ObjectiveRural landscape in the Jiangnan Canal Basin is characterized by a synergistic symbiosis of water basin habitats, canal water conservancy and transportation, and rural settlement construction. Based on the perspective of the correlation and coupling of water network − canal channel − rural landscape, this research aims to explore the types of rural landscape characters and spatial coupling patterns in the Jiangnan Canal Basin, so as to ensure that rural landscape continues to play a significant role in the protection of regional historical heritage and the resilient development of urban and rural areas within the basin.MethodsThe research selects the Tiaoxi River − Canal Basin in Zhejiang Province, which is closely connected to the Jiangnan Canal, as the research object. At the river − canal basin scale, the multi-level spatial superposition technique is utilized to identify associative character zones, and a coupling coordination model is used to identify the correlation patterns of water network， canal channel and rural landscape. At the rural community scale, through spatial maximum expectation (EM) clustering, the types of rural landscape characters are classified and spatially mapped through simulation algorithms.ResultsIn terms of the spatial correlation of water network − canal channel − rural landscape within the Tiaoxi River − Canal Basin, the research identifies three major landscape character zones including the West Tiaoxi River − Ditang Canal Basin, East Tiaoxi River − Jiangnan Canal Basin, and Hangzhoutang River − Hangzhou − Jiaxing Canal Basin. In terms of the coupling pattern of water network – canal channel – rural landscape in the Tiaoxi River Canal Basin, the coupling and coordination degree between the East and West Tiaoxi River Basin and the buffer zone along the Jiangnan Canal is generally high, and the that in the west area dominated by natural water system is stronger than that in the east area dominated by canal channel. In the main river basin of the East Tiaoxi River – Jiangnan Canal, there are coupling cold spots at the gathering places of canal towns such as Jiaxing and Hangzhou, and there are significant disturbances in the coupling of the landscape system. In terms of typical rural landscape types in the Tiaoxi River – Canal Basin, six types of rural landscape paradigms are identified, including the canal hydraulic engineering, regional agricultural production, township community linkage, canal trade operation, water conservancy culture collection and water network habitat maintenance types. And significant region − basin differences are explored from the perspectives of spatial proportion, layout pattern, and coupling relationship. At the level of the spatial correlation mechanism of typical rural landscapes, the regional agricultural production and township community linkage types of landscape occupy a relatively large proportion, accounting for 24.49% and 21.89% respectively, while the water conservation culture collection and water network habitat maintenance types of landscape occupy a relatively small proportion, accounting for 12.88% and 10.60% respectively. At the level of spatial transformation from the overall scale of basin as a whole to the individual scale of rural settlements, the canal hydraulic engineering and township community linkage types of landscape are mainly distributed in the East Tiaoxi River and the Hangzhoutang River water network basin, the regional agricultural production type of landscape is mainly distributed in the West Tiaoxi River − Ditang Canal Basin, and the water network habitat maintenance type of landscape is mainly distributed in the connection area between the main veins of the East and West Tiaoxi River systems and the tributaries of the Hangzhou − Jiaxing Canal. The canal trade operation and water conservation culture collection types of landscape are mainly distributed in the East Tiaoxi River − Jiangnan Canal Basin and the Hangzhoutang River − Hangzhou − Jiaxing Canal Basin. From the perspective of coupling mechanism, the spatial coupling degrees of the regional agricultural production and township community linkage types of landscape are relatively high in the West Tiaoxi River − Ditang Canal Basin, with mean values of 0.731 and 0.775, respectively; while the mean value of the canal hydraulic engineering type is only 0.596, relatively low.ConclusionThe research delves into the underlying mechanisms that interlink the water network, canal channel and rural landscape within the human settlement system of the Jiangnan Canal Basin. The research clarifies the stratified compositional elements, the superposition of character zoning, the predominant correlation types, and the coupling mechanisms of rural landscape. The research delineates landscape character zones at the canal basin scale and identifies the dominant types of rural landscapes at the scale of rural settlements. Building on these findings, the research achieves a basin-scale spatial inversion of rural landscape types. Furthermore, the research establishes a research paradigm for examining the characters, spatial distribution and mechanisms of rural landscapes within the canal basin. The research offers resilient planning insights that integrate trans-basin zone governance, multi-type system linkage, and multi-level network construction, providing a comprehensive approach to the management and conservation of canal heritage and rural landscapes. Future research will construct a spatio-temporal dynamic dataset of canal heritage landscapes, which aims to enhance the fine-grained character extraction and type classification accuracy of machine learning algorithm models for rural landscapes. Additionally, the universal applicability of the stratified correlation perspective in the field of rural landscape research within the context of the Grand Canal Basin will also be explored.
Aesthetics of cities. City planning and beautifying, Architectural drawing and design
As extreme heat events intensify due to climate change and urbanization, cities face increasing challenges in mitigating outdoor heat stress. While traditional physical models such as SOLWEIG and ENVI-met provide detailed assessments of human-perceived heat exposure, their computational demands limit scalability for city-wide planning. In this study, we propose GSM-UTCI, a multimodal deep learning framework designed to predict daytime average Universal Thermal Climate Index (UTCI) at 1-meter hyperlocal resolution. The model fuses surface morphology (nDSM), high-resolution land cover data, and hourly meteorological conditions using a feature-wise linear modulation (FiLM) architecture that dynamically conditions spatial features on atmospheric context. Trained on SOLWEIG-derived UTCI maps, GSM-UTCI achieves near-physical accuracy, with an R2 of 0.9151 and a mean absolute error (MAE) of 0.41°C, while reducing inference time from hours to under five minutes for an entire city. To demonstrate its planning relevance, we apply GSM-UTCI to simulate systematic landscape transformation scenarios in Philadelphia, replacing bare earth, grass, and impervious surfaces with tree canopy. Results show spatially heterogeneous but consistently strong cooling effects, with impervious-to-tree conversion producing the highest aggregated benefit (-4.18°C average change in UTCI across 270.7 km2). Tract-level bivariate analysis further reveals strong alignment between thermal reduction potential and land cover proportions. These findings underscore the utility of GSM-UTCI as a scalable, fine-grained decision support tool for urban climate adaptation, enabling scenario-based evaluation of greening strategies across diverse urban environments.
Urban scaling laws reveal how cities evolve as their populations grow, yet the role of street network accessibility in this process remains underexplored. We analyze over 5,000 Brazilian cities to establish a scaling law linking average closeness centrality $\langle c_C\rangle$ -- a measure of structural accessibility in street networks-to population size N . Our results demonstrate that $\langle c_C\rangle$ decays sublinearly as $N^{-σ}$ ($σ\approx 0.38$), indicating that larger cities redistribute accessibility from cores to peripheries while maintaining navigability through hierarchical shortcuts. This scaling arises from the fractal interplay between infrastructure and population, characterized by a network dimension $d \approx 2.17$, which exceeds that of a 2D grid. The slower decline in closeness centrality ($σ< 0.5$) reflects a trade-off: urban expansion reduces proximity but enhances connectivity through optimized path diversity, fostering economic dynamism. By integrating the Molinero & Thurner model with network centrality metrics, we provide a framework to reconcile infrastructure efficiency with equitable accessibility in growing cities.
Lucy Temple, Gabriela Viale Pereira, Lukas Daniel Klausner
This short paper represents a systematic literature review that sets the basis for the future development of a framework for digital twin-based decision support in the public sector, specifically for the smart city domain. The final aim of the research is to model context-specific digital twins for aiding the decision-making processes in smart cities and devise methods for defining the policy agenda. Overall, this short paper provides a foundation, based on the main concepts from existing literature, for further research in the role and applications of urban digital twins to assist decision- and policy-making in smart cities. The existing literature analyses common applications of digital twins in smart city development with a focus on supporting decision- and policy-making. Future work will centre on developing a digital-twin-based sustainable smart city and defining different scenarios concerning challenges of good governance, especially so-called wicked problems, in smaller-scale urban and non-urban contexts.
The recent surge in interest in city layout generation underscores its significance in urban planning and smart city development. The task involves procedurally or automatically generating spatial arrangements for urban elements such as roads, buildings, water, and vegetation. Previous methods, whether procedural modeling or deep learning-based approaches like VAEs and GANs, rely on complex priors, expert guidance, or initial layouts, and often lack diversity and interactivity. In this paper, we present CityGen, an end-to-end framework for infinite, diverse, and controllable city layout generation. Our framework introduces an infinite expansion module to extend local layouts to city-scale layouts and a multi-scale refinement module to upsample and refine them. We also designed a user-friendly control scheme, allowing users to guide generation through simple sketching. Additionally, we convert the 2D layout to 3D by synthesizing a height field, facilitating downstream applications. Extensive experiments demonstrate CityGen's state-of-the-art performance across various metrics, making it suitable for a wide range of downstream applications.
Bharath Muppasani, Vishal Pallagani, Biplav Srivastava
et al.
Ontologies are known for their ability to organize rich metadata, support the identification of novel insights via semantic queries, and promote reuse. In this paper, we consider the problem of automated planning, where the objective is to find a sequence of actions that will move an agent from an initial state of the world to a desired goal state. We hypothesize that given a large number of available planners and diverse planning domains; they carry essential information that can be leveraged to identify suitable planners and improve their performance for a domain. We use data on planning domains and planners from the International Planning Competition (IPC) to construct a planning ontology and demonstrate via experiments in two use cases that the ontology can lead to the selection of promising planners and improving their performance using macros - a form of action ordering constraints extracted from planning ontology. We also make the planning ontology and associated resources available to the community to promote further research.
Existing neural radiance field-based methods can achieve real-time rendering of small scenes on the web platform. However, extending these methods to large-scale scenes still poses significant challenges due to limited resources in computation, memory, and bandwidth. In this paper, we propose City-on-Web, the first method for real-time rendering of large-scale scenes on the web. We propose a block-based volume rendering method to guarantee 3D consistency and correct occlusion between blocks, and introduce a Level-of-Detail strategy combined with dynamic loading/unloading of resources to significantly reduce memory demands. Our system achieves real-time rendering of large-scale scenes at approximately 32FPS with RTX 3060 GPU on the web and maintains rendering quality comparable to the current state-of-the-art novel view synthesis methods.
Smart cities transform urban landscapes with interconnected nodes and sensors. The search for seamless communication in time-critical scenarios has become evident during this evolution. With the escalating complexity of urban environments, envisioning a future with a blend of autonomous and conventional systems, each demanding distinct quality-of-service considerations, services in smart cities vary in criticality levels and necessitate differentiated traffic handling, prioritizing critical flows without compromising the network's reliability or failing on hard real-time requirements. To tackle these challenges, in this article, we discuss a time-sensitive networking approach, which presents multi-faceted challenges, notably interoperability among diverse technologies and standards at the scale of a smart city network. TSN emerges as a promising toolkit, encompassing synchronization, latency management, redundancy, and configuration functionalities crucial for addressing smart city challenges. Moreover, the article scrutinizes how TSN, predominantly utilized in domains like automotive and industry, can be tailored to suit the intricate needs of smart cities, emphasizing the necessity for adaptability and scalability in network design. This survey consolidates current research on TSN, outlining its potential in fortifying critical machine-to-machine communications within smart cities while highlighting future challenges, potential solutions, and a roadmap for integrating TSN effectively into the fabric of urban connectivity.
Se estudiará aquí Falls Road (situado en el oeste de Belfast) que es un barrio mayoritariamente católico/republicano irlandés especialmente relevante durante el conflicto conocido como The Troubles, que afectó a Irlanda del Norte durante unos cuarenta años, desde finales de la década de 1960 hasta 1998. Durante este periodo y hasta hoy, Falls Road se convirtió en el corazón del republicanismo irlandés y en la calle más dividida de Europa Occidental. El coste humano del conflicto superó en más de 3.500 muertos. Al otro lado del muro se encuentra la otra calle, la Shankhill Road (protestante y unionista). Esto da una idea clara del impacto del conflicto en el contexto de la vida en la calle antes de que comenzaran The Troubles. La Falls Road, en el oeste de Belfast, que va desde la calle Divis hasta Andersonstown, deriva de la expresión túath na bhFál, que en irlandés significa "territorio de los cercados". He trabajado como arquitecta e investigadora durante más de una década en la ciudad a ambos lados del muro. Este artículo examina la tipología de la calle dividida y su transición a un ejemplo exitoso de la cultura del renacimiento irlandés y la regeneración urbana. La ponencia está dividida en dos partes en las que se diseccionará la Franja de las Cataratas:1- Las Cataratas (parte baja de la calle), 2-Bombay Street (arquitecto Sean Mackel).Utilizaré el enfoque de Manuel de Solà-Morales para la construcción de esta calle en Belfast como una "ciudad urbana de conflicto", como una sucesión de episodios, datos, fechas, hechos, detalles y eventos e interpretaciones y la apertura de la calle en este caso para entender las lecciones que se pueden extraer de un claro estudio tipológico de la calle en dos secciones.
Aesthetics of cities. City planning and beautifying, Anthropology
Published alongside the special issue Contester la métropole, the collective interview “Hey hey, ho ho, metropolis has got to go?” focuses on urban social movements fighting metropolises and the process of metropolization. This paper discusses this collective interview from a peri-urban perspective – with a particular focus on the section about protests outside metropolises. In that section, the authors relay the dominant images of peri-urban areas and imply there is no political engagement in these spaces. They also express a vision unattuned to existing forms of peri-urban political engagement. This paper aims to contribute to a better knowledge of peri-urban spaces; in order to do so, it attempts to deconstruct the generic representations of peri-urban areas which appear in the interview. It thus provides details on the socio-spatial categorisation of peri-urban areas in France, which is often oversimplified. It also shows that alongside cities, peri-urban spaces are sites of middle-class political engagement, and reveals the diversity of forms this engagement takes.
Aesthetics of cities. City planning and beautifying, Urban groups. The city. Urban sociology
A city is a large human settlement that serves the people who live there, and a smart city is a concept of how cities might better serve their residents through new forms of technology. In this paper, we focus on four major smart city domains according to Maslow's hierarchy of needs: smart utility, smart transportation, smart homes, and smart healthcare. Numerous IoT applications have been developed to achieve the intelligence that we desire in our smart domains, ranging from personal gadgets such as health trackers and smart watches to large-scale industrial IoT systems such as nuclear and energy management systems. However, many of the existing smart city IoT solutions can be made better by considering the suitability of their security strategies. Inappropriate system security designs generally occur in two scenarios: first, system designers recognize the importance of security but are unsure of where, when, or how to implement it; and second, system designers try to fit traditional security designs to meet the smart city security context. Thus, the objective of this paper is to provide application designers with the missing security link they may need to improve their security designs. By evaluating the specific context of each smart city domain and the context-specific security requirements, we aim to provide directions on when, where, and how they should implement security strategies and the possible security challenges they need to consider. In addition, we present a new perspective on security issues in smart cities from a data-centric viewpoint by referring to the reference architecture, the Activity-Network-Things (ANT)-centric architecture, built upon the concept of "security in a zero-trust environment". By doing so, we reduce the security risks posed by new system interactions or unanticipated user behaviors while avoiding the hassle of regularly upgrading security models.
A smart city is a place where existing facilities and services are enhanced by digital technology to benefit people and companies. The most critical infrastructures in this city are interconnected. Increased data exchange across municipal domains aims to manage the essential assets, leading to more automation in city governance and optimization of the dynamic offered services. However, no clear guideline or standard exists for modeling these data flows. As a result, operators, municipalities, policymakers, manufac-turers, solution providers, and vendors are forced to accept systems with limited scalability and varying needs. Nonetheless, it is critical to raise awareness about smart city cybersecurity and implement suitable measures to safeguard citizens' privacy and security because the cyber threats seem to be well-organized, diverse, and sophisticated. This study aims to present an overview of cyber threats, attacks, and countermeasures on the primary domains of smart cities (smart government, smart mobility, smart environment, smart living, smart healthcare, smart economy, and smart people) to present information extracted from state-of-the-art to policymakers to perceive the critical situation and, at the same time, to be a valuable resource for the scientific community.
Hamed Vahdat-Nejad, Tahereh Tamadon, Fatemeh Salmani
et al.
With the emergence of the Internet of things (IoT), human life is now progressing towards smartification faster than ever before. Thus, smart cities become automated in different aspects such as business, education, economy, medicine, and urban areas. Since smartification requires a variety of dynamic information in different urban dimensions, mobile crowdsourcing has gained importance in smart cities. This chapter systematically reviews the related applications of smart cities that use mobile crowdsourcing for data acquisition. For this purpose, the applications are classified as environmental, urban life, and transportation categories and then investigated in detail. This survey helps in understanding the current situation of smart cities from the viewpoint of crowdsourcing and discusses the future research directions in this field.
Niklas H. Kitzmann, Pawel Romanczuk, Jonathan F. Donges
Only a fast and global transformation towards decarbonization and sustainability can keep the Earth in a civilization-friendly state. As hotspots for (green) innovation and experimentation, cities could play an important role in this transition. They are also known to profit from each other's ideas, with policy and technology innovations spreading to other cities. In this way, cities can be conceptualized as nodes in a globe-spanning learning network. The dynamics of this process are important for society's response to climate change and other challenges, but remain poorly understood on a macroscopic level. In this contribution, we develop an approach to identify whether network-based complex contagion effects are a feature of sustainability policy adoption by cities, based on dose-response contagion and surrogate data models. We apply this methodology to an example data set, comprising empirical data on the spreading of a public transport innovation (Bus Rapid Transit Systems) and a global inter-city connection network based on scheduled flight routes. We find evidence pointing towards a contagious spreading process which cannot be explained by either the network structure or the increase in global adoption rate alone. This suggests that the actions of a city's abstract "global neighborhood" within the network of cities may be an important factor in which policies and innovations are implemented, with potential connections to the emergence of social tipping processes. The methodology is generic, and can be used to compare the predictive power for innovation spreading of different kinds of inter-city network connections, e.g. via transport links, trade, or co-membership in political networks.