Urban Intensities

Accomodation of diversity and the creation of urban density are a focus of world-wide building and planning activities today. This book combines the architectural and urban scales to demonstrate that it is a specific quality, urban intensity, which determines the success of housing. The authors provide a typology of housing according to the ways in which diversity and density are created. Comparisons with historical models and critical appraisals based on the authors’ unique standing give ample information on the pros and cons of major types of housing, their pitfalls and successful examples. Newly created sets of drawings, from floor plans to spectacular 3D aerial views of the buildings in their urban contexts, accompany each of the more than twenty case studies that are described and analyzed in detail. The approach taken here relates to many pressing issues in contemporary housing, including the avoidance of urban sprawl, the revival of city centers and the ongoing search for innovative housing types.

This edited collection critically discusses the relevance of, and the potential for identifying conceptual common ground between dominant urban theory projects – namely Neo-Marxian accounts on planetary urbanization and alternative ‘Southern’ post-colonial and post-structuralist projects. Its main objective is to combine different urban knowledge to support and inspire an integrative research approach and a conceptual vocabulary which allows understanding the complex characteristics of diverse emerging urban spaces. Drawing on in-depth case study material from across the world, the different chapters in this volume disentangle planetary urbanization and apply it as a research framework to the context-specific challenges faced by many `ordinary' urban settings. In addition, through their focus on both Northern- and Southern urban spaces, this edited collection creates a truly global perspective on crucial practice-relevant topics such as the co-production of urban spaces, the ‘right to diversity’ and the ‘right to the urban’ in particular local settings.

With intensifying emphasis on episodes of care and bundled payments for surgical admissions, anesthesia expenditures are increasingly important in assessing variation in expenditures for surgical episodes. When comparing anesthesia expenditures across surgical settings, adjustment for anesthesia case complexity and duration of anesthesia services, also known as anesthesia service intensity, is desirable. A single anesthesia intensity measure allows researchers to make more direct comparisons between anesthesia outcomes across settings and services. We describe a process for creating a claims-based anesthesia intensity measure using Medicare claims. We create the measure using two fields: base units associated with American Medical Association Current Procedural Terminology codes on the anesthesia claim and time units associated with the service. We rescaled the time component of the anesthesia intensity measure to equally represent base units and time units. For illustration, we applied the measure to Medicare anesthesia expenditures stratified by rural/urban location. We found that adjustments for intensity were greater in urban settings because the level of intensity is greater. Compared with rural settings, unadjusted expenditures in urban settings are roughly 26 percent higher, whereas adjusted expenditures in urban settings are only 20 percent higher. Even absent longitudinal data, researchers can adjust anesthesia outcomes for intensity using our cross-sectional claims-based intensity method.

A practical introduction on today's challenge of controlling and managing the water resources used by and affected by cities and urbanized communities. The book offers an integrated engineering approach, covering the spectrum of urban watershed management, urban hydraulic systems, and overall stormwater management. Each chapter concludes with helpful problems. Solutions Manual available to qualified professors and instructors upon request. Introduces the reader to two popular, non-proprietary computer-modeling pro-grams: HEC-HMS (U.S. Army Corps of Engineers) and SWMM (U.S EPA).

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) established the National Water Quality Assesment (NAWQA) program in 1985 to assess water quality conditions and trends in representative river basins and aquifers across the United States. With this report, the NRC's Water Science and Technology Board has provided advice to USGS regarding NAWQA five separate times as the program evolved from an unfunded concept to a mature and nationally-recognized program in 2002. This report assesses the program's development and representative accomplishments to date and makes recommendations on opportunities to improve NAWQA as it begins its second decade of nationwide monitoring.