Fengze Sun, Egemen Tanin, Shanika Karunasekera
et al.
Recent advances in urban region representation learning have enabled a wide range of applications in urban analytics, yet existing methods remain limited in their capabilities to generalize across cities and analytic tasks. We aim to generalize urban representation learning beyond city- and task-specific settings, towards a foundation-style model for urban analytics. To this end, we propose UrbanVerse, a model for cross-city urban representation learning and cross-task urban analytics. For cross-city generalization, UrbanVerse focuses on features local to the target regions and structural features of the nearby regions rather than the entire city. We model regions as nodes on a graph, which enables a random walk-based procedure to form "sequences of regions" that reflect both local and neighborhood structural features for urban region representation learning. For cross-task generalization, we propose a cross-task learning module named HCondDiffCT. This module integrates region-conditioned prior knowledge and task-conditioned semantics into the diffusion process to jointly model multiple downstream urban prediction tasks. HCondDiffCT is generic. It can also be integrated with existing urban representation learning models to enhance their downstream task effectiveness. Experiments on real-world datasets show that UrbanVerse consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods across six tasks under cross-city settings, achieving up to 35.89% improvements in prediction accuracy.
Lenore Sauer, Ludovica Gambaro, Elisabeth K. Kraus
Abstract This paper examines the new ties refugees form within the first years after arriving in destination countries. While prior research has assessed new ties mainly in relation to integration outcomes and within inter-ethnic ties, our analyses take a broader view of the importance of new contacts by systematically adopting an ego-centric network approach and by differentiating between various types of networks (emotional support, companionship, and practical support network). Drawing on representative quantitative survey data of recent refugees from Eritrea and Syria collected in Germany in 2020 (TransFAR survey), our analytical approach is divided into two parts: First, we investigate on the alter-level (i.e., the persons mentioned in the network) who the newly met persons are and which kind of support they provide, employing descriptive analyses. Second, we conduct multivariate regression analyses on the ego-level (i.e., the respondent) to examine the migration and family-related factors associated with forming new ties. The empirical findings underscore the importance of new contacts as crucial sources of resources and support, particularly in providing practical assistance. Furthermore, our study shows that migration and family-related factors are important for establishing new ties: refugees having other family members in Germany, either a spouse or because they arrived together with kin, are less likely to include newly established contacts in their networks compared to those without a spouse or who arrived in Germany without family. The relative importance of these factors varies between network types. Moreover, as migration circumstances and family constellations differ by gender and country of origin, substantial variations concerning the formation of new ties are observed between men and women and between refugees from Eritrea and Syria.
Abstract The healthy immigrant paradox suggests that immigrants tend to have better health than native residents, despite facing socio-economic disadvantages. At the same time, immigrants are considered to utilise healthcare less. This study compares health-related lifestyle behaviours and healthcare utilisation between foreign-born and native-born adolescents living in Europe. It uses the partial least squares method and data from the 2019 European Health Interview Survey, covering 15,320 individuals aged 15–19 years. On average, being foreign-born was positively associated with following a healthy diet, engaging in physical activity, avoiding smoking, and avoiding alcohol. However, these relationships largely varied depending on whether the adolescents originated from within or outside the European Union. Conversely, being foreign-born was generally linked to lower healthcare utilisation. The utilisation of healthcare was by far the lowest among adolescents born outside the European Union who were not citizens of a European Union member state, which contrasts with health-related lifestyle behaviours. Furthermore, the association between being in this group and healthcare utilisation was moderated by equivalised household income. This aligns with previous research suggesting that immigrants tend to underutilise healthcare, primarily due to administrative and economic barriers. Unlike foreign-born adolescents, second-generation immigrants did not differ significantly from their native counterparts in most health-related behaviours analysed. In conclusion, promoting selective acculturation among adolescent immigrants and enhancing their access to healthcare is recommended.
Particulate matter (PM), especially $\text{PM}_{2.5}$, is a critical air pollutant posing significant risks to human health and the environment in India. This study, using six years (2018-2024) of daily $\text{PM}_{2.5}$ data, investigates the seasonal characteristics of the distributions of $\text{PM}_{2.5}$ concentrations across eleven Indian cities, selected from different regions of the country. We find that, while each city has its own unique seasonal patterns, all of them show a universal exponential decay in the tail of the $\text{PM}_{2.5}$ distribution for all the seasons. However, the decay rates of this tail vary across cities, highlighting regional and seasonal disparities in pollution levels. To quantitatively characterize the {\it randomness} of the seasonal $\text{PM}_{2.5}$ concentration distributions, we compute Shannon entropy, a key information theoretic measure. This allows for classifying cities into different groups, according to the level of randomness observed in their seasonal distributions. To further explore the inter-city relationships, we employ Jensen-Shannon divergence (JSD), a symmetric measure of relative entropy, to quantitatively assess the degree of similarity in the $\text{PM}_{2.5}$ distributions among different cities. Remarkably, we find that several cities show very similar distributions in the winter months, which helps us to categories them into several groups. The groups obtained from these entropy based measures, namely, individual Shannon entropy and the JSD estimate, are consistent with each other, providing a robust framework for efficient air quality management and policy-making in India.
Dolev Mutzari, Tonmoay Deb, Cristian Molinaro
et al.
To counter an imminent multi-drone attack on a city, defenders have deployed drones across the city. These drones must intercept/eliminate the threat, thus reducing potential damage from the attack. We model this as a Sequential Stackelberg Security Game, where the defender first commits to a mixed sequential defense strategy, and the attacker then best responds. We develop an efficient algorithm called S2D2, which outputs a defense strategy. We demonstrate the efficacy of S2D2 in extensive experiments on data from 80 real cities, improving the performance of the defender in comparison to greedy heuristics based on prior works. We prove that under some reasonable assumptions about the city structure, S2D2 outputs an approximate Strong Stackelberg Equilibrium (SSE) with a convenient structure.
Pia Blossfeld, Tomáš Katrňák, Beatrice Chomková Manea
In this paper, we examine (1) whether parental educational homogamy is associated with children’s tertiary educational attainment in different European countries and (2) whether this association is moderated by families’ educational backgrounds. Using data from the European Social Survey and multilevel logistic regression models, we find that parental homogamy is important for children’s tertiary educational attainment. In particular, children of more highly educated homogamous parents are more likely to obtain a tertiary degree themselves. This parental homogamy association varies across countries. While the association is below the European average in Czechia, Austria, Hungary, Italy, Switzerland, and Germany, it is equal or close to average in Slovenia, Estonia, France, Poland, Ireland, Sweden, and Lithuania, and above average in Spain, Finland, the Netherlands, Portugal, the United Kingdom, Norway, and Belgium. Our findings suggest that parental educational constellations should be examined more closely in further education inequality research.
* This article belongs to a special issue on “Changes in Educational Homogamy and Its Consequences”.
Urban groups. The city. Urban sociology, City population. Including children in cities, immigration
Tabea Scharrer, Laura Lambert, Stefan Millar
et al.
Abstract Containment, as a way of restricting mobilities, ranges from physical infrastructures to diffused control practices in everyday life. Alongside their physical, social, and political dimensions, such restrictions also engender various temporal borders and experiences of time particular to situations of containment. A prolific field of research has identified waiting and hope as strategies for both enforcing and surpassing containment. In response, anthropological research on future-making has highlighted a more diverse set of contextual and emergent practices that derive from imagining and realising migrants’ futures. Yet, in contrast to waiting, migrants’ future-making practices have seldom been related to containment. Besides containment informing future-making, migrants and control actors also manipulate time as they plan or experiment with futures to overcome or reinforce containment. Carrying elusive promises of a better future, containment infrastructures can also motivate migrants to stay put and accommodate restrictions to their mobility. This paper addresses how such different relational, often conflicting, practices of envisioning and realising migrant futures contribute to or subvert different types of containment. Building on empirical studies from Turkey, Niger and Kenya we suggest future-making as a relational, practice-oriented and contextual approach suited to trace the negotiation of migrant futures between migrants, control actors, and infrastructures in situations of spatiotemporal containment. We give special attention to resettlement as a form of containment due to its ability to limit mobility through promises of future mobility and its role in negotiating migrant futures. This article serves as a theoretical introduction into the emerging research field of contested future-making in containment and to the corresponding paper cluster.
This critical ethnographic study was conducted among 15 immigrants originally from Caucasian and Central Asian countries, each with more than 10 years of undocumented residence in Moscow. It focuses on the everyday experiences of undocumented immigrants in a non-Western context, illustrating how informal networks, alongside official migration policies, contribute to and exploit unequal capabilities. The study emphasises the thresholds of emotions, affiliation and control over a person’s environment, demonstrating power asymmetries between individuals. Given the participants’ prolonged undocumented stay in Moscow, the findings demonstrate how the socio-legal context of an undocumented status facilitates informal exploitation alongside institutional operating models, aligning with migration policies in practice.
Colonies and colonization. Emigration and immigration. International migration, City population. Including children in cities, immigration
This study investigates the impact of the 2018 summer heat wave on urban mobility in Seoul and the role of economic complexity in the region's resilience. Findings from subway and mobile phone data indicate a significant decrease in the floating population during extreme heat wave, underscoring the thermal vulnerability of urban areas. However, urban regions with higher complexity demonstrate resilience, attracting more visitors despite high temperatures. Our results suggest the centrality of economic complexity in urban resilience against climate-induced stressors. Additionally, it implies that high-complexity small businesses' clusters can serve as focal points for sustaining urban vitality in the face of thermal shocks within city. In the long run perspective, our results imply the possibility that people are more concentrated in high complexity region in the era of global warming.
Everyday spaces represent central platforms that provide opportunities for encounters marked by ethnic and cultural diversity, where transformations can be negotiated that rethink living together. The significance of these ‘third places’ has been extensively researched. Yet, some spaces such as public libraries continue to be largely overlooked by geographers. Public libraries also remain under-appreciated within wider society despite their obvious social functions. Central here is that public libraries can be understood as dynamic and ‘lived spaces’ that enable the emergence of transient connections and relationships. Such spaces are increasingly sparse within modern cities. This paper explores the potential of everyday spaces of encounter, specifically public libraries, to facilitate the unfolding of ‘light’ connections and relationships, nurturing more inclusive forms of urban togetherness and belonging in multi-ethnic societies and the significance that people attribute to these often mundane encounters and micro connections. In so doing, this paper combines findings from two research projects that investigate mixed or intercultural encounters in public libraries in Bremen (Germany) and Glasgow (Scotland).
Colonies and colonization. Emigration and immigration. International migration, City population. Including children in cities, immigration
Abstract The journal Comparative Migration Studies has published a series of articles engaging with critiques of migrant integration. This piece wishes to contribute to such discussion, reflecting back on early critiques of integration as a concept and as a process, and reviewing more recent publications. The aim is to widen the reflection on decolonising the field by including urban postcolonial and southern instances, as well as insights from two funded projects.
The purpose of this study was to determine the effectiveness of the Center and Circle method as an effort to increase interest in early childhood learning. The research subjects were children in KB TK Almutaqin Yogyakarta. The results showed that there were differences in interest in learning before and after getting the Center and Circle method. This is indicated by the results of the t=-4,735 and p=0,000 test (p<0,05). The average interest in learning for students before receiving treatment with the center and circle method was 1,667, while the average after receiving treatment with the center and circle method was 5,600. This confirms that the Sentra and Circle methods are effective in increasing children's interest in learning at KB Almutaqin Kindergarten, Sleman Yogyakarta.
Education, City population. Including children in cities, immigration
Object detection is an algorithm that recognizes and locates the objects in the image and has a wide range of applications in the visual understanding of complex urban scenes. Existing object detection benchmarks mainly focus on a single specific scenario and their annotation attributes are not rich enough, these make the object detection model is not generalized for the smart city scenes. Considering the diversity and complexity of scenes in intelligent city governance, we build a large-scale object detection benchmark for the smart city. Our benchmark contains about 500K images and includes three scenarios: intelligent transportation, intelligent security, and drones. For the complexity of the real scene in the smart city, the diversity of weather, occlusion, and other complex environment diversity attributes of the images in the three scenes are annotated. The characteristics of the benchmark are analyzed and extensive experiments of the current state-of-the-art target detection algorithm are conducted based on our benchmark to show their performance.
Vehicle hijacking is one of the leading crimes in many cities. For instance, in South Africa, drivers must constantly remain vigilant on the road in order to ensure that they do not become hijacking victims. This work is aimed at developing a map depicting hijacking spots in a city by using Twitter data. Tweets, which include the keyword "hijacking", are obtained in a designated city of Cape Town, in this work. In order to extract relevant tweets, these tweets are analyzed by using the following machine learning techniques: 1) a Multi-layer Feed-forward Neural Network (MLFNN); 2) Convolutional Neural Network; and Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT). Through training and testing, CNN achieved an accuracy of 99.66%, while MLFNN and BERT achieve accuracies of 98.99% and 73.99% respectively. In terms of Recall, Precision and F1-score, CNN also achieved the best results. Therefore, CNN was used for the identification of relevant tweets. The relevant reports that it generates are visually presented on a points map of the City of Cape Town. This work used a small dataset of 426 tweets. In future, the use of evolutionary computation will be explored for purposes of optimizing the deep learning models. A mobile application is under development to make this information usable by the general public.
Theofanis P. Raptis, Claudio Cicconetti, Manolis Falelakis
et al.
Smart city management is going through a remarkable transition, in terms of quality and diversity of services provided to the end-users. The stakeholders that deliver pervasive applications are now able to address fundamental challenges in the big data value chain, from data acquisition, data analysis and processing, data storage and curation, and data visualisation in real scenarios. Industry 4.0 is pushing this trend forward, demanding for servitization of products and data, also for the smart cities sector where humans, sensors and devices are operating in strict collaboration. The data produced by the ubiquitous devices must be processed quickly to allow the implementation of reactive services such as situational awareness, video surveillance and geo-localization, while always ensuring the safety and privacy of involved citizens. This paper proposes a modular architecture to (i) leverage innovative technologies for data acquisition, management and distribution (such as Apache Kafka and Apache NiFi), (ii) develop a multi-layer engineering solution for revealing valuable and hidden societal knowledge in smart cities environment, and (iii) tackle the main issues in tasks involving complex data flows and provide general guidelines to solve them. We derived some guidelines from an experimental setting performed together with leading industrial technical departments to accomplish an efficient system for monitoring and servitization of smart city assets, with a scalable platform that confirms its usefulness in numerous smart city use cases with different needs.
Abstract The article examines the migration infrastructures and pathways through which migrants move into, through and out of irregular status in Japan and the UK and how these infrastructures uniquely shape their migrant experiences of irregularity at key stages of their migration projects. Our analysis brings together two bodies of migration scholarship, namely critical work on the social and legal production of illegality and the impact of legal violence on the lives of immigrants with precarious legal status, and on the role of migration infrastructures in shaping mobility pathways. Drawing upon in-depth qualitative interviews with irregular and precarious migrants in Japan and the UK collected over a ten-year period, this article develops a three-pronged analysis of the infrastructures of irregularity, focusing on infrastructures of entry, settlement and exit, casting a comparative light on the mechanisms that produce precarious and expendable migrant lives in relation to access to labour and labour conditions, access and quality of housing and law enforcement, and how migrants adapt, cope, resist or eventually are overpowered by them.