Significance Urban density significantly impacts urban energy use and the quality of life of urban residents. Here, we provide a global-scale analysis of future urban densities and associated energy use in the built environment under different urbanization scenarios. The relative importance of urban density and energy-efficient technologies varies geographically. In developing regions, urban density tends to be the more critical factor in building energy use. Large-scale retrofitting of building stock later rather than sooner results in more energy savings by the middle of the century. Reducing building energy use, improving the local environment, and mitigating climate change can be achieved through systemic efforts that take potential co-benefits and trade-offs of both higher urban density and building energy efficiency into account. Although the scale of impending urbanization is well-acknowledged, we have a limited understanding of how urban forms will change and what their impact will be on building energy use. Using both top-down and bottom-up approaches and scenarios, we examine building energy use for heating and cooling. Globally, the energy use for heating and cooling by the middle of the century will be between 45 and 59 exajoules per year (corresponding to an increase of 7–40% since 2010). Most of this variability is due to the uncertainty in future urban densities of rapidly growing cities in Asia and particularly China. Dense urban development leads to less urban energy use overall. Waiting to retrofit the existing built environment until markets are ready in about 5 years to widely deploy the most advanced renovation technologies leads to more savings in building energy use. Potential for savings in energy use is greatest in China when coupled with efficiency gains. Advanced efficiency makes the least difference compared with the business-as-usual scenario in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa but significantly contributes to energy savings in North America and Europe. Systemic efforts that focus on both urban form, of which urban density is an indicator, and energy-efficient technologies, but that also account for potential co-benefits and trade-offs with human well-being can contribute to both local and global sustainability. Particularly in growing cities in the developing world, such efforts can improve the well-being of billions of urban residents and contribute to mitigating climate change by reducing energy use in urban areas.
Although the literature of smart cities is very rich and broad, the possibility and usefulness of the application of information and communication technologies in rural areas and villages is barely researched area. The objective of our paper is to sum up the main findings of smart city approach and give a review of the notion, measurement and pitfalls of it. We would like to present how the original smart city approach has to be changed to rural communities, and what can we learn from earlier researches to avoid the so-called “ICT-hype” and focus on the problems that villages face in the first place. In the second part we will review what smart villages, smart rural development are, and how the thinking on the effects of ICT on spatiality and the role of distance has changed in the previous decades. Finally, we will present the findings of a smart rural research in Hungary. We used online surveys among mayors and notaries and semi-structured interviews in selected settlements as a methodology for research. The main value of the paper is that it is addressing what smartness means in a disadvantaged rural area. Our final conclusion is that it is possible to create smart communities in smaller territorial scales, but we also think that in this context the term ‘smart’ does not need to imply high-tech projects, or the projects that concentrate on innovative, infrastructural developments, or the project that addresses only the needs specific to advanced rural areas. Smart village is an approach to rural development where central role is played by the local community and its actions. Local governments that meet the basic needs of the local community and consider the needs of various stakeholders not only fulfil their mandated mission but also build trust and help release the creative potential of the local community.
Social sciences (General), Cities. Urban geography
Bright Osei Boateng, Henry Mensah, Oscar Accomford
Abstract In sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), home gardening supports approximately 20% of household food needs, highlighting its significance in addressing food insecurity. This practice has emerged as a vital strategy for promoting sustainable community development in diverse ways. Using Bolgatanga, Ghana, as a case study, this study explores the socioecological and economic benefits of home gardening and their associations with socioeconomic characteristics. In total, 370 residents were interviewed, and the data was analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics. The study revealed that home gardening provides environmental benefits, such as reducing temperature and erosion; social benefits, including enhanced well-being and cohesion; and economic benefits, such as reduced food costs and increased profits. The findings indicated statistically significant associations between environmental benefits, such as soil fertility enrichment (p < 0.01) and natural cooling (p < 0.01); social benefits, including stress reduction (p < 0.01); and economic benefits, such as sustainable living through composting (p < 0.01), and socioeconomic characteristics of respondents. The Relative Importance Index (RII) analysis identified biodiversity enhancement as the most significant environmental benefit, cost savings from homegrown food as the most important economic benefit, and stress reduction as the most significant social benefit. The study concludes that home gardening significantly contributes to sustainable community development through its environmental, social, and economic benefits, therefore it is essential for the Municipal Agriculture Department, non-profit organisations to collaborate with communities in terms of training programmes and resources for home gardening practices to maximize these benefits.
Cities. Urban geography, Urban groups. The city. Urban sociology
Urban scaling laws reveal how cities evolve as their populations grow, yet the role of street network accessibility in this process remains underexplored. We analyze over 5,000 Brazilian cities to establish a scaling law linking average closeness centrality $\langle c_C\rangle$ -- a measure of structural accessibility in street networks-to population size N . Our results demonstrate that $\langle c_C\rangle$ decays sublinearly as $N^{-σ}$ ($σ\approx 0.38$), indicating that larger cities redistribute accessibility from cores to peripheries while maintaining navigability through hierarchical shortcuts. This scaling arises from the fractal interplay between infrastructure and population, characterized by a network dimension $d \approx 2.17$, which exceeds that of a 2D grid. The slower decline in closeness centrality ($σ< 0.5$) reflects a trade-off: urban expansion reduces proximity but enhances connectivity through optimized path diversity, fostering economic dynamism. By integrating the Molinero & Thurner model with network centrality metrics, we provide a framework to reconcile infrastructure efficiency with equitable accessibility in growing cities.
Traditional urban planning methodologies often fail to capture the complexity of contemporary urbanization and environmental sustainability challenges. This study investigates the integration of Generative Design, Virtual Reality (VR), and Digital Twins (DT) to enhance walkability in urban planning. VR provides distinct benefits over conventional approaches, including 2D maps, static renderings, and physical models, by allowing stakeholders to engage with urban designs more intuitively, identify walkability challenges, and suggest iterative improvements. Preliminary findings from structured interviews with Eindhoven residents provide critical insights into pedestrian preferences and walkability considerations. The next phase of the study involves the development of VR-DT integrated prototypes to simulate urban environments, assess walkability, and explore the role of Generative Design in generating adaptive urban planning solutions. The objective is to develop a decision-support tool that enables urban planners to incorporate diverse stakeholder perspectives, optimize pedestrian-oriented urban design, and advance regenerative development principles. By leveraging these emerging technologies, this research contributes to the evolution of data-driven, participatory urban planning frameworks aimed at fostering sustainable and walkable cities.
Anastasios Noulas, Yasin Acikmese, Charles QC LI
et al.
Monitoring urban air quality with high spatiotemporal resolution continues to pose significant challenges. We investigate the use of taxi fleets as mobile sensing platforms, analyzing over 100 million PM2.5 readings from more than 3,000 vehicles across six major U.S. cities during one year. Our findings show that taxis provide fine-grained, street-level air quality insights while ensuring city-wide coverage. We further explore urban air quality modeling using traffic congestion, built environment, and human mobility data to predict pollution variability. Our results highlight geography-specific seasonal patterns and demonstrate that models based solely on traffic and wind speeds effectively capture a city's pollution dynamics. This study establishes taxi fleets as a scalable, near-real-time air quality monitoring tool, offering new opportunities for environmental research and data-driven policymaking.
Juan Palma-Borda, Eduardo Guzmán, María-Victoria Belmonte
Crime is one of the greatest threats to urban security. Around 80 percent of the world's population lives in countries with high levels of criminality. Most of the crimes committed in the cities take place in their urban environments. This paper presents the development and validation of a digital shadow platform for modeling and simulating urban crime. This digital shadow has been constructed using data-driven agent-based modeling and simulation techniques, which are suitable for capturing dynamic interactions among individuals and with their environment. Our approach transforms and integrates well-known criminological theories and the expert knowledge of law enforcement agencies (LEA), policy makers, and other stakeholders under a theoretical model, which is in turn combined with real crime, spatial (cartographic) and socio-economic data into an urban model characterizing the daily behavior of citizens. The digital shadow has also been instantiated for the city of Malaga, for which we had over 300,000 complaints available. This instance has been calibrated with those complaints and other geographic and socio-economic information of the city. To the best of our knowledge, our digital shadow is the first for large urban areas that has been calibrated with a large dataset of real crime reports and with an accurate representation of the urban environment. The performance indicators of the model after being calibrated, in terms of the metrics widely used in predictive policing, suggest that our simulated crime generation matches the general pattern of crime in the city according to historical data. Our digital shadow platform could be an interesting tool for modeling and predicting criminal behavior in an urban environment on a daily basis and, thus, a useful tool for policy makers, criminologists, sociologists, LEAs, etc. to study and prevent urban crime.
Christopher Boulton, Aysin Dedekorkut-howes, J. Byrne
Over the past two decades, there has been an efflorescence of park and greenspace research. This trend may reflect substantial increases in urban populations globally and concomitant pressures on land resources – including greenspace. But so far research has mainly tended to focus on demand rather than supply, and specifically the practice of provision – notwithstanding the body of literature studying disparities in greenspace access and geographic distribution through an environmental justice lens (e.g. using spatial analysis). Comparatively fewer studies have considered the interplay of factors that may shape local government’s capacity to supply greenspace. This paper reports results of a systematic quantitative review of the greenspace provision literature: assessing the factors that configure its supply, and different approaches to planning and assessing greenspace provision. A conceptual model is offered, explaining the interaction between greenspace provision factors across different scales. Findings suggest many cities continue to experience gaps between planned and actual greenspace provision. Moreover, urban greenspace is typically planned using a recreational standards approach, despite increasing demands for a range of ecosystem functions, services, and benefits. Future research should engage directly with greenspace managers responsible for urban greenspace delivery, especially in rapidly expanding cities, to illuminate points of convergence and divergence between theory and practice. Policy implications include consideration of holistic greenspace planning approaches that better recognise and respond to emerging demands upon, and for, urban greenspace.
Abstract Over the last few years, much online volunteered geographic information (VGI) has emerged and has been increasingly analyzed to understand places and cities, as well as human mobility and activity. However, there are concerns about the quality and usability of such VGI. In this study, we demonstrate a complete process that comprises the collection, unification, classification and validation of a type of VGI—online point-of-interest (POI) data—and develop methods to utilize such POI data to estimate disaggregated land use (i.e., employment size by category) at a very high spatial resolution (census block level) using part of the Boston metropolitan area as an example. With recent advances in activity-based land use, transportation, and environment (LUTE) models, such disaggregated land use data become important to allow LUTE models to analyze and simulate a person’s choices of work location and activity destinations and to understand policy impacts on future cities. These data can also be used as alternatives to explore economic activities at the local level, especially as government-published census-based disaggregated employment data have become less available in the recent decade. Our new approach provides opportunities for cities to estimate land use at high resolution with low cost by utilizing VGI while ensuring its quality with a certain accuracy threshold. The automatic classification of POI can also be utilized for other types of analyses on cities.
Diet is one of the main factors that affects the composition of gut microbiota. When people move from a rural environment to urban areas, and experience improved socio-economic conditions, they are often exposed to a “globalized” Western type diet. Here, we present preliminary observations on the metagenomic scale of microbial changes in small groups of African children belonging to the same ethnicity and living in different environments, compared to children living on the urban area of Florence (Italy). We analyzed dietary habits and, by pyrosequencing of the 16S rRNA gene, gut microbiota profiles from fecal samples of children living in a rural village of Burkina Faso (n = 11), of two groups of children living in different urban settings (Nanoro town, n = 8; Ouagadougou, the capital city, n = 5) and of a group of Italian children (n = 13). We observed that when foods of animal origin, those rich in fat and simple sugars are introduced into a traditional African diet, composed of cereals, legumes and vegetables, the gut microbiota profiles changes. Microbiota of rural children retain a geographically unique bacterial reservoir (Prevotella, Treponema, and Succinivibrio), assigned to ferment fiber and polysaccharides from vegetables. Independently of geography and ethnicity, in children living in urban areas these bacterial genera were progressively outcompeted by bacteria more suited to the metabolism of animal protein, fat and sugar rich foods, similarly to Italian children, as resulted by PICRUSt (Phylogenetic Investigation of Communities by Reconstruction of Unobserved States), a predictive functional profiling of microbial communities using 16S rRNA marker gene. Consequently, we observed a progressive reduction of SCFAs measured by gas chromatography–mass spectrometry, in urban populations, especially in Italian children, respect to rural ones. Our results even if in a limited number of individuals point out that dietary habit modifications in the course of urbanization play a role in shaping gut microbiota, and that ancient microorganisms, such as fiber-degrading bacteria, are at risk of being eliminated by the fast paced globalization of foods and by the advent of westernized lifestyle.
A growing body of literature discusses the CO2 emissions of cities. Still, little is known about emission patterns across density gradients from remote rural places to highly urbanized areas, the drivers behind those emission patterns and the global emissions triggered by consumption in human settlements—referred to here as the carbon footprint. In this letter we use a hybrid method for estimating the carbon footprints of cities and other human settlements in the UK explicitly linking global supply chains to local consumption activities and associated lifestyles. This analysis comprises all areas in the UK, whether rural or urban. We compare our consumption-based results with extended territorial CO2 emission estimates and analyse the driving forces that determine the carbon footprint of human settlements in the UK. Our results show that 90% of the human settlements in the UK are net importers of CO2 emissions. Consumption-based CO2 emissions are much more homogeneous than extended territorial emissions. Both the highest and lowest carbon footprints can be found in urban areas, but the carbon footprint is consistently higher relative to extended territorial CO2 emissions in urban as opposed to rural settlement types. The impact of high or low density living remains limited; instead, carbon footprints can be comparatively high or low across density gradients depending on the location-specific socio-demographic, infrastructural and geographic characteristics of the area under consideration. We show that the carbon footprint of cities and other human settlements in the UK is mainly determined by socio-economic rather than geographic and infrastructural drivers at the spatial aggregation of our analysis. It increases with growing income, education and car ownership as well as decreasing household size. Income is not more important than most other socio-economic determinants of the carbon footprint. Possibly, the relationship between lifestyles and infrastructure only impacts carbon footprints significantly at higher spatial granularity.
By tracing the main upheavals in the economic history of the Shiite holy city of Najaf, Iraq, between 1923 and 1958, this article analyzes their immediate effects on the social and urban development of the city and on the shifting of its visible and invisible boundaries. The main economic crises affecting Najaf include the interruption of the pilgrimage, the Great Depression of 1929, the British occupation of Iraq in 1941, and climatic hazards. The article focuses in particular on the development of overpopulation, unemployment, hunger, and crime in Najaf and the means employed by the authorities to respond to these social issues. In particular, it shows that urban expansion and the modernization of infrastructure are helping to transform the traditional social practices of this holy city and are profoundly changing its internal boundaries.
Ethnology. Social and cultural anthropology, Cities. Urban geography