Misplaced Memories in Moments of Being is a haunting tapestry of linked short stories tracing the rise and unravelling of the suburban dream in the search for a modern paradise. Spanning post-war Melbourne to the dawn of the 21st century, it follows the lives of ordinary people seeking purpose while tossed by random forces as they chase their own ideals – only to find that paradise, once built, begins to crumble from within.Through childhood freedoms, silent family struggles, wartim...

1964 tells the story of a city lost in a world of relentless change. The year 1964 was one of transition from the certainty of the 1950s to the doubt and disruption of the modern world.A young journalist leaves the security of school and discovers an unfamiliar workplace and an escalating series of confronting experiences. As he begins university, he struggles to relate his studies to the everyday events that he encounters. As he seeks to find a place in this new world, he...

For more than a decade, Melbourne has had the fastest-growing population of any Australian capital city. It is expanding outward while also growing upward through vast new high-rise developments in the inner suburbs. With an estimated 1.6 million additional homes needed by 2050, planners and policymakers need to address current and emerging issues of amenity, function, productive capacity and social cohesion today. Planning Melbourne reflects on planning since the post-war era, but focuses in...

Peri-urban landscapes are some of the world’s most vulnerable areas. Although they are often thought of simply as land awaiting development, these landscapes retain important natural resources and make valuable contributions to agriculture, water use, biodiversity conservation, landscape preservation and human well-being. Billions of people use them and enjoy their natural values. Their continuing loss threatens to alter our relationships with nature and have a negative impact on the envir...

This open access book examines how policymakers respond to natural hazards in the wake of global climate change. Through a series of five case studies it assesses how changing patterns of natural hazards collide with established patterns of spatial planning, and how alternative strategies could be operationalised in local policy practice. Due to global warming, wildfires and floods are occurring in regions where they had previously been virtually unknown. Yet local public policy for immedi...

THE SUNDAY TIMES-BESTSELLING BOOK BY ONE OF BRITAIN'S BEST-LOVED COMIC WRITERS**Pre-order now: David Mitchell's new book Dishonesty is the Second-best Policy**There are many aspects of modern life that trouble award-winning comedian David Mitchell, such as:Why is every film or TV programme a sequel or a remake?Why are people so f***ing hung up about swearing?Why do ...

Ecological Economics from the Ground Up takes a unique and much-needed bottom-up approach to teaching ecological economics and political ecology, using case studies that focus on a wide range of internationally relevant topics, to teach the principles, concepts, methods and tools of these fields, which are seen as increasingly important in the context of the current triple social, economic and environmental crisis.This book provides learning materials which are grounded in...

When I was 10, I was taken from my quiet, safe corner of old Europe and deposited into an exotic new world. Africa, at once breathtaking and soul-destroying, from the snow-capped mountains and teeming game plains of Kenya and Tanzania to the haunted hunger-stalked dustbowls of Ethiopia and the Sudan – the hideous and the magnificent have always gone hand in hand there.Nobody who has once set foot on the soil of Africa will ever be quite free of it again. When I first went there, I ...

The Handbook provides a comprehensive statement and reference point for hazard and disaster research, policy making, and practice in an international and multi-disciplinary context. It offers critical reviews and appraisals of current state of the art and future development of conceptual, theoretical and practical approaches as well as empirical knowledge and available tools.Organized into five inter-related sections, this Handbook contains sixty-five contribution...

The most loved and celebrated poems—from "The Cure at Troy" to "Death of a Naturalist"—by the Nobel Prize–winning poet.Seamus Heaney had the idea to make a personal selection of poems from across the entire arc of his writing life, a collection small yet comprehensive enough to serve as an introduction for all comers. He never managed to do this himself, but now, finally, the project has been returned to, resulting in an intimate gathering of poems chosen and intro...

This open access book presents a nuanced and accessible synthesis of the relationship between land tenure security and sustainable development. Contributing authors have collectively worked for decades on land tenure as connected with conservation and development across all major regions of the globe. The first section of this volume is intended as a standalone primer on land tenure security and its connections with sustainable development. The book then explores key thematic challenges th...

"Between my fingers and my thumbThe squat pen rests.I'll dig with it."Selected Poems 1966-1987 assembles the groundbreaking work of the first half of Seamus Heaney's extraordinary career. This edition, arranged by the author himself, includes the seminal early poetry that struck readers with the force of revelation and heralded the arrival of an heir to Gerard Manley Hopkins, W. B. Yeats, and Robert Frost.Helen Vendler called Heaney "a poet of the in-be...