Hasil untuk "Aesthetics of cities. City planning and beautifying"

Zsófia Zádor, Gergő Pintér, Máté Mizsák et al.

The 15-minute city is a powerful planning concept to counter car-dependence by promoting active mobility to amenities and fostering inclusive urban environments. However, this policy has challenges in amenity-poor urban peripheries. Public transport remains underexplored in this discourse despite its role in distant access. Here, we propose a framework that incorporates public transport into the 15-minute city model using openly available data. By comparing Helsinki, Madrid, and Budapest, we demonstrate that multimodal mobility substantially increases access to amenities and enhances socio-spatial integration within a 15-minute reach. Although urban periphery benefit significantly from radial or high-speed public transport lines in their social mixing potential, such lines alone do not improve their access to amenities. These findings underscore the need to optimize polycentric public transport networks that can improve inclusive urban accessibility and complement active mobility in polycentric cities.

Elena Dorato, Richard Lee Peragine

This article presents an on-going research project developed by the Department of Architecture of the University of Ferrara and AMI Ferrara regarding home-work mobility patterns in local agro-industrial production. By combining quantitative and qualitative research tools (i.e. literature review, surveys, interviews, GIS-mapping), this research originally aimed to research habits, needs, and propensity to change of agricultural workers in the area in relation to home-work mobility. The investigation therefore necessarily has to confront “caporalato”. Bearing in mind existing power relations and the inherent opacity of dynamics in agricultural work, we highlight the difficulties encountered by the mapping campaign, as well as the dangers of its instrumentalization when addressing such work relations. By emphasizing the tendency of agricultural day-labourers to defy localization, we aim at departing from this lack (or absence) of information to suggest the relevance of a critical approach to mapping in contemporary racial capitalism. The paper finally proposes substantial theoretical frameworks, extensive field research and investigative campaigns on-the-ground in contrast to the strictly vertical, top-down and technocratic approach of traditional mapping, in order to answer to mobility habits and needs of agricultural workers.

Yijun Chen

The integration of digital technologies into urban planning has given rise to "smart cities," aiming to enhance quality of life and operational efficiency. However, the implementation of such technologies introduces ethical challenges, including data privacy, equity, inclusion, and transparency. This article employs the Beard and Longstaff framework to discuss these challenges through a combination of theoretical analysis and case studies. Focusing on principles of self-determination, fairness, accessibility, and purpose, the study examines governance models, stakeholder roles, and ethical dilemmas inherent in smart city initiatives. Recommendations include adopting regulatory sandboxes, fostering participatory governance, and bridging digital divides to ensure that smart cities align with societal values, promoting inclusivity and ethical urban development.

Andrea Musso, Diego Rybski, Dirk Helbing et al.

The share of the world population living in cities with more than one million people rose from 11% in 1975 to 24% in 2025 (our estimates). Will this trend towards greater concentration in large cities continue or level off? We introduce two new city population datasets that use consistent city definitions across countries and over time. The first covers the world between 1975 and 2025, using satellite imagery. The second covers the U.S. between 1850 and 2020, using census microdata. We find that urban growth follows a characteristic life cycle. In the early stages of a country's urbanization process, large cities grow faster than smaller ones. At later stages, growth rates equalize across sizes. We use this life cycle to project future population concentration in large cities. Our projections suggest that 38% of the world population will be living in cities with more than one million people by 2100. This estimate is higher than the 33% implied by the well-known theory of proportional growth, but lower than the 42% obtained by extrapolating current trends.

Chonghua Han, Yuan Yuan, Yukun Liu et al.

Human mobility prediction is vital for urban planning, transportation optimization, and personalized services. However, the inherent randomness, non-uniform time intervals, and complex patterns of human mobility, compounded by the heterogeneity introduced by varying city structures, infrastructure, and population densities, present significant challenges in modeling. Existing solutions often require training separate models for each city due to distinct spatial representations and geographic coverage. In this paper, we propose UniMove, a unified model for multi-city human mobility prediction, addressing two challenges: (1) constructing universal spatial representations for effective token sharing across cities, and (2) modeling heterogeneous mobility patterns from varying city characteristics. We propose a trajectory-location dual-tower architecture, with a location tower for universal spatial encoding and a trajectory tower for sequential mobility modeling. We also design MoE Transformer blocks to adaptively select experts to handle diverse movement patterns. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets from diverse cities demonstrate that UniMove truly embodies the essence of a unified model. By enabling joint training on multi-city data with mutual data enhancement, it significantly improves mobility prediction accuracy by over 10.2\%. UniMove represents a key advancement toward realizing a true foundational model with a unified architecture for human mobility. We release the implementation at https://github.com/tsinghua-fib-lab/UniMove/.

Loïc Wacquant

Ítalo Dantas de Araújo Maia, Alexandre Augusto Bezerra da Cunha Castro, Edja Bezerra Faria Trigueiro et al.

O estudo apresentado neste artigo está inserido no campo investigativo da Análise Sintática do Espaço, em particular quanto ao emprego de simulação de mudanças na configuração urbana por meio da investigação de possíveis impactos socioespaciais da construção de uma nova ponte em Natal. O problema de pesquisa centra-se em identificar ganhos e perdas de acessibilidade após realizadas as intervenções e em questionar quem seria o público mais favorecido com tais mudanças. Para tanto, foram modeladas representações (mapas de segmentos) da malha viária da área urbana contínua de Natal, simulando-se um cenário transformado pela introdução da ponte. Valores de acessibilidade origem-destino (NAIN) e de atravessamento (NACH), referentes às situações de antes e depois, foram comparados a dados censitários relativos a padrões de distribuição de renda em Natal. Os resultados apontam para a redistribuição de vetores de alta integração da periferia para o centro geométrico (bairro Potengi) da Região Administrativa Norte de Natal, e para o aumento da acessibilidade em áreas antigas de ocupação (Cidade Alta e Alecrim), potencialmente estendendo-se ao sítio definido como o centro histórico de Natal (Cidade Alta/Ribeira). O atual centro topológico da cidade, na região Leste/Sul, mais rica economicamente, é fortalecido. Como exposto em estudos anteriores, alguns referidos neste artigo, os efeitos de ganho de acessibilidade em centros antigos têm suscitado transformações às vezes radicais do cenário construído, raramente condizentes com a noção de preservação de bens culturais.

Michele Marchi

There are rules that provide shared information with the aim of guiding the behaviour of individuals or the community regarding spaces, processes and products. Therefore, the goal is to start a normalisation and standardisation procedure, which allows to solve a specific problem. With regard to the culture and practice of accessibility of spaces and environments, the reference legislation (Law 13/89, Presidential Decree 24 July 1996, n. 503, ISO 21541:2021, Ministerial Decree 236/89, UNI 17210:2021) is not only rather obsolete, but also excludes a large part of potential users. This paper aims to open a debate on the current operational tools in order to evaluate and design an inclusive context, proposing a new, more performing and universal one. The culture of accessibility is not only the scrupulous and scientific observance of the rules. It also means combining both quantitative and qualitative needs; therefore, providing environmental well-being. Thanks to the critical description of reference or experimental evaluation or design tools (HCD participatory methodologies for the definition of needs analyses, Quality Function Deployment for the tracking of technical specifications, ICF with a focus on UNI activities, laws, decrees and regulations to observe the Rule), this paper describes some projects that attempted to go beyond the rule, providing an inclusive context and space to meet people’s actual needs. Therefore, putting some operational tools into functional synergy (Rules, Inclusive Methodologies, ICF, QFD) to define a new multi-criteria tool can be an excellent starting point to develop, for each specific environmental context, a list of expectations that are important for planning and evaluation.

Rafael Prieto-Curiel, Ronaldo Menezes

Violence is commonly linked with large urban areas, and as a social phenomenon, it is presumed to scale super-linearly with population size. This study explores the hypothesis that smaller, isolated cities in Africa may experience a heightened intensity of violence against civilians. It aims to investigate the correlation between the risk of experiencing violence with a city's size and its geographical isolation. Over a 20-year period, the incidence of civilian casualties has been analysed to assess lethality in relation to varying degrees of isolation and city sizes. African cities are categorised by isolation (number of highway connections) and centrality (the estimated frequency of journeys). Findings suggest that violence against civilians exhibits a sub-linear pattern, with larger cities witnessing fewer casualties per 100,000 inhabitants. Remarkably, individuals in isolated cities face a quadrupled risk of a casualty compared to those in more connected cities.

Günter Gassner

Among the materials for the 1935 Exposé of the Arcades Project: “Toppling of illusionism in the cityscape: perspectives”.1 Haussmann the demolition artist opened up nineteenth-century Paris. He created perspectives, new views in perspectives down long, straight and broad streets. These are perspectives, Frisby notes, that are “cleared for all except admirers, spectators and […] consumers”.2 Walter Benjamin recognises Haussmann’s true goal: “to secure the city against civil war. He wanted to make the erection of bar- ricades in the streets of Paris impossible for all time”.3 Perspectives against radical political change.

Gloria Toma

L’articolo si muove da una riflessione sui piccoli paesi che, perdendo gli abitanti e le pratiche che li costituiscono, si trasformano gradualmente in luoghi fantasma, in cui i residui spettrali dello spo- polamento si sovrappongono ai ripopolamenti fantasmagorici che nuove strategie di valorizzazione turistica si propongono di generare.

Jakini A. Kauba, Thomas Weighill

We apply persistent homology, the main method in topological data analysis, to the study of demographic data. Persistence diagrams efficiently summarize information about clusters or peaks in a region's demographic data. To illustrate how persistence diagrams can be used for exploratory analysis, we undertake a study of the 100 largest U.S.~cities and their Black and Hispanic populations. We use our method to find clusters in individual cities, determine which cities are outliers and why, measure and describe change in demographic patterns over time, and roughly categorize cities into distinct groups based on the topology of their demographics. Along the way, we highlight the advantages and disadvantages of persistence diagrams as a tool for analyzing geospatial data.

Katielle Silva, Jorge Malheiros

Entre 2010 e 2015, o contexto migratório português alterou-se significativamente em consequência dos impactos sociais da crise financeira e económica, o que resultou num saldo migratório negativo, combinando redução do fluxo de entrada e incremento nas saídas de imigrantes (para novos destinos ou retorno ao país de origem) com o aumento da emigração portuguesa. Neste contexto, alguns casais luso-brasileiros mudaram-se para o Brasil, onde as oportunidades económicas e sociais, naquele período, pareciam mais favoráveis; contudo, entre 2016 e 2019, esse fluxo terá de novo oscilado, favorecendo agora Portugal enquanto espaço de destino. Combinando dados quantitativos sobre casamentos e nascimentos para demonstrar as ligações familiares entre brasileiras/os e portugueses/as e dados qualitativos coletados em entrevistas com famílias luso-brasileiras que vieram para Portugal, este texto procurou escrutinar duas ideias principais: (i) as razões do retorno para Portugal e a relevância dos contextos familiares, neste processo; e (ii) os projetos migratórios futuros e as suas implicações na (im)permanência neste país europeu. Teoricamente este artigo pretende desafiar e discutir categorias migratórias clássicas dos estudos migratórios como emigrantes-imigrantes e, sobretudo, partida e retorno, posicionando-as em contextos binacionais. Pretende-se assim desafiar a noção clássica de retorno a partir de uma perspetiva centrada em sujeitos migrantes mais complexos (os casais mistos) em relação aos espaços originais de referência que, por sua vez, também se vão transformando no quadro da circularidade migratória.

Marco Cillis

The essay is about the aesthetic experience of staying and about the relationship we establish with the landscape when we stop walking. Right at that moment, our body generates a new relationship with the place, merging more and more into the place itself, according to a contemplative process that has its roots in Platonic thought. When we stop to remember, the landscape design is connected with many universal topics, about history, identity and sense of life as well. In the second part, the text explores the landscape architecture of some memorials set up in different decades of the last sixty years, celebrating very different events, but strongly evoking: which is the role of the nature, and what is about the visitor’s proxemics while he’s remembering, living an aesthetic experience?

Omar Cheikhrouhou, Ichrak Amdouni, Khaleel Mershad et al.

Cybersecurity is an inherent characteristic that should be addressed before the large deployment of smart city applications. Recently, Blockchain appears as a promising technology to provide several cybersecurity aspects of smart city applications. This paper provides a comprehensive review of the existing blockchain-based solutions for the cybersecurity of the main smart city applications, namely smart healthcare, smart transportation, smart agriculture, supply chain management, smart grid, and smart homes. We describe the existing solutions and we discuss their merits and limits. Moreover, we define the security requirements of each smart city application and we give a mapping of the studied solutions to these defined requirements. Additionally, future directions are given. We believe that the present survey is a good starting point for every researcher in the fields of cybersecurity, blockchain, and smart cities.

Vasilis Naserentin, Anders Logg

The concept of creating digital twins, connected digital models of physical systems, is gaining increasing attention for modeling and simulation of whole cities. The basis for building a digital twin of a city is the generation of a 3D city model, often represented as a mesh. Creating and updating such models is a tedious process that requires manual work and considerable effort, especially in the modeling of building geometries. In the current paper, we present a novel algorithm and implementation for automatic, efficient, and robust mesh generation for large-scale city modeling and simulation. The algorithm relies on standard, publicly available data, in particular 2D cadastral maps (building footprints) and 3D point clouds obtained from aerial scanning. The algorithm generates LoD1.2 city models in the form of both triangular surface meshes, suitable for visualisation, and high-quality tetrahedral volume meshes, suitable for simulation. Our tests demonstrate good performance and scaling and indicate good avenues for further optimization based on parallelisation. The long-term goal is a generic digital twin of cities volume mesh generator that provides (nearly) real-time mesh manipulation in LoD2.x.

Federico Camerin

Farid Ghareh Mohammadi, Farzan Shenavarmasouleh, M. Hadi Amini et al.

The explosion of advancements in artificial intelligence, sensor technologies, and wireless communication activates ubiquitous sensing through distributed sensors. These sensors are various domains of networks that lead us to smart systems in healthcare, transportation, environment, and other relevant branches/networks. Having collaborative interaction among the smart systems connects end-user devices to each other which enables achieving a new integrated entity called Smart Cities. The goal of this study is to provide a comprehensive survey of data analytics in smart cities. In this paper, we aim to focus on one of the smart cities important branches, namely Smart Mobility, and its positive ample impact on the smart cities decision-making process. Intelligent decision-making systems in smart mobility offer many advantages such as saving energy, relaying city traffic, and more importantly, reducing air pollution by offering real-time useful information and imperative knowledge. Making a decision in smart cities in time is challenging due to various and high dimensional factors and parameters, which are not frequently collected. In this paper, we first address current challenges in smart cities and provide an overview of potential solutions to these challenges. Then, we offer a framework of these solutions, called universal smart cities decision making, with three main sections of data capturing, data analysis, and decision making to optimize the smart mobility within smart cities. With this framework, we elaborate on fundamental concepts of big data, machine learning, and deep leaning algorithms that have been applied to smart cities and discuss the role of these algorithms in decision making for smart mobility in smart cities.

Sayat Mimar, David Soriano-Paños, Alec Kirkley et al.

While much effort has been devoted to understand the role of intra-urban characteristics on sustainability and growth, much remains to be understood about the effect of inter-urban interactions and the role cities have in determining each other's urban welfare. Here we consider a global mobility network of population flows between cities as a proxy for the communication between these regions, and analyze how these flows impact socioeconomic indicators that measure economic success. We use several measures of centrality to rank cities according to their importance in the mobility network, finding PageRank to be the most effective measure for reflecting these prosperity indicators. Our analysis reveals that the characterization of the welfare of cities based on mobility information hinges on their corresponding development stage. Namely, while network-based predictions of welfare correlate well with economic indicators in mature cities, for developing urban areas additional information about the prosperity of their mobility neighborhood is needed. For these developing cities, those that are connected to sets of mature cities show markedly better socio-economic indicators than those connected to less mature cities. We develop a simple generative model for the allocation of population flows out of a city that balances the costs and benefits of interaction with other cities that are successful, finding that it provides a strong fit to the flows observed in the global mobility network and highlights the differences in flow patterns between developed and developing urban regions. Our results hint towards the importance of leveraging inter-urban connections in service of urban development and welfare.

Meiyi Ma, Ezio Bartocci, Eli Lifland et al.

With the development of the Internet of Things, millions of sensors are being deployed in cities to collect real-time data. This leads to a need for checking city states against city requirements at runtime. In this paper, we develop a novel spatial-temporal specification-based monitoring system for smart cities. We first describe a study of over 1,000 smart city requirements, some of which cannot be specified using existing logic such as Signal Temporal Logic (STL) and its variants. To tackle this limitation, we develop SaSTL -- a novel Spatial Aggregation Signal Temporal Logic -- for the efficient runtime monitoring of safety and performance requirements in smart cities. We develop two new logical operators in SaSTL to augment STL for expressing spatial aggregation and spatial counting characteristics that are commonly found in real city requirements. We define Boolean and \newcontent{quantitative semantics}~for SaSTL in support of the analysis of city performance across different periods and locations. We also develop efficient monitoring algorithms that can check a SaSTL requirement in parallel over multiple data streams (e.g., generated by multiple sensors distributed spatially in a city). Additionally, we build a SaSTL-based monitoring tool to support decision making of different stakeholders to specify and runtime monitor their requirements in smart cities. We evaluate our SaSTL monitor by applying it to three case studies with large-scale real city sensing data (e.g., up to 10,000 sensors in one study). The results show that SaSTL has a much higher coverage expressiveness than other spatial-temporal logic, and with a significant reduction of computation time for monitoring requirements. We also demonstrate that the SaSTL monitor improves the safety and performance of smart cities via simulated experiments.