Cities are challenged with issues that are related to and land scarcity, rapid population growth, complex terrain, and a lack of updated analytical planning decisions. Traditionally, planners have relied on two-dimensional spatial models rather than more realistic three-dimensional representations of urban reality. In light of this difficulty, volumetric urbanism seeks to improve city planning by considering cities as three-dimensional phenomena influenced by underground systems, multi-level spacing, and vertical expansion. Based on Hong Kong’s well-established volumetric urban structure, this study uses a GIS-based framework to evaluate the readiness and potential for volumetric development in four cities in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq: Erbil, Sulaymaniyah, Duhok, and Akre. The proposed framework links two connected entities: natural contexts, represented by slope and elevation, and man-made contexts, which capture urban physical characteristics and spatial integration. Physical characteristics include building height, VFR, and EVD, while Spatial integration is measured by accessibility and compactness metrics, including closeness, reach, betweenness, and built-up kernel density. The ArcGIS Pro 3.6.0 Suitability Modeler operationalizes all indicators using MCDA. The results show significant volumetric potential differences between case cities. Erbil’s urban pattern is strongly centralized around its historical core, while Sulaymaniyah, Duhok, and Akre offer greater potential for terrain-adaptive vertical densification. Despite the differences in scale, Akre and Hong Kong exhibit comparable volumetric characteristics shaped by terrain and compact urban form. Overall, the results demonstrate how topographical constraints, built-form intensity, and spatial integration influence volumetric transformation, providing a transferable approach for evidence-based and context-responsive urban densification.
Marathons are now common ways of seeing cities, yet little is known about how representative their routes are. Using 311 marathon routes across five continents, we compare landmarks and amenities along the course with those elsewhere in the same city, finding that museums are 15.7 times denser near the route and that the median city has about 8.5 times more luxury brands near the route than elsewhere in the city. These patterns persist under perturbed routes with the same start and finish lines: monuments and landmarks, in particular, are more prevalent on the race course than on similar alternative routes, suggesting that marathons function as intentionally selective urban portraits.
Ghulam Mudassir, Antinisca Di Marco, Giordano d'Aloisio
Natural disasters always have several effects on human lives. It is challenging for governments to tackle these incidents and to rebuild the economic, social and physical infrastructures and facilities with the available resources (mainly budget and time). Governments always define plans and policies according to the law and political strategies that should maximise social benefits. The severity of damage and the vast resources needed to bring life back to normality make such reconstruction a challenge. This article is the extension of our previously published work by conducting comprehensive comparative analysis by integrating additional deep learning models plus random agent which is used as a baseline. Our prior research introduced a decision support system by using the Deep Reinforcement Learning technique for the planning of post-disaster city reconstruction, maximizing the social benefit of the reconstruction process, considering available resources, meeting the needs of the broad community stakeholders (like citizens' social benefits and politicians' priorities) and keeping in consideration city's structural constraints (like dependencies among roads and buildings). The proposed approach, named post disaster REbuilding plAn ProvIdeR (REPAIR) is generic. It can determine a set of alternative plans for local administrators who select the ideal one to implement, and it can be applied to areas of any extension. We show the application of REPAIR in a real use case, i.e., to the L'Aquila reconstruction process, damaged in 2009 by a major earthquake.
The paper focuses on unfinished public constructions that represent an anomaly and an urgency with environmental, economic and even social consequences. The prerequisite of the research is the possibility that unfinished buildings can be considered opportunities to start new building processes consistently with the renewed needs of the contemporary situation, and not as a shared set of disvalues. The use of a specific methodological framework and programmatic strategies can direct the interventions, evaluating the suggested potential performance, and trigger virtuous and accessible cycles of signification and actualisation. The paper derives from a doctoral research and has been developed within the activities of the cross-border cooperation project CUBÂTI.
Aesthetics of cities. City planning and beautifying, Architectural drawing and design
Naoki Tamura, Kazuyuki Shoji, Shin Katayama
et al.
We publicly release OpenUAS, a dataset of area embeddings based on urban usage patterns, including embeddings for over 1.3 million 50-meter square meshes covering a total area of 3,300 square kilometers. This dataset is valuable for analyzing area functions in fields such as market analysis, urban planning, transportation infrastructure, and infection prediction. It captures the characteristics of each area in the city, such as office districts and residential areas, by employing an area embedding technique that utilizes location information typically obtained by GPS. Numerous area embedding techniques have been proposed, and while the public release of such embedding datasets is technically feasible, it has not been realized. One reason for this is that previous methods could not embed areas from different cities and periods into the same embedding space without sharing raw location data. We address this issue by developing an anchoring method that establishes anchors within a shared embedding space. We publicly release this anchor dataset along with area embedding datasets from several periods in eight major Japanese cities.
Truong Thanh Hung Nguyen, Phuc Truong Loc Nguyen, Monica Wachowicz
et al.
This paper presents a Multimodal Ambient Context-enriched Intelligence Platform (MACeIP) for Smart Cities, a comprehensive system designed to enhance urban management and citizen engagement. Our platform integrates advanced technologies, including Internet of Things (IoT) sensors, edge and cloud computing, and Multimodal AI, to create a responsive and intelligent urban ecosystem. Key components include Interactive Hubs for citizen interaction, an extensive IoT sensor network, intelligent public asset management, a pedestrian monitoring system, a City Planning Portal, and a Cloud Computing System. We demonstrate the prototype of MACeIP in several cities, focusing on Fredericton, New Brunswick. This work contributes to innovative city development by offering a scalable, efficient, and user-centric approach to urban intelligence and management.
Cities have an important role to play in implementing the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and to mobilize sustainability at the urban level. Yet, municipalities encounter challenges in localizing the SDGs into their governance structures, and there is a need to advance our understanding of cities strengths and weaknesses in such processes. In this article we provide knowledge and reflections gained in analyzing the process of localizing the SDGs into the spatial planning of Smörkajen, a former industrial harbor site in Malmö, Sweden. By applying the analytical framework of Institutional Capacity Building, the study explores the process of localizing the SDGs in terms of building relational and knowledge capacities and to provide mobilization capacity by the formation of a sustainability strategy. The results illustrate an inclusive approach supporting relational capacity and numerous measures to enhance knowledge capacity, bringing about the formation of a draft sustainability strategy, strongly supported by the municipal participants. But rather than formally adopting the full strategy in the spatial planning of the Smörkajen area, the results of the process were only to be considered to the extent the traditional documents and processes allowed. In all, the results illustrate a strong support for the use of localized SDGs among municipal administrative units to mobilize sustainability, but also the challenges in actually implementing these in the formal planning and development process.
Rosário Mauritti, Sónia Pintassilgo, Helena Belchior Rocha
et al.
O estudo analisa o posicionamento de Portugal nos fluxos de mobilidade internacional por motivos de estudo, num processo que se constrói e consolida, sobretudo, no âmbito dos acordos de cooperação da CPLP. O objetivo é identificar os perfis e características dos estudantes estrangeiros que frequentam o ensino superior em Portugal, sobretudo os provenientes de países da CPLP, detalhar os fluxos e as proveniências, bem como a sua distribuição pelas instituições de ensino superior e pelo território nacional, discutindo os potenciais benefícios da sua integração para as diferentes tipologias de instituições/territórios. O estudo recorre a dados oficiais de natureza censitária produzidos pela DGEEC, relativos a 2012-2021. A análise demonstra a presença crescente de estudantes internacionais nas IES portuguesas, num processo facilitado pela alteração do quadro institucional no âmbito dos acordos de cooperação. No elenco de razões para a adesão das IES a essa tendência, assinalam-se quer as possibilidades de captação de novos recursos financeiros através das prestações de propinas, quer elementos simbólicos de prestígio das IES nos rankings nacionais e internacionais, além do potencial de dinamismo e inovação que resulta da confluência no campus das IES de estudantes com referenciais de experiência e orientações culturais diferenciadas. No artigo evidencia-se também a relevância da procura internacional para o reforço da oferta de ensino superior hoje em funcionamento nas diferentes áreas de educação e ciclos de estudo, incluindo nas regiões com menor capacidade de atração de estudantes nacionais.The study analyses the positioning of Portugal in the international mobility flows for study purposes, in a process built and consolidated mainly in the scope of the CPLP cooperation agreements. The aim is to identify the profile and characteristics of foreign students attending higher education in Portugal, especially those coming from CPLP countries, to detail the flows and origins, as well as their distribution across higher education institutions and the national territory, discussing the potential benefits of their integration for the different types of institutions/territories. The study is based on official census data produced by DGEEC for the years 2012-2021. The analysis shows the adherence of Portuguese Higher Education Institutions (HEI) to the recruitment of international students, a process facilitated by the change in the institutional framework under the cooperation agreements. In the list of reasons for this adhesion, it is pointed out both the possibilities of attracting new financial resources through the payment of tuition fees, as well as symbolic elements of prestige of the HEI in the national and international rankings, besides the potential for dynamism and innovation that results from the confluence on the HEI campus of students with differentiated references of experience and cultural orientations. The article also highlights the relevance of international demand to strengthen the supply of higher education currently in operation in the different areas of education and study cycles, including in regions with less capacity to attract national students.
Aesthetics of cities. City planning and beautifying, Urban groups. The city. Urban sociology
Este artigo se desenvolve a partir das considerações de que a apropriações nos espaços públicos urbanos está relacionada com os usos e ocupações do solo urbano, e que, a leitura do aspecto edificado do tecido urbano é chave de interpretação para as relações que se estabelecem nos espaços públicos. O principal objetivo é apresentar a influência do uso e ocupação do solo na apropriação do entorno da praça Regina Frigeri Furno, em Vitória-ES. Para tanto, o estudo de caso divide-se em três partes, sendo que a primeira busca estabelecer e entender os períodos de consolidação do tecido urbano em questão; a segunda parte corresponde a análise tipo-morfológica do entorno imediato à praça; e, por fim, a terceira demonstra as relações de apropriação do espaço público com os edifícios do entorno da praça. Como resultado, foi possível demonstrar as considerações iniciais da pesquisa, sendo que, as atividades comerciais e de prestação de serviços, ao lado da própria constituição do tecido urbano, influenciaram nas dinâmicas observadas de apropriação dos espaços públicos.
Aesthetics of cities. City planning and beautifying, Urban groups. The city. Urban sociology
The combination between innovative topics and emerging technologies lets researchers define new processes and models. New needs regard the definition of modular and scalable approaches, with society and environment in mind. An important topic to focus on is the smart city one. The use of emerging technologies lets smart cities develop new processes to improve services offered from various actors, either industries or government. Smart cities were born to improve quality of life for citizens. To reach this goal, various approaches have been proposed, but they lack on a common interface to let each stakeholder communicate in a simple and fast way. This paper shows the proposal of an architecture to overcome the actual limitations of smart cities: it uses Blockchain technology as a distributed database to let everyone join the network and feel part of a community. Blockchain can improve processes development for smart cities. Scalability is granted thanks to a context-aware approach: applications do not need to know about the back-end implementation, they just need to adapt to an interface. With Blockchain, it is possible to collect data anonymously to make some statistical analysis, to access public records to ensure security in the city and to guarantee the origin of products and energy.
El presente artículo de investigación busca rastrear qué pistas sobre cómo habitar la ciudad podemos encontrar en las representaciones creadas desde y sobre el Mercado Norte, y con este fin, se parte de un trabajo final de grado y algunas conclusiones posteriores sobre las diversas experiencias concentradas en un punto histórico de la ciudad de Córdoba: el Mercado Norte.
Este Mercado fue inaugurado en un contexto de grandes transformaciones en las urbes latinoamericanas, a principios del siglo XX, bajo la gran ola del progreso. En la actualidad, el Mercado constituye un punto de referencia en la trama de la ciudad, es el centro de una de las “Grandes Manzanas”, y es un espacio que concentra diversas actividades comerciales, sociales y culturales. Proponemos pensar este espacio hoy para comprender algunas dinámicas de las experiencias allí dadas, como también reflexionar sobre qué nociones e ideas impulsan las transformaciones urbanas y de la experiencia sobre este espacio, sin perder de vista - o quizás tomando como punto de comparación - aquellas nociones y consensos que en nombre del progreso impulsaron su creación. Para ello, desde una perspectiva materialista y crítica se analizarán noticias publicadas sobre este espacio, y se trabajará sobre un registro fotográfico para intentar encontrar las nociones de “revalorización” que motivan e impulsan estas transformaciones.
Aesthetics of cities. City planning and beautifying, Architectural drawing and design
Lawrence Kazembe, Jonathan Crush, Ndeyapo Nickanor
Abstract A central feature of the transformation of urban food systems in cities of the Global South is the growing presence of supermarkets and their supply chains, often termed supermarketization or a supermarket revolution. A key issue in the African context is whether supermarkets are a threat to other sources of food including informal sector vendors. Most research on the supermarket revolution and competition with other food retailers focuses on large urban conurbations with little attention paid to the role of supermarkets in smaller urban centres. This paper aims to rectify this situation through a case study of the role of supermarkets in three small urban centres in northern Namibia. The paper uses data from a representative household food security survey in 2018 which collected detailed information on household food consumption and food purchasing patterns. We show that supermarkets have established a dominant role in the local food system and are patronized by almost all households. However, the informal food sector displays considerable resilience and is patronized on a regular basis by low-income households. Future research on the impact of the secondary supermarket revolution should examine the experience and strategies of informal food vendors and whether the relationship with supermarkets is truly symbiotic or not.
Aesthetics of cities. City planning and beautifying, Cities. Urban geography
Characterizing the spatial organization of urban systems is a challenge which points to the more general problem of describing marked point processes in spatial statistics. We propose a non-parametric method that goes beyond standard tools of point pattern analysis and which is based on a mapping between the points and a "dominance tree", constructed from a recursive analysis of their Voronoi tessellation. Using toy models, we show that the height of a node in this tree encodes both its mark and the structure of its neighborhood, reflecting its importance in the system. We use historical population data in France (1876-2018) and the US (1880-2010) and show that the method highlights multiscale urban dynamics experienced by these countries. These include non-monotonous city trajectories in the US, as revealed by the evolution of their height in the tree. We show that the height of a city in the tree is less sensitive to different statistical definitions of cities than its rank in the urban hierarchy. The method also captures the attraction basins of cities at successive scales, and while in both countries these basin sizes become more homogeneous at larger scales, they are also more heterogeneous in France than in the US. Finally, we introduce a simple graphical representation - the height clock - that monitors the evolution of the role of each city in its country.
Cities are typical dynamic complex systems that connect people and facilitate interactions. Revealing universal collective patterns behind spatio-temporal interactions between residents is crucial for various urban studies, of which we are still lacking a comprehensive understanding. Massive cellphone data enable us to construct interaction networks based on spatio-temporal co-occurrence of individuals. The rank-size distributions of hourly dynamic population of locations are stable, although people are almost constantly moving in cities and hotspots that attract people are changing over time in a day. A larger city is of a stronger heterogeneity as indicated by a larger scaling exponent. After aggregating spatio-temporal interaction networks over consecutive time windows, we reveal a switching behavior of cities between two states. During the "active" state, the whole city is concentrated in fewer larger communities; while in the "sleeping" state, people are scattered in more smaller communities. Above discoveries are universal over diversified cities across continents. In addition, a city sleeps less, when its population grows larger. And spatio-temporal interaction segregation can be well approximated by residential segregation in smaller cities, but not in larger ones. We propose a temporal-population-weighted-opportunity model by integrating time-dependent departure probability to make dynamic predictions on human mobility, which can reasonably well explain observed patterns of spatio-temporal interactions in cities.
The Church of San Pellegrino in the historic centre of Lucca takes its name from its location on Via San Pellegrino, now called Via Galli Tassi: the northernmost route to the city of Lucca on Via Francigena. The only historical sources found are the pastoral visits found at the Diocesan Historical Archive. Expanded in the middle of the seventeenth century with the great vaulted hall, it became a pilgrimage and prayer centre for wealthy local families. In 1808, the Church of San Pellegrino was closed for worship. In the twentieth century, it was the site of an organ workshop and more recently it became a warehouse. The Church was in an advanced state of neglect, the objective set by the commission was to restore the exterior, the roofs and interiors with the intent of transferring the plaster cast collections from the Polo Museale Toscano. The collection consists of 231 pieces dated from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. When we visited the Church for the first time, we were struck by the extraordinary natural light that filtered through the windows and highlighted the great interior space. The project was set at maximum cost-effectiveness and respect for the historical building, the space has been restored to its former glory and both natural and artificial light is the material that defines the space.
Architectural drawing and design, Aesthetics of cities. City planning and beautifying
Imelda I. Damanik, Bakti Setiawan, M. Sani Roychansyah
et al.
Urban Kampung is an urban area with distinctive characters. The symbols as a poor, dense, and slum area, put the urban kampung as a high priority task for the government to solve. But besides that, the urban kampung demonstrates the capacity of the local community and institutions. Vulnerability aspects embedded with capacity aspects, build configuration that complements one to another, and build the distinctiveness in the context of resilience. As part of the urban area, urban kampung has to bring out its local resilience value to support urban resilience. This paper will provide an analysis of the resilience’s value by measuring the aspects of the communities and institutions of urban kampung in Yogyakarta. This research was conducted by distributing questionnaires that are compiled on a Likert scale in five urban kampungs in Yogyakarta City. The results are analyzed using the Principle Component Analysis (PCA), which will show the genetics distance and the relation between variables of the community aspects and the institutional aspects of the urban kampung. The PCA’s outcome of community and institutional aspects will be useful in designing public spaces in urban kampung as an effort to increase urban resiliency.
Keywords: urban kampung; community; institution; resilience; principal component analysis
Abstrak
Kampung Kota adalah ruang perkotaan yang memiliki karakter yang khas. Simbol miskin, padat dan kumuh membentuk kampung kota menjadi pekerjaan rumah yang harus diselesaikan oleh pemerintah kota. Namun disamping itu, kampung kota hadir dengan kekuatan komunitas dan institusi lokalnya. Aspek-aspek pembentuk kerentanan (vulnerability) berdampingan dengan aspek-aspek pembentuk kapasitas (capacity), saling mengisi dan membentuk kekhasan dalam konteks resiliensi. Sebagai bagian dari wilayah perkotaan, kampung harus menunjukkan nilai seberapa resiliensi aspek-aspek tersebut. Tulisan ini akan memberikan telaah mengenai perhitungan nilai resiliensi aspek komunitas dan institusi kampung kota di Yogyakarta. Penelitian ini dilakukan dengan menyebar kuestioner yang disusun dengan skala Likert di 5 kampung kota di Yogyakarta. Hasilnya kemudian akan dianalisis dengan Komponen Fundamental (Principal Component Analysis, PCA), yang akan menunjukkan jarak genetika dan relasi antara variabel aspek komunitas dan aspek institusi kampung kota. Temuan komponen fundamental aspek komunitas dan institusi akan bermanfaat dalam mendesain ruang publik dalam kampung kota dalam upaya peningkatan resiliensi kota.
Kata kunci: kampung kota; komunitas; institusi; resiliensi; analisis komponen fundamental
Aesthetics of cities. City planning and beautifying
Smart cities solutions are often monolithically implemented, from sensors data handling through to the provided services. The same challenges are regularly faced by different developers, for every new solution in a new city. Expertise and know-how can be re-used and the effort shared. In this article we present the methodologies to minimize the efforts of implementing new smart city solutions and maximizing the sharing of components. The final target is to have a live technical community of smart city application developers. The results of this activity comes from the implementation of 35 city services in 27 cities between Europe and South Korea. To share efforts, we encourage developers to devise applications using a modular approach. Single-function components that are re-usable by other city services are packaged and published as standalone components, named Atomic Services. We identify 15 atomic services addressing smart city challenges in data analytics, data evaluation, data integration, data validation, and visualization. 38 instances of the atomic services are already operational in several smart city services. We detail in this article, as atomic service examples, some data predictor components. Furthermore, we describe real-world atomic services usage in the scenarios of Santander and three Danish cities. The resulting atomic services also generate a side market for smart city solutions, allowing expertise and know-how to be re-used by different stakeholders.