Abstract Libraries, laundrettes, and lidos. Pizzerias, plazas, and playgrounds. Sidewalks, swimming pools, and schools. These are just some of the kinds of spaces and facilities that contribute to the public life of cities. Drawing on the arguments of the sociologist Eric Klinenberg, this article develops the concept of “social infrastructure” as a way to research and value these kinds of spaces. Social infrastructure helps in recognising the public dimensions of often overlooked and undervalued spaces. It draws attention to the breadth, depth, and textures of sociality that can be afforded by different urban environments. In developing the concept of social infrastructure, this article pulls together four related strands of social scientific inquiry: work on infrastructure; publicness and public space; sociality and encounter; and the politics of provision. An infrastructural approach to the topic of public space presents geographers with some productive tools for understanding the public life of cities.
This chapter explores the six core dimensions of smart cities (i.e. smart economy, mobility, environment, people, living, and governance) emphasizing their interdependence and the need for holistic orchestration. Building on Giffinger et al. (2007) and subsequent literature, it argues that integrating these dimensions is crucial for sustainable urban development. ICT plays a key enabling role but must be complemented by human and social capital. Through institutional examples, such as the creation of dedicated municipal offices for digital innovation, the chapter illustrates how governance and internal capacity shape smart transitions. A human-centric approach is also essential, ensuring inclusivity, creativity, and active civic participation. Ultimately, smart cities must be viewed as cohesive urban ecosystems where technology, people, and governance interact dynamically.
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.
Phnom Penh’s rapid urban expansion has led to the large-scale conversion of wetlands into residential areas, undermining natural flood protection and accelerating environmental degradation. While previous studies have examined wetland loss and urban governance challenges in Cambodia, few have compared water management practices between Borey (gated communities) and non-Borey (non-gated) on both wetland and non-wetland. This study addresses that gap through a mixed-methods approach combining GIS mapping, field surveys, and semi-structured interviews with 27 stakeholders. Results show that while Borey developments feature planned layouts and green areas, these are predominantly decorative and provide limited flood mitigation. Non-Borey projects, particularly on wetlands, face severe flood risks due to inadequate drainage and minimal green space. Weak enforcement of wetland protection laws, fragmented governance, and the absence of water-sensitive design standards exacerbate these problems. Policy recommendations include mandating nature-based solutions, integrating Water Sensitive Urban Design principles into all housing developments, and strengthening enforcement of environmental regulations. By reframing wetlands as essential urban infrastructure, Phnom Penh can balance housing growth with climate resilience.
Die Landbesitzverhältnisse in Abya Yala haben koloniale Wurzeln. Dieser Beitrag fokussiert die Gegebenheiten in Chile, wo sich Landbesitz bis heute insbesondere in den Händen weniger aristokratischer Familien befindet. Obwohl häufig die Besitzverhältnisse darüber entscheiden, ob und wo Sozialwohnungen gebaut werden können, werden koloniale Landbesitzverhältnisse bei Debatten über fehlenden sozialen Wohnraum kaum berücksichtigt und Diskussionen über notwendige Reparationen häufig aus Planungsprozessen und akademischen Planungskontexten ausgeklammert.
In unserem Beitrag beschreiben wir die Kämpfe der selbstorganisierten Agrupación por la vivienda Luchadores de Lo Hermida (Wohnvereinigung Kämpfer*innen von Lo Hermida) gegen ungleiche Landbesitzverhältnisse. Dabei stellen wir unsere Interpretation der Perspektiven der Wohnvereinigung LH auf Reparationsforderungen für würdige Wohnverhältnisse für den Stadtteil Lo Hermida (Santiago de Chile) dar. Wir zeigen, inwiefern integral-transformative Reparationen eine Möglichkeit zur Sichtbarmachung und Bekämpfung der historischen Ursachen geschlechtsspezifischer, rassifizierter und klassenbasierter Ausgrenzung und Gewalt darstellen. Abschließend erörtern wir, wie eine kritische Auseinandersetzung über Reparationen in der Wissenschaft und bei der Entscheidungsfindung im Bereich der Stadtplanung und -entwicklung aussehen könnte.
Cities. Urban geography, Urban groups. The city. Urban sociology
Chuhan Yang, Fares B. Mehouachi, Monica Menendez
et al.
Predicting traffic flow in data-scarce cities is challenging due to limited historical data. To address this, we leverage transfer learning by identifying periodic patterns common to data-rich cities using a customized variant of Dynamic Mode Decomposition (DMD): constrained Hankelized DMD (TrHDMD). This method uncovers common eigenmodes (urban heartbeats) in traffic patterns and transfers them to data-scarce cities, significantly enhancing prediction performance. TrHDMD reduces the need for extensive training datasets by utilizing prior knowledge from other cities. By applying Koopman operator theory to multi-city loop detector data, we identify stable, interpretable, and time-invariant traffic modes. Injecting ``urban heartbeats'' into forecasting tasks improves prediction accuracy and has the potential to enhance traffic management strategies for cities with varying data infrastructures. Our work introduces cross-city knowledge transfer via shared Koopman eigenmodes, offering actionable insights and reliable forecasts for data-scarce urban environments.
Nurlisa Gintinga, Ike Revita, Eko B. Santoso
et al.
The Indonesian government has allocated 30
billion rupiahs in 2020 to revitalise Huta Siallagan, a
traditional village on the borderline of Lake Toba, in order to
support the national development agenda. The revitalisation
is carried out to increase the attractiveness of the destination
by reorganising the area and improving the facilities.
Traditional villages in Lake Toba are typically acres of land
owned and lived on by a single-family clan, which manages
tourism activities through family members. As Huta
Siallagan receives significant attention from the government,
this study seeks to examine the managerial modifications
and adjustments following the finished revitalisation project.
This study employs a sustainable tourism framework from
the Global Sustainable Tourism Council (GSTC). The
findings are juxtaposed with the model of sustainable
traditional village revitalisation that has been widely used as
the basis for integrating rural tourism into tourism growth.
The result of this study provides knowledge in the
sustainable tourism literature, particularly in the context of
village revitalisation for tourism purposes. It also highlights,
from a practical standpoint, the subsequent challenges that
arise in traditional village revitalisation projects. The study
then identifies solutions to minimise internal and external
conflicts in tourism governance.
Cities. Urban geography, Urban groups. The city. Urban sociology
The geography of urban innovation in the United States has often been portrayed as dominated by a few large cities. However, emerging perspectives challenge this notion by highlighting the significance of secondary cities for innovation processes. Unfortunately, prevailing narratives and empirical evidence focus on technological invention only, measured by patents. This study aims to reevaluate the geography of urban innovation by considering various phases of the innovation process and incorporating a broader range of innovation types. In addition to conventional patent metrics, this research suggests incorporating trademarks and design rights as complementary data. The findings reveal that large cities still exhibit prominence when examining absolute counts of innovation. Instead, analysing intensities allows the identification of secondary cities that specialise in various innovation activities beyond technological invention only. Overall, the findings provide compelling evidence that urban innovation in the United States is not limited to a few large cities nor is it solely driven by technological invention.
Barriers in cities, such as administrative boundaries, natural obstacles, railways or major roads are thought to induce segregation. However, the empirical knowledge about this phenomenon is limited. Here, we present a network science framework to assess barriers to urban mobility along their hierarchy, across residential areas and visited amenities. Using GPS mobility data, we construct a network of blocks from the sequence of individual stays in a major European city. A community detection algorithm allows us to partition this network into non-overlapping areas of dense mobility clusters, in which the effect of transportation hubs can be tuned with a parameter. We apply the Symmetric Area Difference index to quantify the overlap between these mobility clusters and the polygons of urban area separated by barriers. Reducing the effect of transportation hubs results in smaller scale mobility clusters that fit better to lower rank administrative or road barriers compared to their higher rank pairs. We find that characteristic urban barriers can replace each other in dividing mobility clusters of different scales. Next, we define the Barrier Crossing Ratio, the fraction of barrier crossings that bridge mobility clusters. The decomposition of this indicator by origins and destinations suggests a significantly higher impact of barriers on those who live closer to the city center and smaller impact on visits to complex amenities. These results contribute to the ongoing discourse on urban segregation, emphasizing the importance of barriers to urban mobility in shaping interactions and mixing.
City modeling and generation have attracted an increased interest in various applications, including gaming, urban planning, and autonomous driving. Unlike previous works focused on the generation of single objects or indoor scenes, the huge volumes of spatial data in cities pose a challenge to the generative models. Furthermore, few publicly available 3D real-world city datasets also hinder the development of methods for city generation. In this paper, we first collect over 3,000,000 geo-referenced objects for the city of New York, Zurich, Tokyo, Berlin, Boston and several other large cities. Based on this dataset, we propose AETree, a tree-structured auto-encoder neural network, for city generation. Specifically, we first propose a novel Spatial-Geometric Distance (SGD) metric to measure the similarity between building layouts and then construct a binary tree over the raw geometric data of building based on the SGD metric. Next, we present a tree-structured network whose encoder learns to extract and merge spatial information from bottom-up iteratively. The resulting global representation is reversely decoded for reconstruction or generation. To address the issue of long-dependency as the level of the tree increases, a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) Cell is employed as a basic network element of the proposed AETree. Moreover, we introduce a novel metric, Overlapping Area Ratio (OAR), to quantitatively evaluate the generation results. Experiments on the collected dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model on 2D and 3D city generation. Furthermore, the latent features learned by AETree can serve downstream urban planning applications.
Planning in pluralistic societies implies to propose measurements in situations of dissent and unsolved conflicts. Insofar it is congruent with the domain of politics, inclusive the involvement in the network of effects on existing or awakened, mostly divergent interests. In the resulting case of conflict, their respective representatives try to influence the plan – by their arguments in a rational discourse and by means of power. However, argumentation itself turns out to be a mean of power: As their agents try to push through themselves against resistance, they definitively enter the mechanisms of power acting. Following these considerations, a power model of planning is developed, with its logical structure, its calculi, means and instruments, as it is embedded in its societal conditions, with its ethical positions and including trials to hinder its misuse by procedures.
Cities. Urban geography, Urbanization. City and country
With the increasing pervasiveness of Artificial Intelligence (AI), many visual analytics tools have been proposed to examine fairness, but they mostly focus on data scientist users. Instead, tackling fairness must be inclusive and involve domain experts with specialized tools and workflows. Thus, domain-specific visualizations are needed for algorithmic fairness. Furthermore, while much work on AI fairness has focused on predictive decisions, less has been done for fair allocation and planning, which require human expertise and iterative design to integrate myriad constraints. We propose the Intelligible Fair Allocation (IF-Alloc) Framework that leverages explanations of causal attribution (Why), contrastive (Why Not) and counterfactual reasoning (What If, How To) to aid domain experts to assess and alleviate unfairness in allocation problems. We apply the framework to fair urban planning for designing cities that provide equal access to amenities and benefits for diverse resident types. Specifically, we propose an interactive visual tool, Intelligible Fair City Planner (IF-City), to help urban planners to perceive inequality across groups, identify and attribute sources of inequality, and mitigate inequality with automatic allocation simulations and constraint-satisfying recommendations. We demonstrate and evaluate the usage and usefulness of IF-City on a real neighborhood in New York City, US, with practicing urban planners from multiple countries, and discuss generalizing our findings, application, and framework to other use cases and applications of fair allocation.
The difference of a city's artificial land use (ALU) radial profile to the average ALU profile is examined for 585 European cities. Using Urban Atlas 2012 data, a radial (or monocentric) approach is used to calculate a city's land use profile in relation to distance to the city centre. A scaling law is used which controls for city size and population. As a consequence, cities of varying degrees of size can be contrasted in a comparable way. Utilising the mean ALU profile for the entire sample of 585 cities, the difference to the mean profile is calculated for each city. Using these differences allows us to examine heterogeneity of the ALU across European cities but also examine these differences within cities. We utilise city groupings by city size and country to attempt to understand these differences. Combining Urban Atlas and Corine Land Cover data, the impact of water on the ALU profiles is examined. A city classification is also introduced which considers the difference to the average curve. Ordering methods are used to visualise cities within these classifications. Results highlight the level of heterogeneity between cities. Removing water, we can see that the cities with the highest levels of water have a higher level of ALU on average. Spain and France are found to have contrasting levels of ALU, Spanish cities having below average ALU and France above average. Using seriation techniques enables us to group and order cities into a typology which can be used to benchmark cities.
Niklas H. Kitzmann, Pawel Romanczuk, Jonathan F. Donges
Only a fast and global transformation towards decarbonization and sustainability can keep the Earth in a civilization-friendly state. As hotspots for (green) innovation and experimentation, cities could play an important role in this transition. They are also known to profit from each other's ideas, with policy and technology innovations spreading to other cities. In this way, cities can be conceptualized as nodes in a globe-spanning learning network. The dynamics of this process are important for society's response to climate change and other challenges, but remain poorly understood on a macroscopic level. In this contribution, we develop an approach to identify whether network-based complex contagion effects are a feature of sustainability policy adoption by cities, based on dose-response contagion and surrogate data models. We apply this methodology to an example data set, comprising empirical data on the spreading of a public transport innovation (Bus Rapid Transit Systems) and a global inter-city connection network based on scheduled flight routes. We find evidence pointing towards a contagious spreading process which cannot be explained by either the network structure or the increase in global adoption rate alone. This suggests that the actions of a city's abstract "global neighborhood" within the network of cities may be an important factor in which policies and innovations are implemented, with potential connections to the emergence of social tipping processes. The methodology is generic, and can be used to compare the predictive power for innovation spreading of different kinds of inter-city network connections, e.g. via transport links, trade, or co-membership in political networks.
Izadi Maliheh, Vardanjani Mehdi Jafari, Varesi Hamidreza
The indices of housing serve as an important tool in planning for housing, in that they allow the parameters affecting housing to be recognised and any planning process to be facilitated. The purpose of the study is to investigate and to evaluate the housing situation in cities of Isfahan province. The study is applied and descriptive-analytic in terms of method. Thirty-nine indices were collected in the housing sector. Then the rate of prosperity and ranking of the cities were evaluated by TOPSIS method. Prosperity is defined here as an important index of housing that reflects the welfare of residents. The cities were then categorised into six levels of prosperity: Very important, Important, Partially important, Moderate, Poor and Very poor. The results from the study indicate an imbalance in the studied indices between the cities, and a clear disparity between the levels of prosperity in the cities, and the only city in the very prosperous group is Isfahan, with a rate of 0.813.
Informal settlements intersect with spatial planning when they are placed on a trajectory towards permanent upgrading. In South Africa, the law requires this intersection to be as non-disruptive as possible. However, this is difficult to secure, as the Slovo Park informal settlement case in Johannesburg exemplifies. This article demonstrates the conceptual relevance of Henri Lefebvre’s writing on the right to the city and his closely associated theory on differential space for the informal settlement and planning question. The article notes that the planning theory discourse has engaged with what occurs outside of statutory planning. This skirts Lefebvre’s radical critique of statutory planning and its direct implication for spontaneous urban spatial practice. Lefebvre’s critique of planning is open-ended, providing pointers towards an alternative, namely transduction. The article shows the relevance of this for the transformation of planning and urban space in South Africa.
Cities. Urban geography, Urban groups. The city. Urban sociology