Hasil untuk "Urbanization. City and country"

Stefan Siedentop, Maximilian Schartmann

In recent years, land prices in Germany have skyrocketed to levels that were hardly thought possible. This has particularly affected prospering cities, where price increases of more than 100 % have often been recorded since the turn of the millennium. The underlying causes are highly controversial. While some scholars point to the scarcity of developable land due to regulatory restrictions, others see the “financialization” of housing markets in the wake of the financial crisis and the massive influx of liquid capital into land and housing markets as the decisive driver. Against this background, this paper investigates the spatial patterns of land price dynamics in North Rhine-Westphalia during a phase of strong demographic and economic reurbanization. We used disaggregated data from the BORIS system for the years 2012 to 2024, which is available state-wide and georeferenced. Our empirical findings point to a significant trend of market polarization, with excessive growth rates in prospering metropolitan areas and real value losses in some rural areas. Overall, the paper offers new insights into the spatial patterns of urban land markets and possible driving factors explaining uneven developments.

Shuai Pang, Junlong Zhang, Yu Liu et al.

Urban space is highly heterogeneous, with population and human activities concentrating in localized centers. However, the global organization of such intra-urban centers remains poorly understood due to the lack of consistent, comparable data. Here we develop a scalable geospatial framework to identify intra-urban activity centers worldwide using nighttime light observations. Applying this approach to more than 9,500 cities, we construct a high-resolution global dataset of over 15,000 centers. We uncover a striking regularity: despite vast differences in city size, regional development, and population density, the built-up area associated with individual centers remains remarkably consistent. Across cities, total urban area scales proportionally with the number of centers, yielding a stable mean spatial footprint. This regularity holds at the micro-scale, where Voronoi-based service areas exhibit a characteristic size that is persistent across countries and independent of local population concentration. As a geometric consequence, this polycentric multiplication maintains stable average distances to the nearest center as cities expand, preventing the accessibility decay inherent in monocentric growth. These findings reveal a universal organizing principle whereby urban expansion is accommodated through the replication of activity centers with a consistent spatial extent, providing a new empirical foundation for understanding the nature of urban growth.

Muhammad Sabil FAROOQ, Nazia FEROZE, Tongshun CHENG et al.

Within the context of ecological civilization, this study examines Pakistan’s path toward green urbanization. This study’s main driving force is Pakistan’s rapidly urbanizing landscape, which makes it imperative to address environmental degradation and advance sustainable development. A paradigm change towards green urbanization is required because of the multiple environmental difficulties brought about by urbanization in Pakistan, such as pollution, resource depletion, and habitat loss. This study examines the current status of green urbanization in Pakistan through a thorough analysis using a mixed-methods methodology that combines quantitative data analysis with qualitative evaluations. The findings show that, although there are regional variations in the extent of implementation, there is a growing consciousness of and desire to implement eco-friendly policies and practices within urban areas. Goals for green urbanization are seriously hampered by issues including poor infrastructure, scarce resources, and institutional capacity limitations. However, there are encouraging indications of development such as programs supporting green building techniques, sustainable transportation, and renewable energy. Beyond the confines of academia, the research has implications that teach stakeholders, legislators, and urban planners about the necessity of incorporating ecological principles into urban development initiatives. Pakistan can reduce environmental risks, increase climate change resistance, and promote inclusive, sustainable cities for future generations by adopting green urbanization.

Jeasurk Yang, Sumin Lee, Sungwon Park et al.

Mongolia is among the countries undergoing rapid urbanization, and its temporary nomadic dwellings-known as Ger-have expanded into urban areas. Ger settlements in cities are increasingly recognized as slums by their socio-economic deprivation. The distinctive circular, tent-like shape of gers enables their detection through very-high-resolution satellite imagery. We develop a computer vision algorithm to detect gers in Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia, utilizing satellite images collected from 2015 to 2023. Results reveal that ger settlements have been displaced towards the capital's peripheral areas. The predicted slum ratio based on our results exhibits a significant correlation (r = 0.84) with the World Bank's district-level poverty data. Our nationwide extrapolation suggests that slums may continue to take up one-fifth of the population after the COVID-19 pandemic, contrary to other official predictions that anticipated a decline. We discuss the potential of machine learning on satellite imagery in providing insights into urbanization patterns and monitoring the Sustainable Development Goals.

Luis Sanchez, Luis Muñoz, Jose Antonio Galache et al.

This paper describes the deployment and experimentation architecture of the Internet of Things experimentation facility being deployed at Santander city. The facility is implemented within the SmartSantander project, one of the projects of the Future Internet Research and Experimentation initiative of the European Commission and represents a unique in the world city-scale experimental research facility. Additionally, this facility supports typical applications and services of a smart city. Tangible results are expected to influence the definition and specification of Future Internet architecture design from viewpoints of Internet of Things and Internet of Services. The facility comprises a large number of Internet of Things devices deployed in several urban scenarios which will be federated into a single testbed. In this paper the deployment being carried out at the main location, namely Santander city, is described. Besides presenting the current deployment, in this article the main insights in terms of the architectural design of a large-scale IoT testbed are presented as well. Furthermore, solutions adopted for implementation of the different components addressing the required testbed functionalities are also sketched out. The IoT experimentation facility described in this paper is conceived to provide a suitable platform for large scale experimentation and evaluation of IoT concepts under real-life conditions.

Andrei Khurshudov

Cities worldwide are rapidly adopting smart technologies, transforming urban life. Despite this trend, a universally accepted definition of 'smart city' remains elusive. Past efforts to define it have not yielded a consensus, as evidenced by the numerous definitions in use. In this paper, we endeavored to create a new 'compromise' definition that should resonate with most experts previously involved in defining this concept and aimed to validate one of the existing definitions. We reviewed 60 definitions of smart cities from industry, academia, and various relevant organizations, employing transformer architecture-based generative AI and semantic text analysis to reach this compromise. We proposed a semantic similarity measure as an evaluation technique, which could generally be used to compare different smart city definitions, assessing their uniqueness or resemblance. Our methodology employed generative AI to analyze various existing definitions of smart cities, generating a list of potential new composite definitions. Each of these new definitions was then tested against the pre-existing individual definitions we have gathered, using cosine similarity as our metric. This process identified smart city definitions with the highest average cosine similarity, semantically positioning them as the closest on average to all the 60 individual definitions selected.

Andy Jingqian Xue, Chenyu Huang, Bin Jiang

As urban critic Jane Jacobs conceived, a city is essentially the problem of organized complexity. What underlies the complexity refers to a structural factor, called living structure, which is defined as a mathematical structure composed of hierarchically organized substructures. Through these substructures, the complexity of cities, or equivalent to the livingness of urban space (L), can be measured by the multiplication the number of cities or substructures (S) and their scaling hierarchy (H), indicating that complexity is about both quantity of cities and how well the city is organized hierarchically. In other words, complexity emerges from a hierarchical structure where there are far more small cities or substructures than large ones across all scales, and cities are more or less similar within each individual hierarchical level. In this paper, we conduct comprehensive case studies to investigate urban complexity on a global scale using multisource geospatial data. We develop an efficient approach to recursively identifying all natural cities with their inner hotspots worldwide through connected component analysis. To characterize urban complexity, urban space is initially represented as a hierarchy of recursively defined natural cities, and all the cities are then represented as a network for measuring the degree of complexity or livingness of the urban space. The results show the Earth's surface is growing more complex from an economic perspective, and the dynamics of urban complexity are more explicit from nighttime light imagery than from population data. We further discuss the implications in city science, aiming to help create and recreate urban environments that are more resilient and livable by fostering organized complexity from the perspective of living structure.

A.A. Tafida, A.L. Tukur, E.F. Adebayo et al.

This study examines the vulnerability of rural households in eight selected insurgency-affected communities using the household vulnerability index with particular consideration to six main components of socio-demographics, healthcare, food security, water resources, conflicts and marketing, and access to finance as effect factors caused by Boko Haram Insurgency. Primary data used for the analysis were generated using an interview schedule among 280 household respondents in eight communities, selected using a purposive random sampling technique in July-September 2019. Livelihood Vulnerability Index (LVI) was used to analyse the data. The result showed that Gulak, Shuwa, Vih, and Lughu were the most vulnerable communities. The major components that contributed substantially to the overall LVIs were the conflict index, market, and financial index. The results have implications for adaptive and household resilient projects by the government and other humanitarian organizations for specific target interventions in the area. The insurgency has adversely affected rural households in Adamawa State, North East Nigeria. Therefore, enhancing infrastructure facilities, provision of basic amenities, access to market and finance, and improving the security architecture of the region will go a long way in addressing the plight and vulnerability of the people.

Xi Chen, Wei Hu, Jingru Yu et al.

Urban growth sometimes leads to rigid infrastructure that struggles to adapt to changing demand. This paper introduces a novel approach, aiming to enable cities to evolve and respond more effectively to such dynamic demand. It identifies the limitations arising from the complexity and inflexibility of existing urban systems. A framework is presented for enhancing the city's adaptability perception through advanced sensing technologies, conducting parallel simulation via graph-based techniques, and facilitating autonomous decision-making across domains through decentralized and autonomous organization and operation. Notably, a symbiotic mechanism is employed to implement these technologies practically, thereby making urban management more agile and responsive. In the case study, we explore how this approach can optimize traffic flow by adjusting lane allocations. This case not only enhances traffic efficiency but also reduces emissions. The proposed evolutionary city offers a new perspective on sustainable urban development, highliting the importance of integrated intelligence within urban systems.

Sukanya Ghosh, Deepak Kumar, Rina Kumari

Pervasive development across the country has resulted in unprecedented urbanization with a phenomenal change to the urban landscape. This rapid expansion of cities has generated characteristic local urban climates with an increased land surface temperature (LST) and the intensities of urban heat islands (UHI). The study on LST and UHI can be performed to investigate the spatiotemporal variation in dynamics of land surface temperature and satellite-derived indices for enhanced urban planning and development. The study undertakes a comprehensive assessment for the city of Bangalore to understand its impact on environmental quality. The corresponding satellite-derived indices like Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), Normalized Difference Built-up Index (NDBI), and Modified Normalized Difference Water Index (MNDWI) are used to express the Built-up area (BUA) to analyse the dynamics of LST on UHI profiles. The results of the study reveal that the mean LST has a positive correlation for impervious surfaces and a negative correlation with the green surfaces, which is common for all Indian cities and it results in degradation of environmental eminence. The results shows that the area has undergone a drastic transformation and has resulted in a rise in overall temperature and UHI intensity due to an increase of urbanized areas by 3% between 2007 and 2020. The urban policy and planning for new town development is being seen from various aspects such as design and architecture, geography, and sociology, with much of the literature concentrating on the substantive challenges of the development process. However the account of its technical challenges arising from the influential actors and factors are lacking in the planning process of smart cities. This works address focuses on the critical assessment of the spatiotemporal dynamics of land surface temperature and satellite-derived indices as key factors and actors involved in development decisions of New town development and suburbanization planning. The discoveries of the study can be endorsed to monitor the impacts of UHI intensity for future studies and can be used for sustainable urban planning of cities.

Yvette Santos

Este artigo pretende explorar o modo como o regresso dos emigrantes (ou a sua intencionalidade) foi concebido pelo Estado Novo. A bibliografia centrada nesta temática tem incidido no período posterior ao 25 de Abril de 1974/à Revolução dos Cravos. Embora se tenham registado movimentos de regresso após a Segunda Guerra Mundial, evidenciou-se a inexistência de uma política estruturada com esse intuito por parte das autoridades competentes.Recorrendo às fontes históricas, o propósito do presente artigo é demonstrar os paradoxos entre o discurso e as diligências do Estado Novo. Para todos os efeitos, a questão do regresso esteve presente no pensamento e nas ações institucionais da ditadura portuguesa. Por um lado, a racionalidade aplicada na gestão das saídas legais a partir de 1945 revela uma preocupação em gerir o fluxo dos regressos desejados e indesejados. Por outro lado, a emigração para os países europeus permitiu reconsiderar o papel dos emigrantes regressados, dentro do quadro das mudanças de mentalidade institucional sobre a sua utilidade na sociedade de origem, uma visão que, ainda hoje, em democracia, repercute nas políticas migratórios do Estado português.

Martina Fuchs

Book Review

Omar Cheikhrouhou, Ichrak Amdouni, Khaleel Mershad et al.

Cybersecurity is an inherent characteristic that should be addressed before the large deployment of smart city applications. Recently, Blockchain appears as a promising technology to provide several cybersecurity aspects of smart city applications. This paper provides a comprehensive review of the existing blockchain-based solutions for the cybersecurity of the main smart city applications, namely smart healthcare, smart transportation, smart agriculture, supply chain management, smart grid, and smart homes. We describe the existing solutions and we discuss their merits and limits. Moreover, we define the security requirements of each smart city application and we give a mapping of the studied solutions to these defined requirements. Additionally, future directions are given. We believe that the present survey is a good starting point for every researcher in the fields of cybersecurity, blockchain, and smart cities.

Jaffar Abbas

The existing literature has paid insufficient attention to crisis management of global health challenges in the advent of epidemics and pandemics. This study articulates resilience importance and opportunities in the COVID-19 from crisis management challenges in essential ways. The second wave of the COVID-19 infectious disease's rapid global spread has developed a severe threat to global peace, which has posed global mental health and crisis management issues worldwide. Public health implementations' aggressive actions recommended a series of precautionary safety measures by the health specialists to suppress, sustain, and manage the local transmission of the COVID-19 pandemic. This study explores adverse consequences of the COVID-19 on communities' behavioral and interventional changes that might specify transmission dynamics. This present study recommends two model strategies that help sustain the rapid transmission and COVID-19′s adverse impacts on mental health in the general population and patients needing treatment. This study proposes mitigation and suppression models in the absence of a vaccine to decrease and manage the healthcare systems' burdens of treating patients. This global health emergency has challenged the global healthcare systems worldwide, and Governments are struggling to upgrade the healthcare systems to provide the best possible healthcare facilities to the patients. The healthcare systems in Pakistan are undeveloped to manage this global health emergency efficiently. Scientists' have already initiated experimental trials worldwide to develop vaccines to treat this infectious disease; however, the proposed two models are useful in managing the health emergency in the present situation. This study discusses global healthcare challenges, crisis management, and two model interventional strategies that help minimize the COVID-19′s rapid spread with practical crisis management preventive measures to reduce burden on healthcare systems.

Mwoya Byaro, Juvenal Nkonoki, Hozen Mayaya

This study examines the contribution of trade openness to health outcomes (measured in terms of under-five mortality and life expectancy) in 33 sub-Saharan African countries using a two-step system Generalized Methods of Moments (GMM) estimator over the year 2000–2016, while controlling for endogeneity of variables (i.e. omitted variables bias and reverse causality). The findings show that, trade openness and measles vaccination reduces under-five mortality in the region. The findings reveal that, trade openness, income (GDP per capita), and health financing (total public and private health expenditure) all contribute to a longer life expectancy. Overall, it was found that trade openness is statistically significant and contributes to health improvement (i.e. under-five mortality and life expectancy). This implies that the health sector in sub-Saharan African countries is not at risk as a result of increased trade. However, the study recommends easing and increasing trade to allow governments to obtain more financial resources to improve the welfare of their people, to include health professionals in future trade negotiations and agreements for public health benefits, and take steps to remove import duties on health related products. These findings have significant implications for sub-Saharan Africa, as well as other developing countries.

Geoffrey L. Cueto, Francis Aldrine A. Uy, Keith Anshilo Diaz

General Santos City, as the tuna capital of the Philippines, relies with the presence of tricycles in moving people and goods. Considered as a highly-urbanized city, General Santos City serves as vital link of the entire SOCKSARGEN region's economic activities. With the current thrust of the city in providing a sustainable transport service, several options were identified to adopt in the entire city, that includes cleaner and better transport mode. Electric tricycle is an after sought alternative that offers better choice in terms of identified factors of sustainable transport: reliability, safety, comfort, environment, affordability, and facility. A literature review was conducted to provide a comparison of cost and emission between a motorized tricycle and an e-tricycle. The study identified the existing tricycle industry of the city and reviewed the modal share with the city's travel pattern. The survey revealed a number of hazards were with the current motorized tricycle that needs to address for the welfare of the passengers and drivers. The study favors the shift to adopting E-tricycle. The model derived from binary logistics regression provided a 72.72% model accuracy. Based from the results and findings, electric tricycle can be an alternative mode of public transport in the city that highly support sustainable option that provides local populace to improve their quality of life through mobility and economic activity. Further recommendation to local policy makers in the transport sector of the city include the clustering of barangays for better traffic management and franchise regulation, the inclusion of transport-related infrastructure related to tricycle service with their investment planning and programming, the roll out and implementation of tricycle code of the city, and the piloting activity of introducing e-tricycle in the city.

Scott W. Hegerty

Decades of deindustrialization have led to economic decline and population loss throughout the U.S. Midwest, with the highest national poverty rates found in Detroit, Cleveland, and Buffalo. This poverty is often confined to core cities themselves, however, as many of their surrounding suburbs continue to prosper. Poverty can therefore be highly concentrated at the MSA level, but more evenly distributed within the borders of the city proper. One result of this disparity is that if suburbanites consider poverty to be confined to the central city, they might be less willing to devote resources to alleviate it. But due to recent increases in suburban poverty, particularly since the 2008 recession, such urban-suburban gaps might be shrinking. Using Census tract-level data, this study quantifies poverty concentrations for four "Rust Belt" MSAs, comparing core-city and suburban concentrations in 2000, 2010, and 2015. There is evidence of a large gap between core cities and outlying areas, which is closing in the three highest-poverty cities, but not in Milwaukee. A set of four comparison cities show a smaller, more stable city-suburban divide in the U.S. "Sunbelt," while Chicago resembles a "Rust Belt" metro.

Ferah Burgul Adıgüzel

Places of literary memory include the literary past of a society and all kinds of meaning patterns. The function of literary memory places is to determine the state of all sorts of literary products and their creators, protect and immortalize them in order to prevent them from being forgotten. For example, the works of an author, the production process she/he underwent, and all events, people, etc. involved in her/his life during this process may fall within this scope. Ankara, as the subject of literary works, as the place where literary works were written, and as the home of authors living in it, can be defined as a place of literary memory. There are six literary museums in Ankara, where interactive activities can be conducted in line with the purpose and scope of literature education. Many educational or artistic interactive activities in literary museums facilitate the spread of literature education because they are implemented outside of school settings. In addition to supporting literature education, literary museums provide a collective perception of Ankara as a literary place through conveying the literary culture of the city. The purpose of this study is to encourage prospective Turkish language and literature teachers to perceive Ankara as a place of literary memory, as well as to raise their awareness in literary museums through the use of creative drama-based activities held in literary museums. The study was designed as a case study –a qualitative research design. Purposeful sampling method was used in the study. Data was collected through a semi-structured interview form, student diaries, and process evaluation notes/products. Descriptive analysis was used to analyze and interpret the data. The study concludes that the activities conducted in the literary museums in Ankara directly contributed to Ankara’s perception as a literary memory place, and that the literary memory of a city could be further developed with literary museums in that city as well as through interactive activities such as creative drama.

Ruiqi Li, Lingyun Lu, Weiwei Gu et al.

Cities are centers for the integration of capital and incubators of invention, and attracting venture capital (VC) is of great importance for cities to advance in innovative technology and business models towards a sustainable and prosperous future. Yet we still lack a quantitative understanding of the relationship between urban characteristics and VC activities. In this paper, we find a clear nonlinear scaling relationship between VC activities and the urban population of Chinese cities. In such nonlinear systems, the widely applied linear per capita indicators would be either biased to larger cities or smaller cities depends on whether it is superlinear or sublinear, while the residual of cities relative to the prediction of scaling law is a more objective and scale-invariant metric. %(i.e., independent of the city size). Such a metric can distinguish the effects of local dynamics and scaled growth induced by the change of population size. The spatiotemporal evolution of such metrics on VC activities reveals three distinct groups of cities, two of which stand out with increasing and decreasing trends, respectively. And the taxonomy results together with spatial analysis also signify different development modes between large urban agglomeration regions. Besides, we notice the evolution of scaling exponents on VC activities are of much larger fluctuations than on socioeconomic output of cities, and a conceptual model that focuses on the growth dynamics of different sized cities can well explain it, which we assume would be general to other scenarios.

Till Niese, Sören Pirk, Matthias Albrecht et al.

The placement of vegetation plays a central role in the realism of virtual scenes. We introduce procedural placement models (PPMs) for vegetation in urban layouts. PPMs are environmentally sensitive to city geometry and allow identifying plausible plant positions based on structural and functional zones in an urban layout. PPMs can either be directly used by defining their parameters or can be learned from satellite images and land register data. Together with approaches for generating buildings and trees, this allows us to populate urban landscapes with complex 3D vegetation. The effectiveness of our framework is shown through examples of large-scale city scenes and close-ups of individually grown tree models; we also validate it by a perceptual user study.