Abstract Since February 2022 many Ukrainians have been being forcibly displaced in the ongoing war. However, little is known regarding the experiences of internationally displaced Ukrainians. This article explores these experiences and unpacks their return migration aspirations, through in-depth interviews, participatory workshops, and participatory observation with Ukrainians displaced to Spain and Sweden (May-December 2023), as well as policy and context analysis. Building on the aspirations-capabilities framework, we analyse how aspirations and capabilities, combined with macro and micro-factors, shape the narratives and decision-making processes of these displaced individuals regarding a possible return. Our findings reveal the interplay between macro sociopolitical environments and micro-factors such as stigma and trauma, highlighting a strong gender dimension. We showcase the concept of “virtual return”, underlining the role of digital connectivity in maintaining transnational ties and contributing to home country recovery. The study provides nuanced insights into the multifaceted nature of (return) migration and critical implications for both Ukrainian and EU migration policies.
Abstract This article examines how gender identities are relationally constructed and strategically negotiated in marriages between Syrian refugee women and Egyptian men in Egypt. Based on in-depth interviews with 33 women and 9 men, the study explores how uprooting, legal precarity, and social asymmetries shape performances of idealized masculinity and femininity. It introduces the concept of negotiated femininities to describe how displaced women navigate structural vulnerability through context-sensitive gender performances, while men enact protective masculinities centered on provision and moral authority. Although Syrian women are idealized for their perceived virtues of docility and domesticity, their narratives expose tensions that both challenge and affirm ideals of hegemonic masculinity. Framed as a “dance of virtue and protection,” the paper contributes to debates on Arab masculinities, inter-Arab and cross-national marriage, refugee-host relations, and the gendered politics of displacement, highlighting marriage as a site of complex negotiation, reciprocal gender role formation, and a pathway for self-resettlement.
Abstract Over the past few decades, the forms and geographies of international retirement migration have diversified globally. An outstanding example of this is Hungary, a destination for both retirement migrants from Western Europe and older people, mainly ethnic Hungarian migrants from neighbouring regions. While an increasing body of literature deals with the spatiality of international retirement migration, only a few studies have analysed the settlement choices of older immigrants in receiving countries. To fill this gap, our paper presents a multi-level analysis of the spatial characteristics of the older adults who are settling in Hungary. We examine two different groups of older people arriving in Hungary to identify the factors that may influence their choice of place of residence and explain the possible reasons for their mobility. The empirical data pertain to German and Ukrainian individuals aged over 60, whose migration choices, because their places of residence are characterised by remarkably different geographical patterns, can be considered distinct. Based on a multivariate statistical analysis of the size and distribution of German and Ukrainian migrants aged 60 and over, we found that only some of the German older adults arrive in Hungary as ‘classic’ lifestyle migrants. However, many of them live in urban areas or disadvantaged regions. In contrast, older persons from Ukraine, primarily ethnic Hungarians, are concentrated along the Ukrainian border or choose to reside in urban municipalities located farther from the border. Data suggest that retired people arriving in Hungary are driven mainly by economic strategies, which, in our view, can be identified as different forms of geoarbitrage, namely, higher pension-seeking among Ukrainians and escaping relative deprivation among Germans. The increasing number of older migrants entails new challenges at the local level, requiring municipalities to expand social services, underscoring the political relevance of our findings.
Abstract This study examines how crisis dynamics enabled Japan’s exclusionary border control during the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on policy documents, content analysis, and international comparison, it reveals how emergency measures evolved into prolonged restrictions targeting foreign nationals. Japan maintained some of the strictest entry bans among developed nations, often exceeding epidemiological justification. The analysis demonstrates how crisis contexts facilitate exclusionary politics, turning borders into tools for political legitimation. These policies imposed significant economic, educational, and diplomatic costs. The findings illuminate the politics of foreign entry in times of crisis and underscore tensions between populist control and democratic inclusion.
This paper presents a hopeful perspective on the potentially dramatic impacts of Large Language Models on how we children learn and how they will expect to interact with technology. We review the effects of LLMs on education so far, and make the case that these effects are minor compared to the upcoming changes that are occurring. We present a small scenario and self-ethnographic study demonstrating the effects of these changes, and define five significant considerations that interactive systems designers will have to accommodate in the future.
Accurate origin-destination (OD) flow prediction is of great importance to developing cities, as it can contribute to optimize urban structures and layouts. However, with the common issues of missing regional features and lacking OD flow data, it is quite daunting to predict OD flow in developing cities. To address this challenge, we propose a novel Causality-Enhanced OD Flow Prediction (CE-OFP), a unified framework that aims to transfer urban knowledge between cities and achieve accuracy improvements in OD flow predictions across data-scarce cities. In specific, we propose a novel reinforcement learning model to discover universal causalities among urban features in data-rich cities and build corresponding causal graphs. Then, we further build Causality-Enhanced Variational Auto-Encoder (CE-VAE) to incorporate causal graphs for effective feature reconstruction in data-scarce cities. Finally, with the reconstructed features, we devise a knowledge distillation method with a graph attention network to migrate the OD prediction model from data-rich cities to data-scare cities. Extensive experiments on two pairs of real-world datasets validate that the proposed CE-OFP remarkably outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, which can reduce the RMSE of OD flow prediction for data-scarce cities by up to 11%.
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.
Smart cities stand as pivotal components in the ongoing pursuit of elevating urban living standards, facilitating the rapid expansion of urban areas while efficiently managing resources through sustainable and scalable innovations. In this regard, as emerging technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI), the Internet of Things (IoT), big data analytics, and fog and edge computing have become increasingly prevalent, smart city applications grapple with various challenges, including the potential for unauthorized disclosure of confidential and sensitive data. The seamless integration of emerging technologies has played a vital role in sustaining the dynamic pace of their development. This paper explores the substantial potential and applications of Deep Learning (DL), Federated Learning (FL), IoT, Blockchain, Natural Language Processing (NLP), and large language models (LLMs) in optimizing ICT processes within smart cities. We aim to spotlight the vast potential of these technologies as foundational elements that technically strengthen the realization and advancement of smart cities, underscoring their significance in driving innovation within this transformative urban milieu. Our discourse culminates with an exploration of the formidable challenges that DL, FL, IoT, Blockchain, NLP, and LLMs face within these contexts, and we offer insights into potential future directions.
Margarita Mishina, Mingyi He, Venu Garikapati
et al.
Urban development is shaped by historical, geographical, and economic factors, presenting challenges for planners in understanding urban form. This study models commute flows across multiple U.S. cities, uncovering consistent patterns in urban population distributions and commuting behaviors. By embedding urban locations to reflect mobility networks, we observe that population distributions across redefined urban spaces tend to approximate log-normal distributions, in contrast to the often irregular distributions found in geographical space. This divergence suggests that natural and historical constraints shape spatial population patterns, while, under ideal conditions, urban organization may naturally align with log-normal distribution. A theoretical model using preferential attachment and random walks supports the emergence of this distribution in urban settings. These findings reveal a fundamental organizing principle in urban systems that, while not always visible geographically, consistently governs population flows and distributions. This insight into the underlying urban structure can inform planners seeking to design efficient, resilient cities.
Caring for the elderly, aging-in-place, and enabling the elderly to maintain a good life continue to be topics of increasing importance, especially in countries with a higher percentage of older people, as people live longer, and care-giving costs rise. This position paper proposes the concept of urban agetech, where agetech services beyond the home can be an integral part of a modern ageing-friendly city, and where support for the elderly, where needed, in the form of automated systems (e.g., robots and automated vehicles) would be a normal city function/service, akin to the rather commonplace public transport services today.
Abstract Background Community surveillance for acute respiratory illness (ARI) can include unsupervised participant-collected nasal swabs. Little is known about use of self-swabs in low-income populations or among households including extended family members and the validity of self-collected swabs. We assessed the acceptability, feasibility, and validity of unsupervised participant-collected nasal swabs in a low-income, community sample. Methods This was a substudy of a larger prospective community-based ARI surveillance study in 405 households in New York City. Participating household members self-collected swabs on the day of a research home visit for an index case, and for 3–6 subsequent days. Demographics associated with agreement to participate and swab collection were assessed, and index case self-collected versus research staff–collected swab results were compared. Results Most households (n = 292 [89.6%]) agreed to participate, including 1310 members. Being <18 years old, female, and the household reporter or member of the nuclear family (parents and children) were associated with both agreement to participate and self-swab collection. Being born in the United States or immigrating ≥10 years ago was associated with participation, and being Spanish-speaking and having less than a high school education were associated with swab collection. In all, 84.4% collected at least 1 self-swabbed specimen; self-swabbing rates were highest during the first 4 collection days. Concordance between research staff–collected swabs and self-swabs was 88.4% for negative swabs, 75.0% for influenza, and 69.4% for noninfluenza pathogens. Conclusions Self-swabbing was acceptable, feasible, and valid in this low-income, minoritized population. Some differences in participation and swab collection were identified that could be noted by future researchers and modelers.
Abstract A consistent finding in the public opinion literature shows that individuals who attain higher levels of education are more likely to express pro-immigrant attitudes. The ideational hypothesis suggests that ideas learned during formal education drive this empirical relationship. In this article, we develop this hypothesis further by asking, "What types of ideas socialize pro-immigrant attitudes?" We argue that exposure to social theories during higher education promotes social inclusivity and tolerance, leading to positive views toward immigrants. This article draws theoretical insights from attitudinal-based theories of immigrant sentiment to construct a mediation model linking ideas from the classroom to attitudes toward immigrants. Using original data from a population-based survey in South Korea, we examine the relationship between respondents’ prior enrollment in different academic courses and their attitudes toward immigrants. We measure exposure to social theories as enrollment in social science and arts & humanities and find that only social science courses are positively associated with pro-immigrant attitudes. We also examine whether enrollment exhibits indirect effects via previously identified attitudinal determinants of immigrant sentiment. Results from our mediation analysis show that enrollment in social science courses is associated with stronger cosmopolitan views and negatively correlates with isolationist attitudes. In contrast, we find that enrollments in courses unrelated to social theories, like math & science and engineering, are not statistically significant predictors of immigrant attitudes. We interpret our results as observational evidence consistent with ideational-based explanations for pro-immigrant attitudes.
Abstract In this rejoinder we argue, based on the papers of this commentary series, that ‘race’ is such a tricky notion because it can be used in (at least) two very different and contradictory ways—as a concept to disentangle racism and racialisation (what M’charek calls the ‘work race actually does’) and as a way of categorization and social classification, in which case it might create the very essentialised hierarchies ‘race’ as a critical concept tries to disentangle. We wonder if it is indeed possible to use ‘race’ as a concept without evoking ‘race’ as a social classification. At first, we give a short summary of the four discussion papers and then delve into two aspects the papers share, namely the need for spatial and temporal contextualization and comparison, as well as their choice not to take up our invitation to compare race as a category with gender. In a second step we will discuss two points arising from the papers, (1) ‘race’ as category, not as lens, often resulting in essentialism and (2) ‘race’ as potentially obscuring racism and racialisation. We conclude by proposing to give more space to complexity.
In 2022, upon the unexpected activation of the Temporary Protection Directive (TPD) by the Council Implementing Decision 2022/382, the Member States had to revive the EU law that had not been used for over 20 years. Poland adopted a new law that was aimed at offering extended rights to Ukrainian nationals and their family members. Other persons enjoying temporary protection under EU law were offered general protection available in Poland since 2003. This contribution sets out to answer the question of whether Poland followed the TPD and the Council Implementing Decision 2022/382 in its two-way response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The article is based on a comparative analysis of Polish and EU law, doctrinal views concerning temporary protection and available information about domestic practice. It focuses on the following areas of interest: eligibility for temporary protection, residence permits, accommodation, family reunification, returns and measures after temporary protection ends, and remedies. The analysis conducted showed that Polish law on temporary protection is not fully compatible with the respective EU law. In the selected areas of interest, Poland either did not thoroughly follow the Council Implementing Decision 2022/382 or did not meet the minimum standards arising from the TPD.
Colonies and colonization. Emigration and immigration. International migration, City population. Including children in cities, immigration
Cities play an important role in achieving sustainable development goals (SDGs) to promote economic growth and meet social needs. Especially satellite imagery is a potential data source for studying sustainable urban development. However, a comprehensive dataset in the United States (U.S.) covering multiple cities, multiple years, multiple scales, and multiple indicators for SDG monitoring is lacking. To support the research on SDGs in U.S. cities, we develop a satellite imagery dataset using deep learning models for five SDGs containing 25 sustainable development indicators. The proposed dataset covers the 100 most populated U.S. cities and corresponding Census Block Groups from 2014 to 2023. Specifically, we collect satellite imagery and identify objects with state-of-the-art object detection and semantic segmentation models to observe cities' bird's-eye view. We further gather population, nighttime light, survey, and built environment data to depict SDGs regarding poverty, health, education, inequality, and living environment. We anticipate the dataset to help urban policymakers and researchers to advance SDGs-related studies, especially applying satellite imagery to monitor long-term and multi-scale SDGs in cities.
Hand, foot, and mouth disease (HFMD) is a common childhood infectious disease caused by human enteroviruses (EV). This study aimed to describe the epidemiological features of HFMD and the genetic characteristics of Coxsackievirus A16 (CVA16) in Taiyuan, Shanxi, China, from 2010 to 2021. Descriptive epidemiological methods were used to analyze the time and population distribution of HFMD and the genetic characteristics of CVA16. Except being affected by the COVID-19 epidemic in 2020, HFMD epidemics were sporadic from January to March each year, and began to increase in April, with a major epidemic peak from May to August, which declined in September, followed by a secondary peak from October to December. The prevalence of EV infection was the highest in children aged one to five years (84.42%), whereas its incidence was very low in children under one year of age (5.48%). Enterovirus nucleic acid was detected by real-time reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction in 6641 clinical specimens collected from patients with HFMD from 2010 to 2021, and 4236 EV-positive specimens were detected, including 988 enterovirus A71 (EV-A71), 1488 CVA16, and 1760 other enteroviruses. CVA16 remains prevalent and has co-circulated with other EVs in Taiyuan from 2010 to 2021. A phylogenetic tree constructed based on the VP1 region showed that all CVA16 strains belonged to two different clades of the B1 genotype, B1a and B1b. They showed a nucleotide similarity of 86.5–100%, and an amino acid similarity of 96.9–100%. Overall, these findings add to the global genetic resources of CVA16, demonstrate the epidemiological characteristics of HFMD as well as the genetic features of CVA16 in Taiyuan City during 2010–2021, and provide supporting evidence for the prevention and control of HFMD.
With populations rapidly aging, the development over time in the cognitive function among the elderly approaching or reaching retirement is important for successful aging at work and planning pension policies. However, few studies in this field focus on this age group. This study characterizes time trends in cognitive function among 55-69-year-old Europeans from 2006 to 2015, and compares these trends by region, gender, and education. This study analyzes 40,689 subjects in Waves 2, 4, 5 and 6 of the Survey of Health, Aging and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) covering ten countries. Cognitive function was measured by Recall and Verbal Fluency. Educational levels were classified by quartiles. A Generalized Estimating Equation (GEE) model was used to explore the association between cognitive function and development over time after controlling for confounders. Further stratification analysis using GEE models was conducted, stratified by region, gender and education. Cognitive function improved significantly in southern and central Europe over the observed timeframe, whereas it did not in northern Europe. Those with relative low levels of formal education displayed the most rapid increases in cognitive function in southern and central Europe. Among those with lower education in southern Europe, males’ cognitive function improved more quickly than females’. The improvement of cognitive function at ages 55-69 in southern and central Europe may contribute to continuing engagement with productive activities in old age. Educational interventions for people with lower levels of education may be most effective in achieving such engagement. This paper extends the literature on the development over time in the cognitive function among the elderly close to retirement age in Europe by analysing southern, central and northern Europe, as well as differences by region, gender and education. The results may provide evidence for planning pension policies and educational interventions.
Urban groups. The city. Urban sociology, City population. Including children in cities, immigration
Emily Muller, Emily Gemmell, Ishmam Choudhury
et al.
The interactions of individuals with city neighbourhoods is determined, in part, by the perceived quality of urban environments. Perceived neighbourhood quality is a core component of urban vitality, influencing social cohesion, sense of community, safety, activity and mental health of residents. Large-scale assessment of perceptions of neighbourhood quality was pioneered by the Place Pulse projects. Researchers demonstrated the efficacy of crowd-sourcing perception ratings of image pairs across 56 cities and training a model to predict perceptions from street-view images. Variation across cities may limit Place Pulse's usefulness for assessing within-city perceptions. In this paper, we set forth a protocol for city-specific dataset collection for the perception: 'On which street would you prefer to walk?'. This paper describes our methodology, based in London, including collection of images and ratings, web development, model training and mapping. Assessment of within-city perceptions of neighbourhoods can identify inequities, inform planning priorities, and identify temporal dynamics. Code available: https://emilymuller1991.github.io/urban-perceptions/.
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.