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Cities were regions ruled by local governments, where people were supposed to live together and provide equal access to sociocultural opportunities. In the 21st century, global warming and overuse of scarce limited resources has made sustainability more examined about for our entire environment, particularly cities. With the rapid increase in the population in the cities, humankind has faced a lot of pollution, destruction, and social inequality. Many regions and countries have started to build new smart cities using technology to overcome crowded life, traffic, and air pollution, improve food production, and use scarce natural resources sustainable. Smart cities also provide residents to improve their quality of life and their health; therefore, eco-gastronomy is related to organic farming and cooking method that minimize the damage to the environment with organic ingredients. For a healthy and quality life, meals made with healthy ingredients are required. Smart cities have also started to implement eco-gastronomy projects by using technology. In this chapter, cities which can be associated with the eco-gastronomy dimension of smart cities such as Gaziantep, Izmir, and Konya from Turkey and Copenhagen were analyzed.

In the mid-2000s, the operator of New York City’s mass transit network committed more than a half-billion dollars to military contractor Lockheed Martin for a security technology capable, in part, of inferring threats based on analysis of data streams, of developing response strategies, and taking automated action toward alerts and calamities in light of evolving circumstances. The project was a failure. This chapter explores the conceptualization and development of this technology – rooted in cybernetics – and compares its conceptual underpinnings with some situated problems of awareness, communication, coordination, and action in emergencies as they unfold in one of the busiest transport systems in the world, the New York subway. The author shows how the technology, with all the theatrical trappings of a “legitimate” security solution, was apparently conceived without a grounded understanding of actual use-cases, and the degree to which the complex interactions which give rise to subway emergency can be anticipated in – and therefore managed through – a technological system. As a case-study, the chapter illustrates the pitfalls of deploying technology against problems which are not well-defined in the first place, to the neglect of investments against much more fundamental problems – such as inadequate communication systems, and unstable relationships with emergency response agencies – which might offer guaranteed benefits, and indeed lay a firm groundwork for future deployment of more ambitious technology.

Today, the rapid increase in the population living in cities and new developments in information and communication technologies (ICTs) increase the demand for smart cities day by day. It is thought that limited public resources and crowded cities will be managed better by making more use of the opportunities offered by smart technologies. At this point, many countries around the world are turning to smart city applications. Especially after the Covid-19 pandemic, local governments have started to give importance to smart city projects due to the advantages of smart cities. It is thought that urban planning against epidemics will gain more importance in the coming years.

In the current chapter, we discuss the shape and contours of the field of probation in Romania as they appear in scientific literature and mass media, focusing on the concerns academics and professionals have voiced about Romanian probation. We analyse the timeframe from 2014 to 2021, after the introduction of the country’s New Penal Code (NPC). We structure our argument as follows. The chapter begins with a short incursion into the historiography of probation as a field in Romania. The focus, however, is on the adoption of a NPC in 2014, as this was a significant moment that led to changes for both probation workers and probationers. While we present the first 25 years since probation was instituted in Romania in 1997 as a period of experiments, trials and errors, we aim to highlight the development and consolidation that occurred in the period after 2014 (see Durnescu 2008, 2015; Preda, 2015a, 2017; Sandu, 2016). The NPC was intended to bring forward a reconfiguration of the probation system in Romania (Preda, 2015b). Beyond the promise of the NPC, the 2014–2021 period is one where probation edges into the public sphere via extensive media coverage, including the considerable number of probationers or a string of protests by probation counsellors who felt overworked and overwhelmed. We continue the chapter by analysing the composition and the dynamics of the probation population, always looking beyond the mere numbers to other analytic markers (i.e. numbers of obligations and lengths of the probation period). We conclude the chapter by arguing that our discussion of the ‘weight’ of supervision adds to the current understanding of mass supervision by looking at the aggregated impact that different social, political, penal and cultural factors have on probation practice. In other words, large caseloads, limited human resources, precarious material conditions and negative organisational cultures are likely to generate supervision experiences that can be better interpreted by looking and thinking beyond numbers.

Digital financial inclusion is a need of the recent era in order to flourish the growth of economies as well as businesses and individuals. Thus, varieties of digital technologies are launched to provide ease and leverage to customers’ financial needs. Among the well-known digital technologies, Fintech emerged as a well-known and accepted form of digital technologies. However, the acceptance level is much lower, especially in developing sides of the world like Pakistan where issues related to cyber-security are the major hindrance in the way of digitization and n-tier online payments. However, with a massive youth population, Pakistan also has the opportunity to use Fintech as the major tool for economic and social development. Therefore, this chapter has been written purposely to shed light on the importance, use, and role of Fintech in the growth of developing countries like Pakistan. The purpose is to increase the knowledge of youth about financial technologies especially Fintech so they may embrace their abilities with technological innovation, especially for their financial needs. On the other side, the chapter will also address the lack of research on this emerging trend to diverge the focus of researchers and academicians towards Fintech and its uses, scope, implications, and benefits for developing countries.

This introduction provides the methodological framework for the book, approaching the business of football through the lens of its most reliable consumers – the fanbase. Fan cultures necessarily inform the normative understanding of a football club, due to the popularly held belief that it is the fan’s – or some reified idea of the fan – that is the permanent feature of a football club and that provides its identity. Players and owners come and go, but the relationship between the club and the fan is, theoretically, never-ending. In truth, this is never a real fan who could exist, but a constructed image of the fan built out of other narratives and that, at some level, football fans associate themselves. This fan is no one in particular, but is drawn from a close reading of football culture and identifying the directives of the traditional fan. Utilising a combination of critical theory and the existing literature on football club ownership, our goal is to reveal the distinction between how people talk about the social dimension of football clubs, and how they actually relate to their fans and the wider world in the era of late capitalism. A club is not simply the romanticised notions held by those within the games, but, as with all businesses, it is also the product of it conducts itself in a series of other networks of exchange. Often irreconcilable with the aforementioned romantic notions, these networks often get hidden by the prevailing discourse.

The goal of this chapter is to reexamine the nature and structure of the military–industrial complex (MIC) through the works of John Kenneth Galbraith. MIC, or military power as he prefers, is a coalition of vested interests within the state and industry that promoted the military power in the name of “national security” for their interests. Galbraith’s theory of giant corporations helps us understand the role of military corporations in the MIC. Moreover, he is a critical scholar in examining this topic because he was a political insider in the Roosevelt, Kennedy, and Johnson administrations and a prominent public intellectual against the Vietnam War. Against this background, this chapter has three parts. After explaining the development of military Keynesianism with respect to the main economic thoughts, it examines the history of the MIC and its impact on economic priorities during and after the Cold War through Galbraith’s works. Finally, this chapter discusses MIC’s relevancy today and evaluates Galbraith’s prophecies.

Government spending plays a crucial role in fiscal policy in any country, both as a tool for implementing individual government policies and as a possible instrument for mitigating uneven economic developments and economic shocks. This chapter provides direct empirical evidence on the development and structure of general government expenditure and its relationship with real economic growth in Czechia and the European Union countries. Compared to theoretical recommendations, general government expenditure has not been used as a stabiliser in Czechia and EU countries and has been observed to be pro-cyclical in the period under review. Granger causality analysis identified the direction of causality between the macroeconomic variables analysed and found that in most cases economic growth came first, followed by government spending.