The construction of the water supply infrastructure in the locality of Barreiro (Setúbal) illustrates diverse aspects of the public water management model undertaken in continental Portugal from the second third of the 20th century. Sources consulted encompass local, state, and international institutional documents as well as private papers, ranging from annual reports to specialist studies, among others. The positive outcomes in terms of better public health conditions and the growth of industry were obscured by the appearance of new taxes and unequal access to water. This inequality was caused by the availability of larger volumes of water, thanks to the combined stimulus -and commercialisation- of private water prospection initiatives and the location of most of the country's industry in a relatively small area. On the one hand, a scenario arose of new economic dependence due to the compulsory payment of services by part of the population, on the other, ecosystemic factors intervened; at the dawn of the 1990s, Barreiro was among the areas of the country with greatest problems of overexploitation and contamination of water resources.
Aesthetics of cities. City planning and beautifying, Urban groups. The city. Urban sociology
ObjectiveThe Nanjiang Ancient Waterway is a uniquely distinctive ancient waterway among the ancient post roads in southern Guangdong, with settlements along it flourishing in history. Although the scale and prosperity of individual settlements are not comparable to those in other parts of Lingnan, under the influence of multicultural integration, the value of the multicultural landscape characteristics presented by these settlements is prominent. Exploring the landscape characteristics of settlements along the Nanjiang Ancient Waterway and influencing factors thereof from the macro perspective of “cultural routes” can break through the limitations of the point-like research model of “studying individual villages in isolation” and help tap the multi-dimensional value of settlements.MethodsThe cultural routes focus on integrity and emphasizes the cognition of cultural phenomena through dynamic and historical functions, which provides a holistic research perspective for the research on settlement landscape along the Nanjiang Ancient Waterway. Therefore, based on the theoretical framework of “human – land – property” of cultural geography in combination with field investigation and GIS spatial analysis, 65 traditional settlements along the Nanjiang Ancient Waterway are selected as the research object by typology analysis method from the three functional dimensions of human settlement, commerce and culture of cultural routes, and the landscape characteristics of settlements along the ancient waterway and the influencing factors thereof are analyzed.Results1) As an important traffic foundation for the formation and development of settlements, ancient waterway have a significant impact on the differentiation of landscape types. The settlement landscape along Nanjiang Ancient Waterway can be divided into three categories: Human settlement landscape, commercial landscape and cultural landscape, with different spatial distribution, morphological characteristics and cultural characteristics. The settlements along the Nanjiang Ancient Waterway present characteristics of “being rich in layers, mountains and waters embracing each other”, “adapting to the terrain and following the natural flow of wind and water”, and “a crisscross network of canals with dikes and dams encircling”. 2) The commercial function of the Nanjiang Ancient Waterway and the formation of the commercial landscape of settlements have a mutually promoting relationship, forming commercial landscape characteristics of “interconnecting land and water routes, with ferries and crossings interwoven”, and “setting up fairs by the water, and forming markets along streets”. 3) During Ming and Qing dynasties, the “policy of recruiting people to settle and be registered” spurred a large number of immigrants to move in along the Nanjiang Ancient Waterway, and establish clans and set up villages there. The mutual exchange of immigrant cultures gave rise to cultural landscapes featuring “separation of residences and ancestral halls with mixed styles” and “pantheistic worship, and water-based landscape creation”. In Ming and Qing dynasties, the Ming government encouraged people to migrate there, and the policy of granting household registration prompted a large number of immigrants to move in along the Nanjiang Ancient Waterway, and establish clans and set up villages there. This led to the formation of diversified and mixed-style landscapes of residences and ancestral halls as well as religious cultural landscapes, boasting unique regional cultural characteristics of Nanjiang.Conclusion The settlements along the Nanjiang Ancient Waterway, are the spatial carriers of human settlement landscape, commerce, culture and other functions. The population base provided by the immigration policy is the starting point of settlement development. As a key factor, immigration policy provides the necessary population base for the formation of settlements along the ancient waterway, and is the starting point of settlement development. The distribution and rise of immigrant settlements along the Nanjiang Ancient Waterway, benefited from the efficient water transportation system constructed by the ancient waterway network, and the flourishing commercial development of settlements along the ancient Waterway. The mutual fostering between population mobility and trade greatly promotes the exchange and integration of immigrant culture, giving birth to Nanjiang regional cultural landscape. Revealing the landscape characteristics of settlements along the cultural routes and the influencing factors thereof from the perspective of integrity and dynamics can provide a basis for the overall protection of settlements along the Nanjiang Ancient Waterway. Under the background of rapid urbanization, the protection of settlement landscape along the Nanjiang Ancient Waterway has encountered severe challenges such as the decline of traditional features and the imbalance of development. In the reconstruction of settlement landscape, we should adhere to the principles of integrity, dynamics and sustainability of cultural route protection, integrate natural and human landscape resources, and rationally activate and utilize settlement landscape. The researches advocates to well protect the Nanjiang Ancient Waterway through the chain of beads, the implementation of zoning – subsection – grading differentiation development, the establishment of the overall spatial control system for the protection of settlements along the Nanjiang Ancient Waterway, the construction of cultural routes for the integration of ecology, culture and industry, the creation of nostalgic settlement memory scene, and the promotion of the revitalization and development of settlements.
Aesthetics of cities. City planning and beautifying, Architectural drawing and design
Francesco Marzolla, Matteo Bruno, Hygor P. M. Melo
et al.
In the quest for more environmentally sustainable urban areas, the concept of the 15-minute city has been proposed to encourage active mobility, primarily through walking and cycling. An urban area is considered a ``15-minute city" if every resident can access essential services within a 15-minute walk or bike ride from their home. However, there is an ongoing debate about the effectiveness of this model in reducing car usage and carbon emissions. In this study, we conduct a large-scale data-driven analysis to evaluate the impact of service proximity to homes on CO$_2$ emissions. By examining nearly 400 cities worldwide, we discover that, within the same city, areas with services located closer to residents produce less CO$_2$ emissions per capita from transportation. We establish a clear relationship between the proximity of services and CO$_2$ emissions for each city. Additionally, we quantify the potential reduction in emissions for 30 cities if they optimise the location of their services. This optimisation maintains each city's total number of services while redistributing them to ensure equal accessibility throughout the entire urban area. Our findings indicate that improving the proximity of services can significantly reduce expected urban emissions related to transportation.
Cities have developed over time alongside advancements in civilization, focusing on efficient travel and reducing costs. Many studies have examined the distinctive features of urban road networks, such as their length, efficiency, connection to population density, and other properties. However, the relationship between car routes and population in city structures remains unclear. In this study, we used the center of mass for each city tract, defined by the US Census, as the origins and destinations for our itineraries. We calculated travel time, and both Euclidean and travel distances for sixty major cities. We discovered that the total sum of all routes adheres to an urban law. The distribution of these car journeys follows Weibull functions, suggesting that the urban center plays a crucial role in optimizing routes across multiple cities. We also developed a simple point pattern model for the population, which aligns with the well-known decreasing exponential density expression. Our findings show that the interplay between population and path optimization influences city structure through its center. This study offers a new perspective on the fundamental principles that shape urban design.
È difficile stabilire se la centralità delle stazioni sia una condizione preesistente o se sia generata dall’essere una sintesi di un milione di cose. Un organo bionico, una promessa di futuro (ormai alle spalle), un concentrato di funzioni pubbliche, interessi economici e ricordi privati, un’eterotopia, un (ex)-nonluogo, e chissà cos’altro.
Architecture, Aesthetics of cities. City planning and beautifying
Il contributo è una recensione del volume Suolo come paesaggio: nature, attraversamenti e immersioni, nuove topografie, radicato nelle discussioni delle Giornate internazionali di studio sul paesaggio 2020, organizzate da Fondazione Benetton Studi Ricerche.
Il libro raccoglie i contributi di quindici autori e autrici che ribadiscono la centralità del suolo per la sua straordinaria vitalità ecosistemica e l'insostituibile risorsa che rappresenta.
Attraverso la rassegna di pratiche artistiche ed esperienze progettuali contemporanee, Suolo come paesaggio restituisce un’attitudine poetica e pragmatica, rivelandosi non solo un’utile fonte di riferimenti ma anche una raffinata raccolta di riflessioni che, con orientamenti scientifici e culturali diversi, esortano ad interpretare il suolo come il paesaggio relazionale per antonomasia.
Architecture, Aesthetics of cities. City planning and beautifying
The article examines how the increasing financialisation of the housing market is materialised in modes of production and management of real estate geared towards high and quick yields. Using mainly qualitative methods, it takes as a case study the Brussels coliving sector - a real estate niche in which private companies rent out furnished rooms in the same building, along with common areas and services, to a clientele of young expatriates. By documenting the strategies of these management companies in Brussels, the paper sheds light on the modalities of the financialisation of a small but growing proportion of the residential real estate sector. This is manifested in the densification of space, the shortening of production times and the reduction of management work. The article also shows how real estate industry adapts its products to the constraints of the local territory in order to take advantage of them.
Aesthetics of cities. City planning and beautifying, Urban groups. The city. Urban sociology
Keith Burghardt, Johannes H. Uhl, Kristina Lerman
et al.
Despite the rapid growth of cities in the past century, our quantitative, in-depth understanding of how cities grow remains limited due to a consistent lack of historical data. Thus, the scaling laws between a city's features and its population as they evolve over time, known as temporal city scaling, is under-explored, especially for time periods spanning multiple decades. In this paper, we leverage novel data sources such as the Historical Settlement Data Compilation for the U.S. (HISDAC-US), and analyze the temporal scaling laws of developed area, building indoor area, building footprint area, and road length and other road network statistics for nearly all metropolitan areas in the U.S. from 1900 to 2015. We find that scaling exponents vary dramatically between cities as a function of their size and location. Three notable patterns emerge. First, scaling law exponents imply many, but not all, metropolitan areas are becoming less dense and indoor area per capita increases as cities grow, in contrast to expectations. Second, larger cities tend to have a smaller scaling exponent than smaller cities. Third, scaling exponents (and growth patterns) are similar between nearby cities. These results show a long-term trend that could harm urban sustainability as previously dense populations are rapidly spreading out into undeveloped land. Moreover, the regional similarity of long-term urban growth patterns implies that city evolution and sustainability patterns are more interconnected than prior research has suggested. These results help urban planners and scientists understand universal, long-term patterns of city growth across the US.
Cross-view geo-localization (CVGL), which involves matching and retrieving satellite images to determine the geographic location of a ground image, is crucial in GNSS-constrained scenarios. However, this task faces significant challenges due to substantial viewpoint discrepancies, the complexity of localization scenarios, and the need for global localization. To address these issues, we propose a novel CVGL framework that integrates the vision foundational model DINOv2 with an advanced feature mixer. Our framework introduces the symmetric InfoNCE loss and incorporates near-neighbor sampling and dynamic similarity sampling strategies, significantly enhancing localization accuracy. Experimental results show that our framework surpasses existing methods across multiple public and self-built datasets. To further improve globalscale performance, we have developed CV-Cities, a novel dataset for global CVGL. CV-Cities includes 223,736 ground-satellite image pairs with geolocation data, spanning sixteen cities across six continents and covering a wide range of complex scenarios, providing a challenging benchmark for CVGL. The framework trained with CV-Cities demonstrates high localization accuracy in various test cities, highlighting its strong globalization and generalization capabilities. Our datasets and codes are available at https://github.com/GaoShuang98/CVCities.
The advancement of 5G technology has transformed various aspects of life, including tourism, by enabling people worldwide to communicate and travel with ease. Traveling to different places and countries is now seamless, removing language barriers and facilitating easy access to information on culture, accommodation, and tourist attractions. Additionally, access to applications that facilitate quicker language translation further enhances the travel experience. Phetchaburi Province holds significant importance as a global tourist destination. UNESCO has recognized Phetchaburi as a member of the UNESCO Creative Cities Network (UCCN), comprising one of 49 cities worldwide acknowledged for their creative city initiatives. Phetchaburi Province stands as the 5th city in Thailand to receive this designation. This research investigated 5G performance in Phetchaburi Province, both the inner and outer city, focusing on download and upload speeds. The results indicate that there is widespread 5G coverage throughout Phetchaburi Province, including urban and rural areas, especially for the 5G network with a good performance provided by one of the mobile network operators. In addition, the statistical analysis reveals differences in 5G performances between the inner city and the outer city of Phetchaburi Province, particularly for download speeds (p-value < 0.001).
With the digitization of modern cities, large data volumes and powerful computational resources facilitate the rapid update of intelligent models deployed in smart cities. Continual learning (CL) is a novel machine learning paradigm that constantly updates models to adapt to changing environments, where the learning tasks, data, and distributions can vary over time. Our survey provides a comprehensive review of continual learning methods that are widely used in smart city development. The content consists of three parts: 1) Methodology-wise. We categorize a large number of basic CL methods and advanced CL frameworks in combination with other learning paradigms including graph learning, spatial-temporal learning, multi-modal learning, and federated learning. 2) Application-wise. We present numerous CL applications covering transportation, environment, public health, safety, networks, and associated datasets related to urban computing. 3) Challenges. We discuss current problems and challenges and envision several promising research directions. We believe this survey can help relevant researchers quickly familiarize themselves with the current state of continual learning research used in smart city development and direct them to future research trends.
While the health crises of the last twenty years have highlighted China's wet markets as potential transmission sites for zoonotic pathogens such as influenza viruses or SARS coronaviruses, Chinese consumers have maintained a demand for freshness and proximity that drives them to these markets rather than to supermarkets. Based on a literature review and a survey in the city of Chengdu, this article shows the differentiation of forms of wet market (retail or wholesale) and slaughtering practices according to the rural areas in which they are located. It highlights the fact that the control of zoonotic risks in these markets takes place more generally in a context of privatisation and transformation of relations between town and country, which delegates the responsibility of control to merchants and increases the uncertainty of sellers about the possibility of selling their animals on a regular basis.
Aesthetics of cities. City planning and beautifying, Urban groups. The city. Urban sociology
Housing plays a key role in the world path to energy transition, and retrofitting buildings is a major asset to this end. Unfortunately, despite the supporting measures and incentives promoted in many countries, the renovation rate is still too slow. This is even more complex within some specific assets, such as social housing, which, especially in Italy, depends on the availability of public funds. The study proposes a predictive tool conceived as an enabler in the decision-making process, capable of considering and comparing the performance levels that different retrofitting actions can reach, according to building features, intervention costs, timing, and resource availability. The tool is tested on a social housing case study in Bologna.
Aesthetics of cities. City planning and beautifying, Architectural drawing and design
The study addresses the patterns of ground sealing for two different types of German cities during 2006 to 2018. By using urban scaling law and corresponding panel regressions, it can be shown that sealing of ground in the distribution of cities with own district administration is significantly stronger and more dynamic than in a corresponding distribution with a lower tail replaced by cities of comparable size but without own district administration. Different levels of per capita tax revenues in both city types appear to be the core reason for that. The findings are relevant for urban environmental policies.
The postscripts of smart cities have been written before its prelude. Inserting smart technologies in infrastructure to improve urban environments, smart cities emphasize data-driven approaches and evidence-based planning. While it asks for production of new vocabularies, new ways of thinking, and proposes new methodologies, smart cities have trivialized baseline surveys. The insignificance to baseline survey hides the existing and functioning cities and leads to appropriation of “smart in the box” technologies. The omission of baseline survey fails to revamp planning and governance techniques as well as management and delivery of urban services. India’s Smart City Mission runs through a similar fate. Despite changes in vision and approach towards urban improvement, Smart City Mission suffers from methodological apathy and produces fractured smart cities. In doing so, the paper explores how the idea of normative smart city shrouds urban complexities and heterogeneities and proposes solutions without comprehending the functional and existing cities. Drawing on cases of urban water and solid waste management in Smart City Dharamshala, this paper discusses how fissures in normative and functional smart cities are continually produced through broken, incomplete, and erroneous data that, ultimately, fails in creating robust and resilient cities.