Hasil untuk "Urbanization. City and country"

E. Swyngedouw, F. Moulaert, Arantxa Rodríguez

Hassan Radoine, Kh Md Nahiduzzaman

Tânia Carvalho, José Barata, Henish Balu et al.

A smart city is essential for sustainable urban development. In addition to citizen engagement, a smart city enables connected infrastructure, data-driven decision making and smart mobility. For most of these features, network data plays a critical role, particularly from public Wi-Fi infrastructures, where cities can benefit from optimized services such as public transport management and the safety and efficiency of large events. One of the biggest concerns in developing a smart city is using secure and private data. This is particularly relevant in the case of Wi-Fi network data, where sensitive information can be collected. This paper specifically addresses the problem of sharing secure data to enhance the quality of the Wi-Fi network in a city. Despite the high importance of this type of data, related work focuses on improving the safety of mobility patterns, targeting only the protection of MAC addresses. On the opposite side, we provide a practical methodology for safeguarding all attributes in real Wi-Fi network data. This study was developed in collaboration with a multidisciplinary team of legal experts, data custodians and technical privacy specialists, resulting in high-quality data. On top of that, we show how to integrate the legal considerations for secure data sharing. Our approach promotes data-driven innovation and privacy awareness in the context of smart city initiatives, which have been tested in a real scenario.

Viet Hung Pham, Malte Wagenfeld, Regina Bernhaupt

Traditional urban planning methodologies often fail to capture the complexity of contemporary urbanization and environmental sustainability challenges. This study investigates the integration of Generative Design, Virtual Reality (VR), and Digital Twins (DT) to enhance walkability in urban planning. VR provides distinct benefits over conventional approaches, including 2D maps, static renderings, and physical models, by allowing stakeholders to engage with urban designs more intuitively, identify walkability challenges, and suggest iterative improvements. Preliminary findings from structured interviews with Eindhoven residents provide critical insights into pedestrian preferences and walkability considerations. The next phase of the study involves the development of VR-DT integrated prototypes to simulate urban environments, assess walkability, and explore the role of Generative Design in generating adaptive urban planning solutions. The objective is to develop a decision-support tool that enables urban planners to incorporate diverse stakeholder perspectives, optimize pedestrian-oriented urban design, and advance regenerative development principles. By leveraging these emerging technologies, this research contributes to the evolution of data-driven, participatory urban planning frameworks aimed at fostering sustainable and walkable cities.

Wenzhang Du

Deploying spatio-temporal forecasting models across many cities is difficult: traffic networks differ in size and topology, data availability can vary by orders of magnitude, and new cities may provide only a short history of logs. Existing deep traffic models are typically trained per city and backbone, creating high maintenance cost and poor transfer to data-scarce cities. We ask whether a single, backbone-agnostic layer can condition on "which city this sequence comes from", improve accuracy in full- and low-data regimes, and support better cross-city adaptation with minimal code changes. We propose CityCond, a light-weight city-conditioned memory layer that augments existing spatio-temporal backbones. CityCond combines a city-ID encoder with an optional shared memory bank (CityMem). Given a city index and backbone hidden states, it produces city-conditioned features fused through gated residual connections. We attach CityCond to five representative backbones (GRU, TCN, Transformer, GNN, STGCN) and evaluate three regimes: full-data, low-data, and cross-city few-shot transfer on METR-LA and PEMS-BAY. We also run auxiliary experiments on SIND, a drone-based multi-agent trajectory dataset from a signalized intersection in Tianjin (we focus on pedestrian tracks). Across more than fourteen model variants and three random seeds, CityCond yields consistent improvements, with the largest gains for high-capacity backbones such as Transformers and STGCNs. CityMem reduces Transformer error by roughly one third in full-data settings and brings substantial gains in low-data and cross-city transfer. On SIND, simple city-ID conditioning modestly improves low-data LSTM performance. CityCond can therefore serve as a reusable design pattern for scalable, multi-city forecasting under realistic data constraints.

Carlos Augusto Martínez Muñoz, Francisco Javier Maroto Ramos

Urban morphogenesis in informal settlements results from occupation, transformation, and morphological extension processes that cause territorial fragmentation, producing inequality and spatial segregation, which are the main characteristics of Latin American informal urbanism. However, there is scarce research on analysing the processes that cause fragmentation. The research develops a morphological analysis that aims to improve the processes of urban assemblage by identifying the dynamics of territorialisation and deterritorialisation promoted by political and social factors, capable of producing spatial discontinuity in the informal morphogenic evolution. As a method, a diachronic analysis is developed by mapping the morphological evolution of the processes of occupation, transformation and extension of networks between 2002 and 2021 on three models of informal settlements in Lima, Mexico City, Medellin and Santiago de Chile for a comparison of cases. As a result, corrective mechanisms called “interface devices” (ID) are obtained, which include the improvement of land management policies and the implementation of gradual interventions according to informal evolution, decreasing urban fragmentation in different phases of territorial evolution and the possibility of being applied in international contexts of the global south.

Margherita Fadda

As the African continent continues to urbanise, cities are becoming increasingly central to the transformations of societies and economies. Many studies highlight the limits of urban planning in these cities, emphasising the high share of population living in slums and the low levels of services that reach neighbourhoods. Less attention is given to the urban planning activities that try to prevent or improve these conditions. This analysis of urban plans illustrates that plans are more widespread than commonly thought. They also, for the large part, consider spatial growth. The low number of cities that grew within the projected boundaries of these plans is a symptom of numerous bottlenecks that constrain planning systems in these countries. Examples of these include the disregard of the full built-up areas at the time of the plan's approval and the missing link between the plans and the financial means allocated for its delivery. This article identifies opportunities to overcome these barriers such as flexible and adaptable urban plans that consider the entire built-up area of the agglomeration.

Federico P. Cortese, Antonio Pievatolo

Thermal comfort is essential for well-being in urban spaces, especially as cities face increasing heat from urbanization and climate change. Existing thermal comfort models usually overlook temporal dynamics alongside spatial dependencies. We address this problem by introducing a spatio-temporal jump model that clusters data with persistence across both spatial and temporal dimensions. This framework enhances interpretability, minimizes abrupt state changes, and easily handles missing data. We validate our approach through extensive simulations, demonstrating its accuracy in recovering the true underlying partition. When applied to hourly environmental data gathered from a set of weather stations located across the city of Singapore, our proposal identifies meaningful thermal comfort regimes, demonstrating its effectiveness in dynamic urban settings and suitability for real-world monitoring. The comparison of these regimes with feedback on thermal preference indicates the potential of an unsupervised approach to avoid extensive surveys.

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.

L. Salvati, I. Zambon, F. Chelli et al.

Land-use changes and urban sprawl have transformed European cities, with a direct impact on both metropolitan structures and socioeconomic functions. However, these processes tend to be relatively different across countries, being influenced by place-specific factors associated to socioeconomic, historical, political and cultural factors that influence decisions on the use of land. Considering 155 metropolitan areas in 6 European macro-regions, the present study investigates spatial patterns of land consumption profiling cities according to a large set of territorial variables, with the final objective to identify relevant socioeconomic dimensions characteristic of recent processes of urban growth. Investigating the socioeconomic background underlying land-use changes in metropolitan regions allows identification of place-specific factors improving the design of effective strategies containing land consumption in different European urban typologies. An exhaustive analysis of land-use changes at regional and local spatial scales contributes to find alternative policies for land-use efficiency and long-term environmental sustainability.

Wei WEI, Dianmin ZHOU, Zhaohui CHEN

The iron and steel industry is the largest carbon emitter in China’s manufacturing sector and one of the most important fields in the country’s response to climate change. This paper aims to explain the current situation, technological pathways, and future direction of green and low-carbon development of the iron and steel industry. According to the carbon emissions of the iron and steel industry, this paper analyzes the relationship between steelmaking technologies and carbon emissions, as well as the transformation trend of the world’s iron and steel industry, finding that China’s iron and steel industry faces both opportunities and challenges. Steel scrap recycling and electric furnace steelmaking technologies, re-electrification, hydrogen metallurgy, resource recycling and by-products, and carbon capture and utilization (CCU) are the main technologies tailored to the transformation pathways, and the optimization of energy consumption structure is an important direction for future development. Therefore, this paper believes that clean energy, as a guarantee for carbon mitigation, will play an increasingly important role in the process towards achieving carbon peaking and carbon neutrality goals (the “dual carbon” goals), in addition to the transformation of metallurgical technologies.

Giovanna Fossa

With this volume - Conversations with TeMA - the Journal opens a new editorial line specifically dedicated to promoting and disseminating the discussion between worldwide researchers on specific issues concerning the contents, methods and timing of our work. This first experience is dedicated to a deepening, in an interview formula, on the future of spatial planning in Italy both from a regulatory and technical-disciplinary perspective, also concerning what is happening in other countries. In line with the aims we had set, we decided to involve, in this first phase, both colleagues working in Italian universities and those working in foreign universities and research centres. This contribution is by Giovanna Fossa, Full Professor in Urban Planning, Politecnico di Milano

Murat Özdemir

Collective memory is a way of remembering that makes it possible for society or groups to have a common identity by bridging the past and the future. Pierre Bourdieu's practical theory also allows discussion of the continuity of collective memory in the context of the structure-action relationship. In this context, the aim of the study is to reveal that social agents are effective in the reproduction of memory. This is done by associating the construction of collective memory with Pierre Bourdieu's conceptualization of space, habitus and capital in the sample of the city of Ankara, which represents the founding ideology of the Republic of Turkey. In line with the purpose of the study, the documentary film named 'Ankara Ambiance', which was broadcast on Blu TV, a digital platform, was chosen as a sample. The 'What Matters to Heart and Love' episode, which was broadcast as the first episode of the documentary, was analyzed using the content analysis method. As a result of the study, it has been evaluated that collective memory is reproduced in the form of space with administrative, political and ideological perspectives. The idea is that the founding leader is a common value which is effective in the reproduction of space in the form of collective memory and is closely related to the social space of individuals and the types of capital they have.

Nadia Pourmohammad-Zia, Mark van Koningsveld

The efficiency of urban logistics is vital for economic prosperity and quality of life in cities. However, rapid urbanization poses significant challenges, such as congestion, emissions, and strained infrastructure. This paper addresses these challenges by proposing an optimal urban logistic network that integrates urban waterways and last-mile delivery in Amsterdam. The study highlights the untapped potential of inland waterways in addressing logistical challenges in the city center. The problem is formulated as a two-echelon location routing problem with time windows, and a hybrid solution approach is developed to solve it effectively. The proposed algorithm consistently outperforms existing approaches, demonstrating its effectiveness in solving existing benchmarks and newly developed instances. Through a comprehensive case study, the advantages of implementing a waterway-based distribution chain are assessed, revealing substantial cost savings (approximately 28%) and reductions in vehicle weight (about 43%) and travel distances (roughly 80%) within the city center. The incorporation of electric vehicles further contributes to environmental sustainability. Sensitivity analysis underscores the importance of managing transshipment location establishment costs as a key strategy for cost efficiencies and reducing reliance on delivery vehicles and road traffic congestion. This study provides valuable insights and practical guidance for managers seeking to enhance operational efficiency, reduce costs, and promote sustainable transportation practices. Further analysis is warranted to fully evaluate the feasibility and potential benefits, considering infrastructural limitations and canal characteristics.

Da Huo, Xiaoting Huang, Xinyu Dou et al.

Building on near-real-time and spatially explicit estimates of daily carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, here we present and analyze a new city-level dataset of fossil fuel and cement emissions. Carbon Monitor Cities provides daily, city-level estimates of emissions from January 2019 through December 2021 for 1500 cities in 46 countries, and disaggregates five sectors: power generation, residential (buildings), industry, ground transportation, and aviation. The goal of this dataset is to improve the timeliness and temporal resolution of city-level emission inventories and includes estimates for both functional urban areas and city administrative areas that are consistent with global and regional totals. Comparisons with other datasets (i.e. CEADs, MEIC, Vulcan, and CDP) were performed, and we estimate the overall uncertainty to be 21.7%. Carbon Monitor Cities is a near-real-time, city-level emission dataset that includes cities around the world, including the first estimates for many cities in low-income countries. A more complete description of this dataset is published in Scientific Data (https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-022-01657-z).

Yaowei Wang, Zhouxin Yang, Rui Liu et al.

Object detection is an algorithm that recognizes and locates the objects in the image and has a wide range of applications in the visual understanding of complex urban scenes. Existing object detection benchmarks mainly focus on a single specific scenario and their annotation attributes are not rich enough, these make the object detection model is not generalized for the smart city scenes. Considering the diversity and complexity of scenes in intelligent city governance, we build a large-scale object detection benchmark for the smart city. Our benchmark contains about 500K images and includes three scenarios: intelligent transportation, intelligent security, and drones. For the complexity of the real scene in the smart city, the diversity of weather, occlusion, and other complex environment diversity attributes of the images in the three scenes are annotated. The characteristics of the benchmark are analyzed and extensive experiments of the current state-of-the-art target detection algorithm are conducted based on our benchmark to show their performance.

Luciano da F. Costa, Eric K. Tokuda

Characterizing the structure of cities constitutes an important task since the identification of similar cities can promote sharing of respective experiences. In the present work, we consider 20 European cities from 5 respective countries and with comparable populations, each of which characterized in terms of four topological as well as one geometrical feature. These cities are then mapped into respective networks by considering their pairwise similarity as gauged by the coincidence methodology, which consists of combining the Jaccard and interiority indices. The methodology incorporates a parameter alpha that can control the relative contribution of features with the same or opposite signs to the overall similarity. Interestingly, the maximum modularity cities network is obtained for a non-standard parameter configuration, showing that it could not be obtained were not for the adoption of the parameter alpha. The network with maximum modularity presents four communities that can be directly related to four of the five considered countries, corroborating not only the effectiveness of the adopted features and similarity methodology, but also indicating a surprising tendency of the cities from a same country of being similar, while differing from cities from other countries. The coincidence methodology was then applied in order to investigate the effect of several features combinations on the respectively obtained networks, leading to a highly modular features network containing four main communities that can be understood as the main possible models for the considered cities.

Q. Zhang, Decai Tang, Brandon J. Bethel

Urbanization has been positioned as an important driving force for economic development. This article examines the impact of urbanization on environmental regulation efficiency (ERE) in the Yangtze River Basin (YRB). Based on a panel dataset of 97 cities in the YRB from 2005 to 2016, a spatial econometric model was used for analysis. Results show that the average ERE in the YRB is relatively low and manifests in the shape of a curved smile. The urbanization level of the permanent population is far lower than the average level of developed countries. However, the urbanization level is showing a steady growth trend. During this period, ERE in the Yangtze River middle, upper, and lower reaches was measured at 0.77, 0.58, and 0.52, respectively. The urbanization rate was measured at 0.59, 0.45, and 0.39, in the lower, middle, and upper reaches, respectively. When only considering population urbanization, the previously observed negative correlation between ERE and the Kuznets curve disappears. However, if the carrying capacity of economic activities is considered, the U-shaped relationship between urbanization rate and ERE returns. The environmental Kuznets curve is consequently verified. In addition, there is an inverted U-shaped nonlinear relationship between economic development and ERE. The results of this article show that there are unsustainable risks in the rapid pursuit of population urbanization. Only by improving the quality of urbanization and adapting the level of urbanization to the carrying capacity of resources and environment can we truly promote high-quality economic development. The article puts forward some suggestions to promote the green development of the economy.

Stefan Kordel

Rezension

Maria Assunção Gato, Ana Rita Cruz