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Project Ireland 2040, announced as ‘one vision for one country’, is the spatial plan for Ireland's development for the coming decades. The plan assigns a particular role to Ireland's cities outside Dublin, including Waterford. This chapter considers the place of Waterford in that national strategy and examines that role as an expression of a neoliberal ‘turn’ in Irish planning. Waterford is, in many senses, as will be shown, unexceptional in modern, Western cities; the chapter therefore in considering Waterford also will illuminate some aspects of the planning of other European cities.

This Chapter examined the development of sustainable road infrastructure in Ghana including transportation roads, and laws, regulations, and frameworks. The Ministry of Transport (MoT) and the Ministry of Roads and Highways (MRH) are responsible for the development of transportation infrastructure and related services. The Department of Urban Roads (DUR) is responsible for facilitating the movement of people, goods, and services and promoting economic and social development of urban regions. The Metropolitan and Municipal Assemblies established road centres to manage, construct, and maintain city roads, the Ghana Road Fund (GRF) was established to provide funding for the maintenance of Ghana’s road network, and the Koforidua Training Centre (KTC) was established in 2007 to provide management and project implementation staff with professional development and hands-on training. The current road length is 71,418 km, including 42,045 km of feeder roads, 14,873 km of trunk roads, and 14,500 km of urban roads. The budget for preventative maintenance is expected to rise year over year. Road infrastructure development (RID) can lead to positive societal outcomes, such as financial gains, employment opportunities, social support systems, equal rights for women and men, increased productivity, and less pollution, but it can also have unintended consequences such as deteriorating air and water quality, noise and vibration, soil erosion and sedimentation, disruption of essential services, confusion between drivers and pedestrians, changes to the landscape and habitat, and eminent domain takings. Environmental and social evaluations of development projects in Ghana must comply with several laws and regulations, and there is no unified sustainability policy or guideline in place to regulate the development of highway infrastructure projects. Resettlement is expected to help those who have been displaced by development initiatives and the Environmental Protection Agency Act of 1994 provides the authority to authorize facilities, set performance standards, and ensure compliance with standards and regulations. The Forestry Policy focusses on reducing deforestation and enhancing ecological and social commitment of forest areas, while the method for managing cultural property requires investigating and cataloguing damaged objects. Sector medium-term development plan (SMTDP) provides solutions for enhanced RID access, while the strategic environmental assessment (SEA) incorporates ecological factors into the Ghana Integrated Transport Plan. The resettlement policy framework (RPF) coordinates laws, rules, and procedures to manage road infrastructure projects and establishes criteria for determining eligibility and entitlement. The Directorate of Policy and Planning of the MRH is responsible for managing road safety and the environment, while the Directorate of Monitoring and Evaluation oversees Monitoring and Evaluation of road projects. The Ghana Highway Authority’s (GHA) four-person Road Safety and Environmental Management Unit (EMU) is responsible for addressing social and environmental issues associated with the feeder roads zone. Sustainable development (SD) has not received much attention from the Ghanaian government, with state-owned institutions prioritizing economic growth over social benefits and environmental preservation. Local governments should include a sustainability framework in their strategic planning for the successful execution of sustainable projects.

The twenty-first century is noted globally as the urban century because more than half of the world's population lives in cities. This population is projected to increase to 70% by 2050. South Africa is no exception to this phenomenal increase in urban population. More than 60% of South African population lives in urban areas, and this figure is projected to increase to 71.3% and 80% by 2030 and 2050, respectively. Access to human settlement by this teaming population remains a challenge. The problem of access to human settlement is compounded by historical apartheid's spatial geography characterized by racial segregation, fragmentation of urban space and separate development. During the apartheid period, settlement patterns were designed and planned in accordance with racial differentiation. This resulted in fragmented, segregated and dysfunctional residential settlements pattern that forced many people to travel long distances between place of work and home. Since 1994, the various housing policies, programmes and legislations have not been able to find solution to the spatial challenges that South Africa faces. The objective of this book is to investigate and unravel mixed-income housing development planning strategy and how this housing typology with a new framework can bring about spatial integration, inclusive cities, improved access to services and the promotion of social cohesion and economic inclusion. This book utilized the case study research design and employed the Delphi method for the investigation. The findings reveal that proper coordination across all sectors of government and good working relationship between the private and public sectors will increase the sustainability of mixed-income housing development. This study also supports existing theory that mixed-income housing might not be able to bring about the overall social integration, and solve all housing problems but has the unique tendency and potential in the South African case to address spatial imbalances by increasing the affordability of low-cost housing. This book concludes that there is need for both inter-sectoral and intergovernmental collaboration as well as proper coordination/adequate urban planning policies to address the increasing human settlement challenges in South Africa and for effective implementation of mixed-income housing development.

This chapter explores the evolution of smart city thinking in order to have a clear understanding of what is involved in effectively and sustainably implementing a Smart City 4.0 strategy. The chapter illustrates that the concept of smart cities has evolved from the technology driven implementations to Cities as Open Innovation Platforms. These open and participatory platforms facilitate the interaction and collaboration of the city's citizens, government, industry, entrepreneurs, academia, creatives and the social sector so that they can harness their collective intelligence for innovation, experimentation and implementation of solutions that creates real transformational value for the betterment of the city's and its stakeholders. The author also identifies the key dimensions on which a smart city 4.0 concept must be built upon but highlights that depending on the composition of its stakeholder ecosystem, the City will prioritise different dimensions and so each smart city is unique. The chapter builds upon the experience of implementing a Smart City 4.0 project in Waterford, Ireland. Details of the smart city initiatives implemented are illustrates with examples.

This chapter explores how critical language theory could be applied to the language dynamics in higher education that is created by internationalization and university's traditional role in maintaining national languages. Language policy is an instrument of governance that is increasingly used to regulate the linguistic situation at the university, so it is at the center of my analysis. As a broad concept, language policy is not limited to the formulations of the policy text but includes interactions of different actors and addresses instruments mediating the university's linguistic situation. A critical approach highlights that language policy is permeated with power, which is unequally distributed between different actors. I suggest further conceptualization of the language dynamics of the internationalized university created by national language protection and internationalization through three layers of analysis. The first layer derives from the Bourdieu's approach to language in society focusing on the societal hierarchies that are underpinned by language use. It also includes a discussion about structure versus agency, and a conversation about the navigational capacities of individuals to challenge preestablished social structures. The second layer discusses dialogue as a theoretical approach to the process of negotiating language policy. This is where agency is being realized, depending on the relative power of different actors in the particular social context. The third layer explores the conception of language, how different ways to understand what language is are turned into policy principles.