a subregional level. Prime contractors will be given longer contracts and have greater autonomy to design individualised support for customers who have been unemployed for more than 12 months. The Committee welcomes the move towards longer contracts and endorses the principles of the FND programme, and was impressed by the work that Jobcentre Plus staff are undertaking to prepare for the introduction of the new regime. Yet there are significant concerns that fundamental flaws exist in the design of FND and the assumptions on which it is based. The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) accepts that on-flows onto FND could be 300 per cent higher than first indicated, with implications for resources at the providers, and possible delays in implementing FND in some areas. The Committee urges DWP to confirm that changes will be made to the budget to reflect the massive increase in predicted onflows to FND. It might not be possible for providers to meet the targets on which contractor payments are principally based, and the Committee received evidence to suggest that the financial model for FND is flawed and its targets unrealistic. It is crucial that DWP and other departments ensure that collaborative working with City Strategies, local authorities and other local Partners is facilitated at all levels if joint commissioning is to become a reality.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Flexible Query Answering Systems, FQAS 2019, held in Amantea, Italy, in July 2019. The 27 full papers and 10 short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 43 submissions. The papers present emerging research trends with a special focus on flexible querying and analytics for smart cities and smart societies in the age of big data. They are organized in the following topical sections: flexible database management and querying; ontologies and knowledge bases; social networks and social media; argumentation-based query answering; data mining and knowledge discovery; advanced flexible query answering methodologies and techniques; flexible query answering methods and techniques; flexible intelligent information-oriented and network-oriented approaches; big data veracity and soft computing; flexibility in tools; and systems and miscellanea.

This book paves the road for researchers from various areas of engineering working in the realm of smart cities to discuss the intersections in these areas when it comes to infrastructure and its flexibility. The authors lay out models, algorithms and frameworks related to the ‘smartness’ in the future smart cities. In particular, manufacturing firms, electric generation, transmission and distribution utilities, hardware and software computer companies, automation and control manufacturing firms, and other industries will be able to use this book to enhance their energy operations, improve their comfort and privacy, as well as to increase the benefit from the electrical system. The book pertains to researchers, professionals, and R&D in an array of industries.