Hasil untuk "Aesthetics of cities. City planning and beautifying"

Weiying KONG, Yizhuo LIU, Sichun DONG et al.

ObjectiveIn the contemporary global context, urban areas are increasingly confronted with the dual pressures of global climate change and rapid urbanization. These pressures have led to a significant rise in urban temperature, thereby amplifying the importance of blue-green spaces in mitigating the urban heat island (UHI) effect. Blue-green spaces, which include natural water bodies, parks, green corridors, and other vegetated areas, play a crucial role in regulating urban microclimates. As cities enter an era of stock development, where the focus shifts from expansion to optimization of existing resources, the strategic configuration of these spaces has become a cornerstone for enhancing urban thermal environments. Understanding the cooling mechanisms of blue-green spaces at various spatial scales is essential for improving urban thermal comfort and guiding the planning and construction of urban blue-green infrastructure.MethodsThis research focuses on the central urban area of Xi’an, a city that has experienced substantial urban growth over the past decade. By employing a combination of spatial autocorrelation analysis and a multi-scale geographically weighted regression (MGWR) model, the research examines the change characteristics of blue-green spaces and their impact on land surface temperature from 2013 to 2023. The findings reveal the spatial heterogeneity of cooling effects and offer tailored optimization strategies for blue-green spaces across diverse urban contexts. The research methodology involves selecting six representative landscape indices to evaluate the changes in blue-green space patterns in the central urban area of Xi’an. These indices are carefully chosen to capture the nuances of spatial configuration, fragmentation, and connectivity of blue-green spaces. Spatial autocorrelation analysis is utilized to identify spatial clustering and patterns extracted from the data collected, while the MGWR model is adopted for a more granular examination of the relationship between landscape indices and land surface temperature levels. This integrated approach not only reveals the factors influencing the cooling effects of blue-green spaces but also highlights their spatial variability across the urban landscape.ResultsThe results of the research are both revealing and instructive. 1) The blue-green space patterns in the central urban area of Xi’an underwent significant changes over the research period, reflecting the dynamic interplay between urban development and environmental management. 2) The spatial distribution of land surface temperature exhibits a distinct pattern of being “high in the north and low in the south”. The central area, characterized by dense urban fabric, shows minimal fluctuations in land surface temperature, whereas low-temperature zones are predominantly concentrated in the southern part of Baqiao District. This uneven thermal distribution underscores the complexity of urban heat dynamics and the need for targeted interventions. 3) The relationship between landscape indices and land surface temperature changes displays notable spatial heterogeneity. In high-density urban areas, small and complex blue-green patches demonstrate stronger cooling effects, emphasizing the importance of intricate designs in densely built environments where space is limited but the need for effective cooling is significant. In contrast, suburban areas benefit from avoiding the aggregation of large blue-green patches, which may otherwise hinder effective cooling due to reduced air circulation and increased shading. Near large water bodies, regularly shaped and highly connected blue-green patches are found to be particularly effective in reducing land surface temperature, highlighting the synergistic effects of water and vegetation in enhancing cooling performance and suggesting that integrated blue-green networks can maximize thermal benefits.ConclusionThe research concludes that the relationship between temperature changes and blue-green space changes in the central urban area of Xi’an is significant and characterized by strong spatial heterogeneity during the period from 2013 to 2023, with the cooling effects of blue-green spaces found varying by their spatial attributes and the characteristics of the surrounding urban environment. These findings highlight the necessity for region-specific optimization strategies to maximize the cooling potential of blue-green spaces. By integrating spatial analysis and regression modeling, the research provides a detailed understanding of the cooling mechanisms of blue-green spaces across diverse urban contexts. The results emphasize the importance of tailoring blue-green space designs to local conditions, considering factors such as urban density, proximity to water bodies, and regional climatic characteristics. This approach enhances the effectiveness of blue-green spaces in mitigating the urban heat island effect and contributes to the creation of more sustainable and thermally comfortable urban environments. The research advocates a holistic and adaptive urban planning strategy, where blue-green spaces are strategically designed and managed to address the unique thermal challenges of different urban areas. This research offers valuable guidance for policymakers and urban planners aiming to optimize blue-green infrastructure and improve urban resilience in the face of climate change and urbanization.

Francesca Thiébat, Cristiana Cellucci

Filippo Marchesani

This chapter explores the six core dimensions of smart cities (i.e. smart economy, mobility, environment, people, living, and governance) emphasizing their interdependence and the need for holistic orchestration. Building on Giffinger et al. (2007) and subsequent literature, it argues that integrating these dimensions is crucial for sustainable urban development. ICT plays a key enabling role but must be complemented by human and social capital. Through institutional examples, such as the creation of dedicated municipal offices for digital innovation, the chapter illustrates how governance and internal capacity shape smart transitions. A human-centric approach is also essential, ensuring inclusivity, creativity, and active civic participation. Ultimately, smart cities must be viewed as cohesive urban ecosystems where technology, people, and governance interact dynamically.

A. K. M. Bahalul Haque, Bharat Bhushan, Gaurav Dhiman

The emergence of smart cities and sustainable development has become a globally accepted form of urbanization. The epitome of smart city development has become possible due to the latest innovative integration of information and communication technology. Citizens of smart cities can enjoy the benefits of a smart living environment, ubiquitous connectivity, seamless access to services, intelligent decision making through smart governance, and optimized resource management. The widespread acceptance of smart cities has raised data security issues, authentication, unauthorized access, device-level vulnerability, and sustainability. This paper focuses on the wholistic overview and conceptual development of smart city. Initially, the work discusses the smart city idea and fundamentals explored in various pieces of literature. Further various smart city applications, including notable implementations, are put forth to understand the quality of living standards. Finally, the paper depicts a solid understanding of different security and privacy issues, including some crucial future research directions.

Pratham Singla, Ayush Singh, Adesh Gupta et al.

Urban planning faces a critical challenge in balancing city-wide infrastructure needs with localized demographic preferences, particularly in rapidly developing regions. Although existing approaches typically focus on top-down optimization or bottom-up community planning, only some frameworks successfully integrate both perspectives. Our methodology employs a two-tier approach: First, a deterministic solver optimizes basic infrastructure requirements in the city region. Second, four specialized planning agents, each representing distinct sub-regions, propose demographic-specific modifications to a master planner. The master planner then evaluates and integrates these suggestions to ensure cohesive urban development. We validate our framework using a newly created dataset comprising detailed region and sub-region maps from three developing cities in India, focusing on areas undergoing rapid urbanization. The results demonstrate that this hybrid approach enables more nuanced urban development while maintaining overall city functionality.

Ceo Institute of Public Health SuzanneCostello, Francesco Branca, Systems and et al.

Food is central to our health and well-being, yet many aspects of our food systems have become unhealthy and unsustainable. Our food systems today contribute significantly to, and are being destabilised by, the environmental crises we are facing. An increase in the consumption of low-quality diets is the leading cause of death and a major contributor to the burden of non-communicable diseases in Europe. Dietary guidelines issued by governments do not align at all with what is being produced, consumed, and exported. Food systems have also contributed to creating, entrenching and widening health inequalities across Europe, as subgroups of the population have little access to and ability to choose healthy and sustainable food. In addition, the benefits of current food production and consumption systems go to large transnational companies rather than small companies and primary producers; the average EU farmer for example earns 50% of the average worker in the economy. Major external shocks such as COVID-19 and the Russian war against Ukraine have reflected the vulnerability of our current systems of food production and redistribution, as experienced through growing levels of food inflation, food insecurity and hunger in Europe, and even more so in other parts of the world. Ambitious intersectoral and systemic approaches are needed to address current contradictions in our food systems, and to make them more sustainable and resilient. Public health professionals need to step up their action to highlight the impacts of unhealthy food consumption, advocating and engaging in political debates. Promising policies at the EU level, such as the Farm to Fork Strategy, Sustainable Food Law, and on Food Security, set out planned measures to make food systems more environmentally friendly, fair and healthy. Ensuring that such policies are actually implemented, and that environmental, health and social considerations are valued in equal measure as economic ones, remains however a major challenge. This plenary session will focus on what measures are urgently needed and must be prioritised to ensure more sustainable food systems and to improve health and well- being across Europe. The plenary will also discuss the challenges, and the role of health professionals in helping to achieve this critical shift. Moderators: Suzanne Costello, CEO, Institute of Public Health, Ireland Caroline Costongs, Director EuroHealthNet Video address: Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General Keynote speaker: Tim Lang, Emeritus Professor of Food Policy, City University of London, UK Panellists: Francesco Branca, Director of the Department of Nutrition for Health and Development, WHO Gunhild A. Stordalen, Founder and Executive Chair EAT Foundation, Norway Holly Cairns, TD for Cork South-West and Leader of the Social Democrats and party spokesperson on Agriculture, Food and the Marine; Rural Development; Social Justice; and Disability, Ireland Anant Jani, University of Heidelberg, Germany and Fellow Oxford Martin School, Oxford University, UK

Serafina Amoroso

La aspiración principal de este artículo es que las breves notas que contiene puedan inspirar un debate político sobre la posibilidad de establecer una renovada relación entre la ciudad y el contexto territorial de Florencia y el río que los atraviesa (el Arno) para poder replantearla sobre la base de una mirada renovada y desde una perspectiva de género, no sólo en términos espaciales y físicos sino también en términos temporales y socioculturales. La metodología de trabajo adoptada aúna la investigación bibliográfica de tipo documental con la experiencia y observación directa de los lugares analizados. El texto se estructura en una primera parte en la que se contextualiza su contenido en el marco teórico del realismo agencial de Karen Barad, en una segunda parte en la que se explora brevemente en qué términos la relación e interacción entre ciudad, territorio y río ha favorecido el desarrollo de ciertas actividades a expensas de otras, y finalmente en una parte conclusiva en la que, ofreciendo una lectura crítica de la situación actual desde una perspectiva de género, se puedan vislumbrar potenciales pistas para delinear estrategias futuras para renovarla.

Jaya Mukhopadhyay, Andrea Martínez-Arias

La evaluación del desempeño de los edificios (conocida como BPE, de Building Performance Evaluation, por sus siglas en inglés) es indispensable para fundamentar las decisiones de diseño. En este artículo se aborda este concepto junto a algunos estudios de casos en los que se pueden ilustrar estrategias de diseño pasivo que, aplicadas en edificios, mejoran no solo la eficiencia energética, sino que la calidad ambiental interior (o IEQ, de Indoor Environmental Quality).

Vincent Verbavatz, Marc Barthelemy

Urban inequality is a major challenge for cities in the 21st century. This inequality is reflected in the spatial income structure of cities which evolves in time through various processes. Gentrification is a well-known illustration of these dynamics in which the population of a low income area changes as wealthier residents arrive and old-settled residents are expelled. Less understood but very important is the reverse process of gentrification through which areas of cities get impoverished. Gentrification has been widely studied among social sciences, especially in case studies, but there have been fewer quantitative analyses of this phenomenon, and more generally about the spatial dynamics of income in cities. Here, we first propose a quantitative analysis of these income dynamics in cities based on household incomes in 45 American and 9 French Functional Urban Areas (FUA). We found that an important ingredient that determines the evolution of the income level of an area is the income level of its immediate neighboring areas. This empirical finding leads to the idea that these dynamics can be modeled by the voter model of statistical physics. We show that such a model constitutes an interesting tool for both describing and predicting evolution scenarios of urban areas with a very limited number of parameters (two for the US and one for France). We illustrate our results by computing the probability that areas will change their income status in the case of Boston and Paris at the horizon of 2030.

Thomas Collins, Riccardo Di Clemente, Mario Gutiérrez-Roig et al.

Urban vibrancy is the dynamic activity of humans in urban locations. It can vary with urban features and the opportunities for human interactions, but it might also differ according to the underlying social conditions of city inhabitants across and within social surroundings. Such heterogeneity in how different demographic groups may experience cities has the potential to cause gender segregation because of differences in the preferences of inhabitants, their accessibility and opportunities, and large-scale mobility behaviours. However, traditional studies have failed to capture fully a high-frequency understanding of how urban vibrancy is linked to urban features, how this might differ for different genders, and how this might affect segregation in cities. Our results show that (1) there are differences between males and females in terms of urban vibrancy, (2) the differences relate to `Points of Interest` as well as transportation networks, and (3) that there are both positive and negative `spatial spillovers` existing across each city. To do this, we use a quantitative approach using Call Detail Record data--taking advantage of the near-ubiquitous use of mobile phones--to gain high-frequency observations of spatial behaviours across the seven most prominent cities of Italy. We use a spatial model comparison approach of the direct and `spillover` effects from urban features on male-female differences. Our results increase our understanding of inequality in cities and how we can make future cities fairer.

Damien Pellier, Alexandre Albore, Humbert Fiorino et al.

Real world applications as in industry and robotics need modelling rich and diverse automated planning problems. Their resolution usually requires coordinated and concurrent action execution. In several cases, these problems are naturally decomposed in a hierarchical way and expressed by a Hierarchical Task Network (HTN) formalism. HDDL, a hierarchical extension of the Planning Domain Definition Language (PDDL), unlike PDDL 2.1 does not allow to represent planning problems with numerical and temporal constraints, which are essential for real world applications. We propose to fill the gap between HDDL and these operational needs and to extend HDDL by taking inspiration from PDDL 2.1 in order to express numerical and temporal expressions. This paper opens discussions on the semantics and the syntax needed for a future HDDL 2.1 extension.

Taiwo Adetiloye, Anjali Awasthi

The logistics of urban areas are becoming more sophisticated due to the fast city population growth. The stakeholders are faced with the challenges of the dynamic complexity of city logistics(CL) systems characterized by the uncertainty effect together with the freight vehicle emissions causing pollution. In this conceptual paper, we present a research methodology for the environmental sustainability of CL systems that can be attained by effective stakeholders' collaboration under non-chaotic situations and the presumption of the human levity tendency. We propose the mathematical axioms of the uncertainty effect while putting forward the notion of condition effectors, and how to assign hypothetical values to them. Finally, we employ a spider network and causal loop diagram to investigate the system's elements and their behavior over time.

Halvard Dalheim

Clément Barbier

Built on a cross-national sociological research that retraces the genesis of two large-scale urban renewal projects in the urban areas of Lille and Hamburg, this article shows to what extent they might be considered as gentrification policies and as a way to question this analytical category. Even if both—Union and IBA Hamburg—projects imply the social and symbolic triage of firms and populations that are legitimate to occupy the targeted neighbourhoods, the coalitions of actors who try to turn these “problem areas” into symbols of “metropolitan attractiveness” are far from acting in a coherent, omnipotent and unequivocal way. The processes of eviction and of real estate value-creation or -destruction throughout the design and implementation of these large-scale urban projects are the result of the action of these public-private coalitions as well as the consequence of their inaction and their (relative) incapacity to actually govern people and capital flows. Therefore, the (in)capacities of local governments to remove populations and businesses from these districts or to enhance the market and symbolic value of these spaces depends on the social and economic embeddedness of these policies.

Horacio Torrent

Resumen Los instrumentos urbanos contenidos en el Plan regulador como figura comprehensiva fueron insuficientes para asumir el desarrollo urbano y su obsolescencia implicó dar paso a una figura alternativa, la del plan seccional, como definición más aproximada de escala edilicia, sobre suelos no comprendidos por el plan regulador y frente a la larga tramitación de la aprobación de sus posibles cambios o ampliaciones. Es objetivo de este trabajo mostrar históricamente las incongruencias de los instrumentos de planificación frente a la condición expansiva de la ciudad en los inicios de la segunda mitad del siglo XX, a través del estudio del caso de Arica en el norte de Chile. Abstract The urban instruments contained in the Urban Plan as a comprehensive model were insufficient to take on urban development at the beginning of the second half of the twentieth century. Its obsolescence implied the use of the alternative figure of the Sectional Plan, as a more approximate definition of architectural scale. These sectionals acted on areas not included in the Regulatory Plan, providing an alternative to the long process of approving changes or extensions to it. The objective of this work is to historically show the incongruities of the planning instruments in the face of the expansive condition of the city through the case study of Arica in northern Chile.

Jascha Grübel, Tyler Thrash, Leonel Aguilar et al.

Smart Cities already surround us, and yet they are still incomprehensibly far from directly impacting everyday life. While current Smart Cities are often inaccessible, the experience of everyday citizens may be enhanced with a combination of the emerging technologies Digital Twins (DTs) and Situated Analytics. DTs represent their Physical Twin (PT) in the real world via models, simulations, (remotely) sensed data, context awareness, and interactions. However, interaction requires appropriate interfaces to address the complexity of the city. Ultimately, leveraging the potential of Smart Cities requires going beyond assembling the DT to be comprehensive and accessible. Situated Analytics allows for the anchoring of city information in its spatial context. We advance the concept of embedding the DT into the PT through Situated Analytics to form Fused Twins (FTs). This fusion allows access to data in the location that it is generated in an embodied context that can make the data more understandable. Prototypes of FTs are rapidly emerging from different domains, but Smart Cities represent the context with the most potential for FTs in the future. This paper reviews DTs, Situated Analytics, and Smart Cities as the foundations of FTs. Regarding DTs, we define five components (Physical, Data, Analytical, Virtual, and Connection environments) that we relate to several cognates (i.e., similar but different terms) from existing literature. Regarding Situated Analytics, we review the effects of user embodiment on cognition and cognitive load. Finally, we classify existing partial examples of FTs from the literature and address their construction from Augmented Reality, Geographic Information Systems, Building/City Information Models, and DTs and provide an overview of future direction

Berenike Masing, Niels Lindner, Ralf Borndörfer

We consider the line planning problem in public transport in the Parametric City, an idealized model that captures typical scenarios by a (small) number of parameters. The Parametric City is rotation symmetric, but optimal line plans are not always symmetric. This raises the question to quantify the symmetry gap between the best symmetric and the overall best solution. For our analysis, we formulate the line planning problem as a mixed integer linear program, that can be solved in polynomial time if the solutions are forced to be symmetric. The symmetry gap is provably small when a specific Parametric City parameter is fixed, and we give an approximation algorithm for line planning in the Parametric City in this case. While the symmetry gap can be arbitrarily large in general, we show that symmetric line plans are a good choice in most practical situations.

Yan Lyu, Hangxin Lu, Min Kyung Lee et al.

With the increasing pervasiveness of Artificial Intelligence (AI), many visual analytics tools have been proposed to examine fairness, but they mostly focus on data scientist users. Instead, tackling fairness must be inclusive and involve domain experts with specialized tools and workflows. Thus, domain-specific visualizations are needed for algorithmic fairness. Furthermore, while much work on AI fairness has focused on predictive decisions, less has been done for fair allocation and planning, which require human expertise and iterative design to integrate myriad constraints. We propose the Intelligible Fair Allocation (IF-Alloc) Framework that leverages explanations of causal attribution (Why), contrastive (Why Not) and counterfactual reasoning (What If, How To) to aid domain experts to assess and alleviate unfairness in allocation problems. We apply the framework to fair urban planning for designing cities that provide equal access to amenities and benefits for diverse resident types. Specifically, we propose an interactive visual tool, Intelligible Fair City Planner (IF-City), to help urban planners to perceive inequality across groups, identify and attribute sources of inequality, and mitigate inequality with automatic allocation simulations and constraint-satisfying recommendations. We demonstrate and evaluate the usage and usefulness of IF-City on a real neighborhood in New York City, US, with practicing urban planners from multiple countries, and discuss generalizing our findings, application, and framework to other use cases and applications of fair allocation.

Milind Naphade, Shuo Wang, David C. Anastasiu et al.

The 6th edition of the AI City Challenge specifically focuses on problems in two domains where there is tremendous unlocked potential at the intersection of computer vision and artificial intelligence: Intelligent Traffic Systems (ITS), and brick and mortar retail businesses. The four challenge tracks of the 2022 AI City Challenge received participation requests from 254 teams across 27 countries. Track 1 addressed city-scale multi-target multi-camera (MTMC) vehicle tracking. Track 2 addressed natural-language-based vehicle track retrieval. Track 3 was a brand new track for naturalistic driving analysis, where the data were captured by several cameras mounted inside the vehicle focusing on driver safety, and the task was to classify driver actions. Track 4 was another new track aiming to achieve retail store automated checkout using only a single view camera. We released two leader boards for submissions based on different methods, including a public leader board for the contest, where no use of external data is allowed, and a general leader board for all submitted results. The top performance of participating teams established strong baselines and even outperformed the state-of-the-art in the proposed challenge tracks.

Ericka Fosado Centeno

Los retos socioambientales actuales exigen responder a diversos objetivos a la vez, si se busca un orden justo y sustentable destacan dos problemáticas: el cambio climático y la desigualdad de género. Ambas se conectan con la forma en que habitamos las ciudades. En este contexto se estudia el ciclismo urbano siguiendo dos objetivos: identificar qué sostiene la brecha entre mujeres y hombres en esta práctica y conocer si ésta favorece cambios en el orden de género. Para ello se realizó un estudio cualitativo en el que se reconstruyó el proceso de conformación de la práctica ciclista con base en entrevistas en profundidad realizadas con mujeres y hombres de la Ciudad de México. Destacan tres hallazgos: a) la experiencia de trayectos seguros y la participación en colectivos ciclistas establecen diferencias entre mujeres y hombres; b) el ciclismo urbano favorece la flexibilización de normas de género; 3) es una práctica que puede conducir al surgimiento de una agencia socioecológica interesada en la habitabilidad, la seguridad, la colectividad y los cuidados, contenidos que desafían el orden de género. Se concluye sobre la pertinencia de impulsar esta alternativa de movilidad e indicando algunas claves para fomentarla de manera incluyente.