Abstract Urban growth is a worldwide phenomenon but the rate of urbanization is very fast in developing country like Egypt. It is mainly driven by unorganized expansion, increased immigration, rapidly increasing population. In this context, land use and land cover change are considered one of the central components in current strategies for managing natural resources and monitoring environmental changes. In Egypt, urban growth has brought serious losses of agricultural land and water bodies. Urban growth is responsible for a variety of urban environmental issues like decreased air quality, increased runoff and subsequent flooding, increased local temperature, deterioration of water quality, etc. Egypt possessed a number of fast growing cities. Mansoura and Talkha cities in Daqahlia governorate are expanding rapidly with varying growth rates and patterns. In this context, geospatial technologies and remote sensing methodology provide essential tools which can be applied in the analysis of land use change detection. This paper is an attempt to assess the land use change detection by using GIS in Mansoura and Talkha from 1985 to 2010. Change detection analysis shows that built-up area has been increased from 28 to 255 km 2 by more than 30% and agricultural land reduced by 33%. Future prediction is done by using the Markov chain analysis. Information on urban growth, land use and land cover change study is very useful to local government and urban planners for the betterment of future plans of sustainable development of the city.
Abstract Neglecting the temporal variations in population distribution can lead to significant discrepancies in exposure estimations for disaster management, especially in the face of increasing natural hazards due to climate change. Effective disaster management necessitates a nuanced understanding of how the urban environment influences the temporal variations in population distribution. This study addresses this knowledge gap by investigating the relationship between the spatial patterns of urban elements and daytime-nighttime population differences across eight European cities. The study reveals a substantial association between urban form indicators and daytime-nighttime population differences. Although the findings suggest that there is no one-size-fits-all set of indicators for different cities, ‘closeness centrality’, which measures the accessibility of a specific location within the overall street network, is identified as a key proxy for daytime-nighttime population differences across all cities analysed, which can be further linked to the accuracy of hazard exposure estimation. These findings can contribute to enhancing urban resilience by offering insights into spatio-temporal population dynamics and considering their implications for disaster management.
The twenty-first century is witnessing continuous developments and diverse challenges that cannot be understood from a disciplinary perspective alone. This prompted academia to pay attention to the interdisciplinary approach as an entry to acquire the skills needed to face these challenges by creating solutions exceeding the scope of one discipline. Accordingly, and in the context of keenness to apply this approach to the local architectural academia, the study aims to provide a proposed vision for integrating the interdisciplinary approach into architectural design (AD) education through the creation of the Interdisciplinary Architectural Design Studio (IADS), to be included in undergraduate curricula. Therefore, the study first relied on the inductive approach to analyzing the latest literature that recorded experiences about this topic, and examples from the current situation have operationalized this approach in the international and local architectural academia to understand various aspects related to this integration. Secondly, the deductive analytical approach, by surveying to investigate the relevance and effectiveness of applying this approach in AD teaching and mechanisms on which the proposed studio should be based. The study concluded by transforming lessons learned into a proposed framework that can be applied and tested, and that aims to link artistic, scientific, theoretical, and practical aspects and provide a learning environment that encourages building the century competencies.
Cities. Urban geography, Urbanization. City and country
Acoustic scene recordings are often collected from a diverse range of cities. Most existing acoustic scene classification (ASC) approaches focus on identifying common acoustic scene patterns across cities to enhance generalization. However, the potential acoustic differences introduced by city-specific environmental and cultural factors are overlooked. In this paper, we hypothesize that the city-specific acoustic features are beneficial for the ASC task rather than being treated as noise or bias. To this end, we propose City2Scene, a novel framework that leverages city features to improve ASC. Unlike conventional approaches that may discard or suppress city information, City2Scene transfers the city-specific knowledge from pre-trained city classification models to scene classification model using knowledge distillation. We evaluate City2Scene on three datasets of DCASE Challenge Task 1, which include both scene and city labels. Experimental results demonstrate that city features provide valuable information for classifying scenes. By distilling city-specific knowledge, City2Scene effectively improves accuracy across a variety of lightweight CNN backbones, achieving competitive performance to the top-ranked solutions of DCASE Challenge in recent years.
Abstract Urban livability has become a major policy and practice priority in many parts of the world. However, its attainment remains challenging in many cities of developing and emerging economies. The lack of data with appropriate quality, coverage, and spatial and temporal resolution often complicates both the assessment of livability in such cities and the identification of priority areas for improvement. Here we develop a framework to mobilize and synthesize open-source data to analyze spatially urban livability patterns in Shanghai. The framework brings together diverse types of open-source data including housing characteristics, population distribution, transportation networks, and points of interest to identify city areas with low livability, and thus priority areas for improvement. Such findings can provide a comprehensive overview of the residential living conditions in Shanghai, as well as useful information to urban planners and decision-makers. Furthermore, subject to data availability, the proposed method has the potential for application in other cities.
تتناول هذه الورقة البحثية البعد الصوتي لمدن الواحات وتوضح كيف ان الصوت العمراني يمكن ان يعزز ديناميكية جماعية، مما يمكن فريقًا متعدد التخصصات من العمل معاً من أجل وضع تصور مستقبلي للواحات مستمداً من تراثها الثقافي. تقع مدن الواحات في قلب الصحراء وتعتمد على نسيج عمراني قديم مصمم لإنشاء مناخات محلية مكتفية ذاتيًا. الشوارع الضيقة والمتعرجة، والموجهة لتقليل التعرض للشمس، تمتد عبر المدينة. يُظهر هذا النمط العمراني التقليدي للواحات تكيف الإنسان مع البيئة المناخية القاسية. ومع ذلك، فإن التطور الحديث، الذي يركز على نماذج موحدة للتصميم يهدد التوازن البيئي والاجتماعي لهذه المدن. يفترض البحث أن الراحة الحرارية لا تنشأ فقط من التشكيل العمراني والقياسات الحرارية، ولكن تنبع أيضا من الممارسات الاجتماعية التي تكيف هذا العمران مع المناخ القاسي. ولهذا يقدم البحث مفهوم نظري جديد وهو الأجواء العمرانية (urban ambiances) وهو مفهوم فرنسي يتناول الجوانب الحسية والشعورية والوجدانية للفراغ. تستخدم الدراسة نهجًا صوتيًا لتحديد مجموعة من المواقف العمرانية urban situations التي تجمع بين الشكل العمراني والممارسات الاجتماعية والظواهر الحسية. يناقش المؤلفون نتائج ورش العمل الجماعية التي تمت في 2015 في تزنيت بالمغرب وفي 2016 في نفطة بتونس كجزء من مشروع ZERKA الذي يدرس الواحات في حوض البحر المتوسط. التسجيلات الصوتية التي تم جمعها خلال البحث متاحة على منصة Cartophonies التابعة لمختبر CRESSON، مما يوفر تجربة صوتية للقارئ وتنشئ أرشيف صوتي للمدن التي تشهد تحولات عمرانية كبيرة تهدد باختفاء بعض الظواهر الصوتية التي تمثل جزء من التراث الثقافي للمدن.
This paper explores how soundscape approaches can foster a collective dynamic, enabling a multidisciplinary team to reimagine the future of the oasis cities. It provides a new perspective for studying the microclimate of these unique settlements, which pose significant challenges for urban planning. Nestled within the desert, oasis cities rely on an ancient urban fabric designed to create self-sustaining microclimates. This traditional oasis urbanism demonstrates human adaptation to a harsh environment. However, modern development, with its focus on standardized designs and efficiency, threatens the ecological and social balance of these settlements. The research postulates that comfort arises from both the thermal regulations of the specific architecture and the social practices that adapt to the harsh climate. It introduces the concept of ambiance, addressing the sensory and experiential aspects of spaces. The study focuses more on a sonic approach to define urban situations that combine urban form, social practices, and sensory phenomena. The authors discuss collective experiences conducted pn 2015 in Tiznit, Morocco, and in 2016 in Nefta, Tunisia, as part of the ZERKA project funded by the Envimed program.The outcomes published in this research examine both fieldwork approaches and the theoritical reflections they inspired during the project. The sonic recordings are available on the CRESSON laboratory's Cartophonies platform, providing an immersive soundscape experience and creating a sonic archive for cities undergoing transformation.
Cities. Urban geography, Urbanization. City and country
Marisa Fuchs, Polina Unger, Maximiliane Seitz
et al.
Since 2005, there has been an increase in the sharing of functions between the central places of the federal states in Germany. Especially in light of the demographic and structural changes in rural regions, function-sharing city alliances are essential to secure the provision of services of general interest. As part of a central place system, function-sharing city alliances are subject to performance evaluation in some states, but the federal-state development plans do not define the type of evaluation, its function, form or criteria. There is currently no standardised evaluation approach. Using the example of three newly cooperating cities in the Harz planning region (Germany), this paper presents a holistic and tiered model for evaluating the shared provision of high-order services of general interest. The model considers the maturity of the cooperation by combining different forms of evaluation at different points in time. The scorecard technique enables the combination of various quantitative and qualitative criteria in one evaluation system. When developing the model, we applied the real-world lab approach as a research mode to ensure the evaluation model met scientific and practical requirements. The modular nature of the evaluation model enables a transfer to other function-sharing city alliances and can therefore form the basis of a standardised evaluation approach.
Cities. Urban geography, Urbanization. City and country
Matteo Bruno, Hygor Piaget Monteiro Melo, Bruno Campanelli
et al.
Proximity-based cities have attracted much attention in recent years. The 15-minute city, in particular, heralded a new vision for cities where essential services must be easily accessible. Despite its undoubted merit in stimulating discussion on new organisations of cities, the 15-minute city cannot be applicable everywhere, and its very definition raises a few concerns. Here, we tackle the feasibility and practicability of the '15-minute city' model in many cities worldwide. We provide a worldwide quantification of how close cities are to the ideal of the 15-minute city. To this end, we measure the accessibility times to resources and services, and we reveal strong heterogeneity of accessibility within and across cities, with a significant role played by local population densities. We provide an online platform (\href{whatif.sonycsl.it/15mincity}{whatif.sonycsl.it/15mincity}) to access and visualise accessibility scores for virtually all cities worldwide. The heterogeneity of accessibility within cities is one of the sources of inequality. We thus simulate how much a better redistribution of resources and services could heal inequity by keeping the same resources and services or by allowing for virtually infinite resources. We highlight pronounced discrepancies among cities in the minimum number of additional services needed to comply with the 15-minute city concept. We conclude that the proximity-based paradigm must be generalised to work on a wide range of local population densities. Finally, socio-economic and cultural factors should be included to shift from time-based to value-based cities.
Good transport infrastructure and services improve the well-being of all groups of the population, including women, men, children, the elderly and people with disabilities. However, they are often incorrectly considered ‘gender-neutral’. Mobility is socially determined by gender roles related to reproduction, production and community. This research investigates the cohesive relationship of urban transportation, including mobility, gender and care, by studying the case of Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC). The differences between women’s and men’s participation in transportation are identified and connected to gender-role activities. The findings show a clear relationship between urban mobility and gender roles. There is clear evidence of women’s trade-off between travelling less than men and carrying more unpaid work in the family, which is more pronounced for married women who live with their families. Differences in women’s traffic experiences compared to men’s reveal the disadvantages that women face in traffic. The findings of this research will assist the HCMC transport sector and project executive agencies in designing gender-inclusive projects. The dissemination of this research will draw attention to the gender dimension of transport and encourage gender mainstreaming across the transport sector to promote and support equality and women’s empowerment.
Urban green spaces (UGS) play important role in enhancing the socioeconomic and environmental health of cities around the world. For instance, UGS such as playgrounds, parks and residential greenery provide relief from mental and physical stress in densely populated areas. In spite of the significance of UGS in urban life and city development, their depletion rate in sub-Saharan countries seems alarming. Based on mixed methods approach including content analysis of relevant publications and spatiotemporal analyses, this paper discusses urban green spaces depletion in three randomly selected sub-Saharan African cities. The selected cities are Dar es Salaam, Accra, and Luanda. The study reveals a disturbing trajectory of UGS depletion in the selected cities. The causation factors include (a) pressure of rapid urbanization; (b) weak urban planning regulations; (c) socioeconomic challenges; and (d) weak institutions. Policy implications of these findings include the need to prepare and implement public park plans at regional and the local levels, and build institutional competence and capacity to address rapid depletion of urban green spaces (UGS) in sub-Saharan African cities.
Arab oil exporting countries have been advised by the IMF to diversify their economies away from oil and that the way to do that is to adopt the ten principles of the Washington Consensus, which call for liberalization, deregulation and privatization. It is not clear how measures like these are conducive to economic diversification, but the message is obvious—that diversification cannot be done without giving the private sector the driving seat and without the participation of multinationals through foreign direct investment. This paper presents a critical evaluation of the advice given by the IMF to Arab oil exporting countries and conveys a simple message to policy-makers in those countries: that they should handle with care the advice received from the IMF.
Cities. Urban geography, Urbanization. City and country
Every human being in this world produces waste. South Africa is a developing country with many townships that have limited waste resources. Over-increasing population growth overpowers the volume of most municipal authorities to provide even the most essential services. Waste in townships is produced via littering, dumping of bins, cutting of trees, dumping of waste near rivers, and overrunning of waste bins. Waste increases diseases, air pollution, and environmental pollution, and lastly increases gas emissions that contribute to the release of greenhouse gases. The ungathered waste is dumped widely in the streets and drains contributing to flooding, breeding of insects, rodent vectors, and spreading of diseases. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to design a smart waste management system for the city of Johannesburg. The city of Johannesburg contains waste municipality workers and has provided some areas with waste resources such as waste bins and trucks for collecting waste. But the problem is that the resources only are not enough to solve the problem of waste in the city. The waste municipality uses traditional ways of collecting waste such as going to each street and picking up waste bins. The traditional way has worked for years but as the population is increasing more waste is produced which causes various problems for the waste municipalities and the public at large. The proposed system consists of sensors, user applications, and a real-time monitoring system. This paper adopts the experimental methodology.
African cities, faced with rapid urbanization and haphazard land use practices, struggle to address their fast-declining urban green space (UGS). Yet the spatial extent of UGS, and the influence of city planning legislation and frameworks, remains largely unexplored. Using a case study of Kumasi, Ghana, this study draws on mixed methods to address three research questions: (i) How did Kumasi’s UGS evolve from 1991 to 2019? (ii) How do city planning, legislation and the regulatory framework influence UGS management? (iii) What is the land governance institutional culture for managing UGS? Findings from the spatial analysis indicate a loss of over 80 per cent in Kumasi’s UGS between 1991 and 2019. Although unplanned urbanization, poor urban planning and political interference were frequently discussed as contributory factors, the foundational cause was found to lie in the complex and conflicting relationship between land governance agencies. This situation has resulted in the absence of a culture of coordination with regard to urban development, particularly towards UGS.
Rapid urbanization has led to the emergence of slums in many developing and industrialized nations. It degrades the quality of life and burdens the urban amenities resulting in uneven distribution of slums. The majority of people in the developing world live in squatter settlements and these random gatherings disrupt the economic and social developmental plans of the concerned country. No suitable planning framework has been created for replicability on a considerable scale, despite the fact that slum upgrading is acquiring worldwide importance as a political issue. In recent years Jammu City has witnessed high population growth rates resulting in an uneven provision of urban amenities and a surge in slum areas. This paper focuses on a method-based approach using Management Information System (MIS) and Geographic Information System (GIS) for upgrading slums and recommends a planning outline using the approach formulated by the Government of India under the scheme named “Rajiv Awas Yojna” (RAY). The aim of this study is to assess the status of slums, propose redevelopment plans, and highlight the roles of different planning agencies to accomplish the redevelopment goals. The study concludes by postulating several recommendations for upgrading slums and formulating a framework that can be used in other similar areas for development.
Cities are typical dynamic complex systems that connect people and facilitate interactions. Revealing universal collective patterns behind spatio-temporal interactions between residents is crucial for various urban studies, of which we are still lacking a comprehensive understanding. Massive cellphone data enable us to construct interaction networks based on spatio-temporal co-occurrence of individuals. The rank-size distributions of hourly dynamic population of locations are stable, although people are almost constantly moving in cities and hotspots that attract people are changing over time in a day. A larger city is of a stronger heterogeneity as indicated by a larger scaling exponent. After aggregating spatio-temporal interaction networks over consecutive time windows, we reveal a switching behavior of cities between two states. During the "active" state, the whole city is concentrated in fewer larger communities; while in the "sleeping" state, people are scattered in more smaller communities. Above discoveries are universal over diversified cities across continents. In addition, a city sleeps less, when its population grows larger. And spatio-temporal interaction segregation can be well approximated by residential segregation in smaller cities, but not in larger ones. We propose a temporal-population-weighted-opportunity model by integrating time-dependent departure probability to make dynamic predictions on human mobility, which can reasonably well explain observed patterns of spatio-temporal interactions in cities.
The reduction of greenhouse gases from buildings forms the cornerstone of policy to mitigate the effects of climate change. However, the automation of urban scale building energy modeling systems required to meet global urban demand has proven challenging due to the bespoke characteristics of each city. One such point of uniqueness between cities is that of urban microclimate, which may play a major role in altering the performance of energy efficiency in buildings. This research proposes a way to rapidly collect urban microclimate data through the utilization of satellite readings and climate reanalysis. We then demonstrate the potential utility of this data by composing an analysis against three years of monthly building energy consumption data from New York City. As a whole, microclimate in New York City may be responsible for large swings in urban energy consumption. We estimate that Central Park may reduce the electricity consumption of adjacent buildings by 5-10%, while vegetation overall seems to have no appreciable impact on gas consumption. We find that favorable urban microclimates may decrease the gas consumption of some buildings in New York by 71% while others may increase gas consumption by as much as 221%. Additionally, microclimates may be responsible for the decrease of electricity consumption by 28.6% in regions or increases of 77% consumption in others. This work provides a method of curating global, high resolution microclimate data, allowing researchers to explore the invisible walls of urban microclimate which interact with the buildings around them.