*Geography, general

Global Trends of Smart Cities provides integrated analysis of 135 cities that participated in the IBM’s Smarter Cities Challenge in 2010–2017. It establishes evidence-based benchmarking of city geographies, city sizes, governance structures, and local planning contexts in smart cities. This book uses a combination of descriptive statistical analysis and real-world case study narratives to evaluate the ways in which each individual urban variable or their combination matter in the diversity of smart city approaches around the globe. It is acknowledged that the Smarter Cities Challenge offers a particular set of smart initiatives and is not representative of all smart cities around the world. Nevertheless, the global presence of the Challenge across five continents and its involvement with 135 cities of all size and socioeconomic status provides a solid foundation to conduct comparative research on smart cities. Considering limited comparative research available in the smart city debate, this book makes significant contribution in understanding the state of smart city development in urban governments worldwide.

The book ‘population geography'examines how population distribution, organization, characteristics, and growth are correlated with the nature of a particular location. This book covers several topics, such as; population patterns across seven continents, factor that influence population distribution trends, and the relationship/connection between populations of a given area its environmental conditions. Models discussed in population geography include population size, distribution, composition, growth and density. Others are immigration, mortality, race, fertility and aging, just to mention a few. Readers will understand better the society around them, demographic structures, and how populations can be managed through controlled movements. This book also discusses the roles of men and women in social development.

What do communities on the social, economic and environmental margins have in common? For one thing, they tend to be on the east sides of cities. In this short talk about a surprising insight, anthropologist and venture capitalist Stephen DeBerry explains how both environmental and man-made factors have led to disparity by design in cities from East Palo Alto, California to East Jerusalem and beyond -- and suggests some elegant solutions to fix it.

In essay format, this textbook considers examples of various sub-categories of Geography in combination with five regions of the Western World.