How should two language models interact to produce better code than either can alone? The conventional approach -- a reasoning model plans, a code specialist implements -- seems natural but fails: on HumanEval+, plan-then-code degrades performance by 2.4 percentage points versus the code specialist alone. We show that reversing the interaction changes everything. When the code specialist generates freely and the reasoning model reviews instead of plans, the same two models on the same hardware achieve 90.2% pass@1 -- exceeding GPT-4o (87.2%) and O1 Preview (89.0%) -- on ~$2/hr of commodity GPU. Cross-benchmark validation across 542 problems (HumanEval+ and MBPP+) reveals a moderating variable: review effectiveness scales with specification richness, yielding 4x more improvement on richly-specified problems (+9.8pp) than on lean ones (+2.3pp), while remaining net-positive in both cases. The practical implication is twofold: compose models by their cognitive strengths (reviewers review, coders code), and invest in specification quality to amplify the returns.
We propose a method to procedurally generate a familiar yet complex human artifact: the city. We are not trying to reproduce existing cities, but to generate artificial cities that are convincing and plausible by capturing developmental behavior. In addition, our results are meant to build upon themselves, such that they ought to look compelling at any point along the transition from village to metropolis. Our approach largely focuses upon land usage and building distribution for creating realistic city environments, whereas previous attempts at city modeling have mainly focused on populating road networks. Finally, we want our model to be self automated to the point that the only necessary input is a terrain description, but other high-level and low-level parameters can be specified to support artistic contributions. With the aid of agent based simulation we are generating a system of agents and behaviors that interact with one another through their effects upon a simulated environment. Our philosophy is that as each agent follows a simple behavioral rule set, a more complex behavior will tend to emerge out of the interactions between the agents and their differing rule sets. By confining our model to a set of simple rules for each class of agents, we hope to make our model extendible not only in regard to the types of structures that are produced, but also in describing the social and cultural influences prevalent in all cities
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/.
Diversified economies are critical for cities to sustain their growth and development, but they are also costly because diversification often requires expanding a city's capability base. We analyze how cities manage this trade-off by measuring the coherence of the economic activities they support, defined as the technological distance between randomly sampled productive units in a city. We use this framework to study how the US urban system developed over almost two centuries, from 1850 to today. To do so, we rely on historical census data, covering over 600M individual records to describe the economic activities of cities between 1850 and 1940, and 8 million patent records as well as detailed occupational and industrial profiles of cities for more recent decades. Despite massive shifts in the economic geography of the U.S. over this 170-year period, average coherence in its urban system remains unchanged. Moreover, across different time periods, datasets and relatedness measures, coherence falls with city size at the exact same rate, pointing to constraints to diversification that are governed by a city's size in universal ways.
Deepak Prakash Kumar, Swaroop Darbha, Satyanarayana Gupta Manyam
et al.
In this paper, we propose a new modeling approach and a fast algorithm for 3D motion planning, applicable for fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles. The goal is to construct the shortest path connecting given initial and final configurations subject to motion constraints. Our work differs from existing literature in two ways. First, we consider full vehicle orientation using a body-attached frame, which includes roll, pitch, and yaw angles. However, existing work uses only pitch and/or heading angle, which is insufficient to uniquely determine orientation. Second, we use two control inputs to represent bounded pitch and yaw rates, reflecting control by two separate actuators. In contrast, most previous methods rely on a single input, such as path curvature, which is insufficient for accurately modeling the vehicle's kinematics in 3D. We use a rotation minimizing frame to describe the vehicle's configuration and its evolution, and construct paths by concatenating optimal Dubins paths on spherical, cylindrical, or planar surfaces. Numerical simulations show our approach generates feasible paths within 10 seconds on average and yields shorter paths than existing methods in most cases.
Acoustic scene recordings are often collected from a diverse range of cities. Most existing acoustic scene classification (ASC) approaches focus on identifying common acoustic scene patterns across cities to enhance generalization. However, the potential acoustic differences introduced by city-specific environmental and cultural factors are overlooked. In this paper, we hypothesize that the city-specific acoustic features are beneficial for the ASC task rather than being treated as noise or bias. To this end, we propose City2Scene, a novel framework that leverages city features to improve ASC. Unlike conventional approaches that may discard or suppress city information, City2Scene transfers the city-specific knowledge from pre-trained city classification models to scene classification model using knowledge distillation. We evaluate City2Scene on three datasets of DCASE Challenge Task 1, which include both scene and city labels. Experimental results demonstrate that city features provide valuable information for classifying scenes. By distilling city-specific knowledge, City2Scene effectively improves accuracy across a variety of lightweight CNN backbones, achieving competitive performance to the top-ranked solutions of DCASE Challenge in recent years.
Urban systems are transforming as artificial intelligence (AI) evolves from automation to Agentic Urban AI (AI systems with autonomous goal-setting and decision-making capabilities), which independently define and pursue urban objectives. This shift necessitates reassessing governance, planning, and ethics. Using a conceptual-methodological approach, this study integrates urban studies, AI ethics, and governance theory. Through a literature review and case studies of platforms like Alibaba’s City Brain and CityMind AI Agent, it identifies early agency indicators, such as strategic adaptation and goal re-prioritisation. A typology distinguishing automation, autonomy, and agency clarifies AI-driven urban decision-making. Three trajectories are proposed: fully autonomous Agentic AI, collaborative Hybrid Urban Agency, and constrained Non-Agentic AI to mitigate ethical risks. The findings highlight the need for participatory, transparent governance to ensure democratic accountability and social equity in cognitive urban ecosystems.
Ellinor M. Frank, Carolina Suarez, Isabel K. Erb
et al.
We investigated the presence of the fecal indicator bacteria <i>Escherichia coli</i>, and other taxa associated with sewage communities in coastal sediments, near beaches with reported poor bathing water quality, focusing on the influence of effluent from a local wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) and combined sewer overflows (CSO). Using a three-year dataset, we found that treated wastewater effluent is a significant source of sewage-associated taxa and viable <i>E. coli</i> in the sediments and that no seasonal differences were observed between spring and summer samples. CSO events have a local and temporary effect on the microbial community of sediments, distinct from that of treated wastewater effluent. Sediments affected by CSO had higher abundances of families Lachnospiraceae, Ruminococcaceae, and Bacteroidaceae. Sewage releases may also impact the natural community of the sediments, as higher abundances of marine sulfur-cycling bacteria were noticed in locations where sewage taxa were also abundant. Microbial contamination at locations distant from known CSO and treatment plant outlets suggests additional sources, such as stormwater. This study highlights that while coastal sediments can be a reservoir of <i>E. coli</i> and contain sewage-associated taxa, their distribution and potential origins are complex and are likely not linked to a single source.
ObjectiveExpanding the coverage of territorial spatial planning to the whole territory and all elements provides an opportunity for the protection and development of historical heritage. The evolution of the cultural landscape of urban historical parks, an urban cultural heritage and an important territorial space, is a medium for the transformation, continuation and reconstruction of the modern city. Under the value orientation of the heritage protection system, strengthening the spatial connection and temporal order among heritage resources can cope with the dilemma of spatial homogenization and fragmentation of the cultural landscape.MethodsThis research takes Xiamen Zhongshan Park (the “Park”) as an example for the interpretation and value assessment of the historical layering process. It constructs a cultural landscape heritage layering model of Xiamen Zhongshan Park by combining ancient literature and the spatial interpretation of ancient maps, and employing the historic urban landscape (HUL) method. By systematically analyzing the characters of the cultural landscape, the distribution patterns of the kernel density of cultural landscape, the layering pattern, and the dynamic superposition of cultural connotations in different periods, the research analyzes the dynamics of the layering evolution of the Park’s cultural landscape. Through expert scoring, the historical importance and cultural influence, artistic aesthetics, social leadership, development potential, and heritage survival status of the cultural landscape heritage of Xiamen Zhongshan Park are assessed, and the value attributes (mainly ontological and reuse values) of such cultural landscape heritage are interpreted by constructing an assessment system.ResultsThis research shows that the layering evolution of cultural landscape in Xiamen Zhongshan Park went through five periods. The initial construction in the germination period formed a preliminary cultural landscape layering space of memorial, natural and landscape scenery sources, as well as special gardens, with cultural scenery sources distributed in a concentrated pattern across the northern, central, and southern areas of the Park. During the destruction period, the development of Xiamen Zhongshan Park stagnated due to the strong force of political power. During the recovery period, the purpose of park construction was to restore the original appearance and maintain the original functions on the basis of adding public facilities of commemorative significance, in an attempt to enhance the Park’s landscape and educational nature. During the recession period, with only some natural and landscape scenery sources remaining, showing a layering state of accumulation in the north and disappearance in the south. During the revival period, the memorial scenery sources, scenic buildings, and special gardens showed a uniform distribution of layering. The spatial functions of cultural landscapes are diversified, forming a multi-integrated cultural landscape layering state.By combing the characters of cultural landscape and the kernel density of cultural landscape distribution in different periods of the Park, the cultural landscape information of multiple periods is superimposed to generate a layering slicing map and a cultural connotation evolution map of the map. According to the results of the layering interpretation, five layering modes of recession, augmentation, juxtaposition, coverage, and regeneration of Xiamen Zhongshan Park are refined, and multiple layering modes are superimposed on each other in the continuous and dynamic evolution of the Park from the modern era to the present day. By retracing the evolution of the Park’s cultural landscape, the driving factors affecting the layering evolution of the Park’s cultural landscape are extracted. The location environment determines the Park’s landscape architecture, forming the initial state of the cultural landscape layering, the public’s demand influences the creation of space in the Park with the change of the times and thus affects the layering evolution, and the urban construction and social politics play a strong role in the layering of cultural landscape through relevant historical, economic, and political elements. In addition, the historical importance, cultural influence, artistic aesthetics, social leadership, and development potential of the Park’s scenic spots are significantly higher than their heritage survival status, which is related to the transformation of the elements in the cultural landscape layering model of Xiamen Zhongshan Park. In view of this, it is necessary to link the natural and cultural heritage resources in the Park, establish a systematic framework for interpreting the value of heritage, and revitalize the styles and features of historical landscapes.ConclusionThis research examines Xiamen Zhongshan Park as a living cultural landscape heritage, and explores the processes, patterns, and mechanisms of cultural landscape heritage superposition across different periods from a dynamic evolutionary perspective. By taking a holistic view of the Park’s heritage value and evolution, this research aims to establish an assessment system for assessing the values and identifying its defining characteristics of the Park’s cultural landscape heritage. The findings seek to inform strategies for the scientific management, comprehensive protection, and sustainable development of urban historical parks. Xiamen Zhongshan Park is not only a historical cultural artifact but also a symbol of urban heritage and modern identity. Analyzing the mechanisms of cultural landscape characterization and value assessment from the perspective of temporal accumulation offers a comprehensive approach to preserving value continuity and supporting the organic renewal of this historic park, bridging territorial spatial planning with heritage preservation.
Aesthetics of cities. City planning and beautifying, Architectural drawing and design
The objective of this research is to find out how the determinants of market conduct monitoring contribute to fostering customer trust and security, supported by the mediating variable customer satisfaction index. The researcher used quantitative research methods from customers of financial service products in DKI Jakarta, then data analysis techniques used SMART PLS 4.0 application and CSI score calculations. The results of this research show that market conduct monitoring has a significant positive determination in increasing customer confidence by 50.2% and customer sense of security by 25.2%, and can be mediated by a customer satisfaction index of 31.4%.
Economics as a science, Regional economics. Space in economics
This research project and exhibit, delves into the complex relationship between public exhibition, urban spaces, and socio-political norms in shaping urban thresholds within the two American and European metropolitan cities of Houston and Amsterdam. This study also investigates the transformative power of new media and emerging technologies in the production, circulation, and consumption of design, offering fresh perspectives on the influence of these technologies on urban design studies and digitally augmented physical spaces. By merging interdisciplinary research areas, including Design Computation and Fabrication, Urban Communities, and Spatial Justice, this project provides an immersive exploration into the co-production of liminal spaces, focusing on the participation of diverse publics and the dynamics of inclusion, exclusion, and recognition in two cities of Houston and Amsterdam. The main emphasis of this paper is on the critical urban studies and the role of emerging technologies in advancing the theoretical and methodological frameworks of the presented immersive installation project.
Aesthetics of cities. City planning and beautifying
In September 2015, the State of Kuwait signed the UN’s 2030 Agenda, committing to all 17 of its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which include the building of sustainable cities and communities through initiatives such as social housing. In response, the New Kuwait Vision 2035 has witnessed a shift in approach to the social housing paradigm at the state level. This paper examines the status of recent social housing projects in Jaber Al-Ahmed City, Kuwait, through a critical, evidence-based analysis of the decision-making processes and urban-architectural products that shaped its development. The mixed-methods data for this case study were generated via archival research and semi-structured interviews supplemented with field observations to evaluate the local and international sustainability agendas implemented in the city as process and product. Principles of Sustainable Urban Forms are implemented for the evaluation. The article also presents evidence of local urban practices (resident appropriation and participation), legitimized environmental practices, and community wellbeing. It concludes with recommendations for resolving issues in the current processes around the design and implementation of sustainable urban forms to inform future social housing developments. These recommendations for sustainable social housing in Kuwait provide an opportunity to revisit and reconsider the core values of sustainability while adding to the multiplicity of its definitions. Although recent social housing projects in Kuwait may demonstrate an overall effective process-to-product procedure as a means of architectural production that addresses the country’s housing demand, important aspects remain in question with regard to sustainable built environments.
Engineering (General). Civil engineering (General), City planning
Diego Ortega, Javier Rodríguez-Laguna, Elka Korutcheva
Half of the world population resides in cities and urban segregation is becoming a global issue. One of the best known attempts to understand it is the Schelling model, which considers two types of agents that relocate whenever a transfer rule depending on the neighbor distribution is verified. The main aim of the present study is to broaden our understanding of segregated neighborhoods in the city, i.e. ghettos, extending the Schelling model to consider economic aspects and their spatial distribution. To this end we have considered a monetary gap between the two social groups and five types of urban structures, defined by the house pricing city map. The results show that ghetto sizes tend to follow a power law distribution in all the considered cases. For each city framework the interplay between economical aspects and the geometrical features determine the location where ghettos reach their maximum size. The system first steps shape greatly the city's final appearance. Moreover, the segregated population ratios depends largely on the monetary gap and not on the city type, implying that ghettos are able to adapt to different urban frameworks.
The paper addresses the issues of the operation of urban settlements in the territory of the Volga Bolgaria in the second half of the 13th – early 15th centuries. Attention is drawn to their distribution and arrangement in the Middle Volga region after the Mongol conquest, as well as to the specifics of these settlements of this time period. The author makes a conclusion about the different distribution of settlement monuments in the area, as well as the quantitative ratio during the 10th–15th centuries. Based on a complex of archaeological information obtained in the course of their study, a conclusion is made about the continued development of urban planning in the territory of the Bolgar ulus of the Golden Horde and its long-term continuity. One of the examples was the continuity of pre-Mongol traditions in the construction and use of fortifications in individual settlements located in the region, as well as the preservation of technological methods in the construction of fortifications. In this regard, the paper addresses the differences from the cities of the central part of the Golden Horde state. The development of the city of Bolgar and its planning features are given as an example.
With an over 20-fold increase in population between 1963 and today, Lagos has expanded significantly both within and outside its city administrative boundaries. Some paradoxes are identified using mixed methodologies from a qualitative research design. Lagos’s northwards expansion has exerted several externalities on a neighbouring state. Expansion within Lagos, on its coastal south-eastern axis, is defined by real estate activities of a different nature. In both cases, new settlements have emerged with differing social and economic characteristics that have far-reaching impact for housing accessibility and affordability. These differences are explored by establishing pull-factors responsible for attracting specific income groups to each axis, the impact of government action (and inaction), and the implications of these for city growth and management. Formal mechanisms of planning lead to a proliferation of higher end real estate development. This has created unequal access to land and housing for lower income families. The subsequent exclusion of lower income families from planned areas represents a failure of the market system. Lagos presents compelling complexities of the management of urban expansion that spread beyond administrative boundaries, as well as the influence of planning to achieve economic development. 'Policy relevance' City managers and policymakers need to plan for expansion in fast growing cities. Urban expansion will flow with the demand for (and availability of) space and will not respect administrative boundaries. Urban containment policies are not known to have a high level of success in African cities, especially in contexts where planning enforcement is weak. Thus, city managers and policymakers must recognise the positive externalities of urban expansion on their cities and provide resources towards optimising this for the common good. They must also take actions towards monitoring and addressing negative externalities from the expansion of neighbouring cities, especially where planning jurisdictions differ. In both cases, government action is required to ensure that resulting housing and real estate markets work for all income classes.
Architectural engineering. Structural engineering of buildings