Cities are complex systems connected to economic, ecological, and demographic conditions and change. They are also characterized by diverging perceptions and interests of citizens and stakeholders. Thus, in the arena of urban planning, we are in need of approaches that are able to cope not only with urban complexity but also allow for participatory and collaborative processes to empower citizens. This to create democratic cities. Connected to the field of smart cities and citizens, we present in this paper, the prototype of an urban digital twin for the 30,000-people town of Herrenberg in Germany. Urban digital twins are sophisticated data models allowing for collaborative processes. The herein presented prototype comprises (1) a 3D model of the built environment, (2) a street network model using the theory and method of space syntax, (3) an urban mobility simulation, (4) a wind flow simulation, and (5) a number of empirical quantitative and qualitative data using volunteered geographic information (VGI). In addition, the urban digital twin was implemented in a visualization platform for virtual reality and was presented to the general public during diverse public participatory processes, as well as in the framework of the “Morgenstadt Werkstatt” (Tomorrow’s Cities Workshop). The results of a survey indicated that this method and technology could significantly aid in participatory and collaborative processes. Further understanding of how urban digital twins support urban planners, urban designers, and the general public as a collaboration and communication tool and for decision support allows us to be more intentional when creating smart cities and sustainable cities with the help of digital twins. We conclude the paper with a discussion of the presented results and further research directions.
Abstract Considering the heterogeneity of environmental regulation, this study calculates the green innovation efficiency of 235 cities in Mainland China from 2004 to 2016. The study builds a spatial measurement model based on the geographic weight matrix to verify the mechanism through which environmental regulation affects regional green innovation efficiency. This study mainly finds that 1) green innovation efficiency has a large spatial imbalance in 235 Chinese cities. During the study period, green innovation efficiency rises in Eastern China, remains stable in Central China, and declines in Western China. Overall, China shows a trend of “rising in the East, stabilizing in Central China, declining in the West.”; 2) the spatial autocorrelation test shows a significant positive autocorrelation of urban green innovation efficiency and the spatial measurement test results show that it has a significant spatial spillover effect; and 3) according to the spatial error model, environmental regulation has a positive U-shaped relationship with urban green innovation efficiency that can be reinforced by increasing investment in educational resources, optimizing the industrial structure, and improving economic development, supporting the Porter hypothesis at the scale of Chinese cities.
The spatial layout of cities is an important feature of urban form, highlighted by urban planners but overlooked by economists. This paper investigates the causal economic implications of city shape in India. I measure cities’ geometric properties over time using satellite imagery and historical maps. I develop an instrument for urban shape based on geographic obstacles encountered by expanding cities. Compact city shape is associated with faster population growth and households display positive willingness to pay for more compact layouts. Transit accessibility is an important channel. Land use regulations can contribute to deteriorating city shape. (JEL O18, R14, R23, R52, R58)
Eduardo Graells-Garrido, Feliu Serra-Burriel, Francisco Rowe
et al.
As cities expand, human mobility has become a central focus of urban planning and policy making to make cities more inclusive and sustainable. Initiatives such as the “15-minutes city” have been put in place to shift the attention from monocentric city configurations to polycentric structures, increasing the availability and diversity of local urban amenities. Ultimately they expect to increase local walkability and increase mobility within residential areas. While we know how urban amenities influence human mobility at the city level, little is known about spatial variations in this relationship. Here, we use mobile phone, census, and volunteered geographical data to measure geographic variations in the relationship between origin-destination flows and local urban accessibility in Barcelona. Using a Negative Binomial Geographically Weighted Regression model, we show that, globally, people tend to visit neighborhoods with better access to education and retail. Locally, these and other features change in sign and magnitude through the different neighborhoods of the city in ways that are not explained by administrative boundaries, and that provide deeper insights regarding urban characteristics such as rental prices. In conclusion, our work suggests that the qualities of a 15-minutes city can be measured at scale, delivering actionable insights on the polycentric structure of cities, and how people use and access this structure.
David Lefutso, Abiodun A. Ogundeji, Gideon Danso-Abbeam
et al.
Flood risk in South Africa remains a problem due to climate change, rapid urbanisation and persistent disparities in the region and low-income urban households are disproportionately impacted because of poor access to affordable flood insurance. This paper constructs the Integrated Market Flood Risk Insurance Framework (IMFRIF) based on a qualitative, desk-based research design consisting of contextual policy analysis, systematic literature review and analytical synthesis through systems thinking. The policy and document analysis reviewed the legislation on national disaster management, insurance and industry reports to determine institutional and market limitations on the provision of flood insurance. A PRISMA-ScR systematic literature review filtered 312 records on Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar, which led to the identification of 47 peer-reviewed articles and 15 policy and comparative case studies. Thematic analysis led to the identification of six prevailing clusters of barriers based on the influence on insurance uptake, which included affordability and product design, trust and risk perception, data and risk assessment gaps, regulatory capacity, multi-stakeholder coordination, and community engagement. The results of these studies were used to design the IMFRIF, a system incorporating 9 major stakeholder groups and 5 interdependent system components into a single market-based design. The framework provides a systematic foundation to the resolution of systemic exclusion of flood insurance, but specifically acknowledges the implementation limitations regarding data availability, regulation capacity, fiscal sustainability and communal level of trust. The IMFRIF is placed as a progressive and responsive system that offers a point of future empirical confirmation and policy implementation to promote inclusive disaster risk financing in South Africa and comparable low- and middle-income contexts.
Disasters and engineering, Cities. Urban geography
Abstract The construction sector faces increasing pressure to integrate sustainable supply chain practices, yet traditional collaboration methods often fall short in addressing stakeholder complexity, resource inefficiencies, and environmental impacts. This study explores how human-centric digital twins can enhance collaboration and promote sustainability throughout construction supply chains. Through a systematic review of Scopus-indexed publications, industry reports, and conference proceedings, the research identifies key factors for collaboration, evaluates the capabilities of digital twins, and measures their impact on sustainability. Results show that human-centric digital twins enable real-time communication, shared information, and collaborative decision-making. The comprehensive view of the supply chain is provided, allowing for bottleneck detection, scenario simulation, and behavioral analysis by incorporating human factors. Challenges such as data interoperability, cybersecurity, and workforce readiness remain. The study suggests a phased implementation approach focused on stakeholder engagement, data standardization, and user-centered design. Ongoing monitoring and evaluation are vital for achieving long-term sustainability goals. By addressing implementation barriers, construction firms can unlock the full benefits of human-centric digital twins, turning supply chain collaboration into a driver of resilience, efficiency, and environmental stewardship.
Wisdom Richard Mgomezulu, Paul Thangata, Daniel Njiwa
The impact of trade liberalization on Malawi’s economy has been a hotly debated topic. To shed light on the subject, a study was conducted using the PEP-1–1 CGE model and the latest Malawi’s Social Accounting Matrix (SAM) from 2019. The results were eye-opening, revealing the potential effects of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) on various sectors of the economy. The removal of trade tariffs is predicted to have a significant impact on prices, with a decrease of 26.31% in the agricultural sector alone, services (−7.88%), public administration (−9.92%), and manufacturing and industry (−11.23%) imposing hopes of improving food affordability and food security. However, it is expected to have adverse impacts on wage rates in the agricultural sector (−18.78%), manufacturing and construction (−19.01%), services (−2.79%) and public administration (−15.81%). Additionally, while exports are expected to increase, the country’s balance of payments may suffer as imports are likely to outweigh foreign earnings. This could also lead to a decrease in government revenue from taxes. To mitigate these effects, the study suggests implementing export restructuring strategies, particularly in industries like manufacturing and construction, and promoting diversification of local production to boost competitiveness and improve wage rates. With these measures in place, the government will not only offset potential losses but also tap into new sources of taxable income.
Cities. Urban geography, Urbanization. City and country
Traffic congestion is an ever-increasing issue across urban environments in the US. One potential mitigation strategy is to improve our understanding of how the geographical patterns of urban land use influence congestion. Unfortunately, there is no consensus regarding if more sprawling or dense urban morphologies help mitigate congestion issues. To potentially clarify the conflicting findings of previous studies, we used a detailed spatial metric-based approach and panel regression to quantify the relationships between urban development patterns and congestion in 98 US urban areas from 2001 to 2011. We found that the abundance and spatial configuration of urban land uses were correlated with traffic congestion. Specifically, high degrees of polycentricity for both high-intensity and low-intensity urban land uses were associated with more congestion, while contiguous residential development was correlated with less congestion. Important distinctions were also observed between different congestion measures, as urban morphology exhibited a more substantial influence on overall congestion than rush-hour congestion. Our findings can potentially inform future land use planning by clarifying which urban morphologies alleviate traffic congestion issues.
In this article we attempt to understand the new world geography through its cities by treating corporate globalization from the perspective of cities insofar as they are central to the global networks that make large-scale economic processes possible. To this end, we draw on a conceptual and empirical extension of world city network research to describe the major globalization phases that have been shaping the twenty-first century. After situating our world city network research in the much broader field of research on globalizing cities, we retell the narrative of the extensive, intensive, and Chinese globalization phases as reflected in the office networks of 175 of the world’s largest producer services firms across 707 cities. A purposeful combination of connectivity and multivariate analysis is used to reveal cumulative, interacting, overlapping, and unfolding geographies of global economic patterns. We argue that these three key globalizations are shaping the global context of economic processes in the twenty-first century and describe the urban geography of each of these globalizations to understand their broader meanings within today’s global economy.
Given that more than half of the world’s population lives in cities, and the urbanisation process continues, it is natural for urban health to be an important concern for many actors from research to decision-making. Urban health as a research and intervention field is usually focused on human health (‘limited by human-centrism’, p. i); the book reviewed here makes a valuable contribution because it ‘turns its attention to urban biodiversity and the many non-human species that live in, make and share cities with humans’ (p. i). This book is authored, and this fact contributes to its homogeneity; it does not contain original research, but it is a synthesis of the main contributions from a range of disciplines to support the author’s idea about a ‘morethan-human’ urban environment. Being part of Routledge Studies in Environment and Health series, which is dedicated to the study of environmental change on human health, this book is set in the human–environment interaction space and wants to understand what makes healthy urban environments and who they are for. Dr. Cecily Maller is Associate Professor, Vice Chancellor’s Senior Research Fellow and Co-leader of the Beyond Behaviour Change Research Program – Centre for Urban Research, School of Global, Urban and Social Studies, RMIT University, Australia. Her research activity combines topics from the areas of urbanism, health and nature, focusing on humanenvironment interactions. Because healthy nature means healthy people (this is also the title of one of the author’s previous articles), the aims of the book are to foster a greater appreciation of the things that make the world more-than-human, to open new ways of thinking, knowing and understanding cities and urban environments as more-than-human habitat, and to encourage experimentation with new concepts and ideas from a more-than-human perspective. Therefore, the author’s approach is organized in two parts that include eight chapters. The first part (Understanding more-than-human theories, Chapters 2–4) draws on philosophical and theoretical resources from three bodies of theory (The Affective Turn, The New Materialisms Turn and The Practice Turn). The chapters in this part describe the main literature associated with each turn and discuss the key contributions from each. The second part (Making more-than-human healthy urban environments, Chapters 5–8) uses the ideas and theories to reconceptualise health and wellbeing in cities as more-than-human, and also how to make cities more-than-human habitat. The author considers that ‘living non-humans should also be considered as both recipients and creators of healthy urban environments’ (p. 91): healthy urban environments are not only about people, they must also be eco-centric urban places. The book includes only two figures, but the narrative is engaging and accessible to readers, with short chapters including notes and an extensive references section. Given its focus on the relationship between urban health, planning, and the environment, the book is of interest to scholars, students, policymakers and professionals in human geography, planning, sociology, health and environment-related fields.
Couples' residential decisions are based on a large variety of factors including housing preferences, family and other social ties, socialisation and residential biography (e.g. earlier experience in the life course) and environmental factors (e.g. housing market, labour market). This study examines, firstly, to what extent people stay in, return to or leave their hometown (referred to as ‘migration type’). We refer to the hometown as the place where most of childhood and adolescence is spent. Secondly, we study which conditions shape a person’s migration type. We mainly focus on variables capturing elements of the residential biography and both partners’ family ties and family socialisation. We focus on the residential choices made at the time of family formation, i.e. when the first child is born. We employ multinomial regression modelling and cross-tabulations, based on two generations in a sample of families who mostly live in the wider Ruhr area, born around 1931 (parents) and 1957 (adult children). We find that migration type is significantly affected by a combination of both partners' place of origin, both partners' parents' places of residence, the number of previous moves, level of education and hometown population size. We conclude that complex patterns of experience made over the life course, socialisation and gendered patterns are at work. These mechanisms should be kept in mind when policymakers develop strategies to attract (return) migrants.
Cities. Urban geography, Urbanization. City and country
Geotagged tweets, Foursquare check-ins and other forms of volunteered geographic information (VGI) play a critical role in numerous studies and a large range of intelligent technologies. We show that three of the most commonly used sources of VGI – Twitter, Flickr, and Foursquare – are biased towards urban perspectives at the expense of rural ones. Utilizing a geostatistics-based approach, we demonstrate that, on a per capita basis, these important VGI datasets have more users, more information, and higher quality information within metropolitan areas than outside of them. VGI is a subset of user-generated content (UGC) and we discuss how our results suggest that urban biases might exist in non-geographically referenced UGC as well. Finally, because Foursquare is exclusively made up of VGI, we argue that Foursquare (and possibly other location-based social networks) has fundamentally failed to appeal to rural populations.
O artigo procura compreender como os/as ex-estudantes que ingressaram pelo sistema de cotas raciais na Universidade Estadual de Londrina entre 2010 e 2016 percebem a presença do racismo nos mecanismos de seletividade do mercado de trabalho. Para isso, foi feita uma análise bibliográfica, recolha e organização de dados do Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística, do Instituto de Pesquisa Econômica Aplicada, da Pesquisa Nacional por Amostra de Domicílios e do Nexo Jornal. Em um terceiro momento, foi confeccionado e aplicado um roteiro de perguntas aos/às egressos/as cotistas raciais da Universidade Estadual de Londrina. A pesquisa se caracteriza como quanti-qualitativa, com ênfase em uma abordagem interpretativa, que se propõe expressar o fenômeno estudado, dando mais liberdade e novas possibilidades no entendimento da realidade.
Abstract Assessing urban environmental sustainability is fundamentally important for guiding urban areas to achieve more sustainable urban development. We followed the theme-oriented framework to select eight indicators for measuring urban environmental sustainability performance in China using three aspects: waste emissions, resource consumption, and environmental initiatives. These eight indicators were measured per unit area, per capita, and per GDP for 286 prefecture-level cities, 22 urban clusters, and 7 geographic regions of China from 2000 to 2010. Among the 7 geographic regions, the East China region had the greatest intensity of waste emissions, resource consumption, and environmental investment per unit area. In comparison, the Central China region had greater water consumption and wastewater discharge measured per capita and per GDP. The North China region had greater waste gas emissions and energy consumption measured per capita and per GDP than the other regions. The three northern regions of China (North China, Northeast China, and Northwest China) also had the greatest solid waste emissions measured per capita and per GDP. The expansion of the built-up area per GDP was the greatest in the western regions (including Northwest China and Southwest China), indicating a very low urban land-use efficiency for these two regions. Among the 22 urban clusters, the 12 well-developed urban clusters had greater waste emissions, resource consumption, and environmental investment per unit area than the 10 less-developed urban clusters. The well-developed urban clusters also had larger environmental investment as a share of GDP than the less-developed urban clusters, but waste emissions and resource consumption per GDP were much lower for the well-developed urban clusters. Among the 286 prefecture-level cities, the cities with greater waste emissions and resource consumption per unit area also had greater environmental investment per unit area, but these cities increased their environmental investment at a relatively slower rate than the increase in their waste emissions and resource consumption. The cities that spent a larger share of GDP on pollution reduction had relatively lower waste emissions per GDP, but more investment should be targeted at improving resource efficiency, especially for those resource-intensive cities. In summary, the well-developed urban clusters and cities in the eastern region of China generally had much greater waste emissions and resource consumption per unit area (i.e., greater impacts), while they had lower waste emissions and resource consumption per capita and per GDP (i.e., higher efficiency) relative to the less-developed urban clusters and cities in central and western regions. Based on these findings, we proposed several countermeasures for improving urban environmental sustainability for different cities, urban clusters, and geographic regions of China.
A pesquisa completa a análise socioambiental do município de Mostardas, em particular a fragilidade ambiental do Parque Lagoa do Peixe situado no entorno da área urbana de Mostardas. Salienta-se que, esta pesquisa teve como objetivo geral realizar um estudo ecossistêmico referente à instalação de um concurso de fotografias da natureza existente no município. Pontua-se que tais levantamentos permitem identificar possíveis impactos ambientais que o município pode apresentar. Metodologicamente, utilizou-se a classificação de impactos ambientais, onde foi adotado como critério aqueles contidos na Resolução CONAMA nº. 001/86, sendo considerado como impacto qualquer alteração das propriedades físicas, químicas e biológicas do meio ambiente. Assim, uma saída para o desenvolvimento e uma forma de estimular a relação homem e natureza de maneira ecológica e consciente faz dessa ideia um exemplo de preservação e respeito direto a natureza.