Marie Reinbigler, Romain Rouffet, Peter Naylor
et al.
The Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect, defined as a significant increase in temperature in urban environments compared to surrounding areas, is difficult to study in real cities using sensor data (satellites or in-situ stations) due to their coarse spatial and temporal resolution. Among the factors contributing to this effect are the properties of urban materials, which differ from those in rural areas. To analyze their individual impact and to test new material configurations, a high-resolution simulation at the city scale is required. Estimating the current materials used in a city, including those on building facades, is also challenging. We propose HeatMat, an approach to analyze at high resolution the individual impact of urban materials on the UHI effect in a real city, relying only on open data. We estimate building materials using street-view images and a pre-trained vision-language model (VLM) to supplement existing OpenStreetMap data, which describes the 2D geometry and features of buildings. We further encode this information into a set of 2D maps that represent the city's vertical structure and material characteristics. These maps serve as inputs for our 2.5D simulator, which models coupled heat transfers and enables random-access surface temperature estimation at multiple resolutions, reaching an x20 speedup compared to an equivalent simulation in 3D.
Realistic 3D city generation is fundamental to a wide range of applications, including virtual reality and digital twins. However, most existing methods rely on training a single diffusion model, which limits their ability to generate personalized and boundless city-scale scenes. In this paper, we present Yo'City, a novel agentic framework that enables user-customized and infinitely expandable 3D city generation by leveraging the reasoning and compositional capabilities of off-the-shelf large models. Specifically, Yo'City first conceptualizes the city through a top-down planning strategy that defines a hierarchical "City-District-Grid" structure. The Global Planner determines the overall layout and potential functional districts, while the Local Designer further refines each district with detailed grid-level descriptions. Subsequently, the grid-level 3D generation is achieved through a "produce-refine-evaluate" isometric image synthesis loop, followed by image-to-3D generation. To simulate continuous city evolution, Yo'City further introduces a user-interactive, relationship-guided expansion mechanism, which performs scene graph-based distance- and semantics-aware layout optimization, ensuring spatially coherent city growth. To comprehensively evaluate our method, we construct a diverse benchmark dataset and design six multi-dimensional metrics that assess generation quality from the perspectives of semantics, geometry, texture, and layout. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Yo'City consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods across all evaluation aspects.
Cities around the world differ greatly in size and in their social and economic characteristics. Yet quantitative regularities can be observed when considering systems of cities. Quite often, rank-size distributions of cities are approximately scale-invariant and scaling laws relate the size of cities to some particular socio-economic variables. These scaling regularities are worth investigating once acknowledged their deviations to strict scale-invariance and their spatial and temporal variations. One research objective is to devise models incorporating generative processes that are thought to be crucial to the emergence of these empirical patterns, and then to test whether the models can reproduce them accurately. The aim here is to provide a critical cross-disciplinary overview of such models. Three disciplines are covered: economics, geography and physics. Models are examined and compared with respect to the explanatory processes they incorporate, with a focus on the role of space, the diversity of the entities modelled and the dynamics that the models can or cannot simulate. From this examination, recommendations are provided for building generative models of scale-invariant systems of cities that are really relevant.
Singing voice beautifying is a novel task that has application value in people's daily life, aiming to correct the pitch of the singing voice and improve the expressiveness without changing the original timbre and content. Existing methods rely on paired data or only concentrate on the correction of pitch. However, professional songs and amateur songs from the same person are hard to obtain, and singing voice beautifying doesn't only contain pitch correction but other aspects like emotion and rhythm. Since we propose a fast and high-fidelity singing voice beautifying system called ConTuner, a diffusion model combined with the modified condition to generate the beautified Mel-spectrogram, where the modified condition is composed of optimized pitch and expressiveness. For pitch correction, we establish a mapping relationship from MIDI, spectrum envelope to pitch. To make amateur singing more expressive, we propose the expressiveness enhancer in the latent space to convert amateur vocal tone to professional. ConTuner achieves a satisfactory beautification effect on both Mandarin and English songs. Ablation study demonstrates that the expressiveness enhancer and generator-based accelerate method in ConTuner are effective.
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.
Fan Zhang, Arianna Salazar Miranda, Fábio Duarte
et al.
The visual dimension of cities has been a fundamental subject in urban studies, since the pioneering work of scholars such as Sitte, Lynch, Arnheim, and Jacobs. Several decades later, big data and artificial intelligence (AI) are revolutionizing how people move, sense, and interact with cities. This paper reviews the literature on the appearance and function of cities to illustrate how visual information has been used to understand them. A conceptual framework, Urban Visual Intelligence, is introduced to systematically elaborate on how new image data sources and AI techniques are reshaping the way researchers perceive and measure cities, enabling the study of the physical environment and its interactions with socioeconomic environments at various scales. The paper argues that these new approaches enable researchers to revisit the classic urban theories and themes, and potentially help cities create environments that are more in line with human behaviors and aspirations in the digital age.
Zuzana Špitálová, Oliver Leontiev, Patrik Harmaňoš
Regarding to the smart city infrastructures, there is a demand for big data processing and its further usage. This data can be gained by various means. There are many IoT devices in the city, which can communicate and share the information about the environment which they are situated in. Moreover every personal mobile device can also participate in this process and help to gain data via various applications. Every app provides the useful data, enabling the location and data sharing. This data can be further processed and used for improving the city infrastructure, transport or other services. We designed the system for shared delivery process, which can help to achieve the described situation. It consists of frontend and backend part. The frontend part, multiplatform mobile app, represents the graphical interface and the backend part represents the database for the gained data.
Moving through the landscape with awareness has always been a revolutionary act for humanity, involving a renewed consciousness of our place in space and time. It is no coincidence that a walk is placed at the origin of the modern concept of landscape, and then continues, through some fundamental moments, to characterize a way of relating to the surrounding environment through movement. If in various eras walking has represented a form of aesthetic research, even a desecrating model of rebellion against the status quo, it still remains a fundamental form of primary knowledge, essential for the understanding of everyday landscapes, explored through bodily and related practices to a more inclusive modality involving different actors, who shape and interpret contemporary landscapes.
Architecture, Aesthetics of cities. City planning and beautifying
Since its inception in 1973, the Agricultural Land Reserve (ALR) in British Columbia remained a single zone, with the same rules used in every decision made by the Agricultural Land Commission (ALC). In 2014, Bill 24 divided the ALR into two zones, with each zone governed by different rules. Zone 1 included the Lower Mainland, Vancouver Island, and the Okanagan regions. Zone 2 covered the rest of the province, which was about 90% of the ALR. The Government changed the legislative framework to reflect the diversity of the agricultural land base and to give farmers in Zone 2 more flexibility to earn non-farm income from their agricultural land. In 2019, the ALR was returned to a single zone with a single set of rules. Given its historical significance, we evaluated the effects of Bill 24 and found little evidence that the new rules influenced Commission decisions. Understanding why Bill 24 had little effect provides important insights about creating effective land use policy.
City planning, Political institutions and public administration (General)
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.
The provision of essential urban infrastructure and services for the expanding population is a persistent financial challenge for many of the rapidly expanding cities in developing nations like Ethiopia. The land lease system has received little academic attention as a means of financing urban infrastructure in developing countries. Therefore, the main objective of this study is to assess the contribution of land leasing in financing urban infrastructure and services using evidence from Bahir Dar city, Ethiopia. Primary and secondary data-gathering techniques have been used. Descriptive statistics and qualitative analysis have been adopted. The results show land lease revenue is a dominant source of extra-budgetary revenue for Bahir Dar city. As evidenced by Bahir Dar city, a significant portion of urban infrastructure expenditure is financed by revenues from land leasing. However, despite the critical importance of land lease revenue to investments in urban infrastructure, there is inefficiency in the collection of potential lease revenue due to weak information exchange, inadequate land provision for various uses, lack of transparency in tender committees, and the existence of poor documentation. Our findings suggest that Bahir Dar City needs to manage lease revenue more effectively to increase investment in urban infrastructure while giving due consideration to availing more land for leasing. Keywords: urban, land, revenue, inefficiency, lease, financing, Bahir Dar City
Esteve Almirall, Davide Callegaro, Peter Bruins
et al.
The A.I. disruption and the need to compete on innovation are impacting cities that have an increasing necessity to become innovation hotspots. However, without proven solutions, experimentation, often unsuccessful, is needed. But experimentation in cities has many undesirable effects not only for its citizens but also reputational if unsuccessful. Digital Twins, so popular in other areas, seem like a promising way to expand experimentation proposals but in simulated environments, translating only the half-baked ones, the ones with higher probability of success, to real environments and therefore minimizing risks. However, Digital Twins are data intensive and need highly localized data, making them difficult to scale, particularly to small cities, and with the high cost associated to data collection. We present an alternative based on synthetic data that given some conditions, quite common in Smart Cities, can solve these two problems together with a proof-of-concept based on NO2 pollution.
The gradual transition from fossil fuels to a carbon neutral economy is one of the greatest challenges of our time. The European Union has undertaken numerous initiatives aimed at what is called the energy – and at the same time digital – transition, in order to create growth, jobs, to improve the quality of life of citizens, and to fight climate change. The EU renewed its climate commitment by launching a regulatory process that led in 2019 to the final approval of a package of directives known as the “Clean Energy for all Europeans Package”1 aimed at ensuring a 40% reduction of greenhouse gas emissions compared to 1990 levels, a 32% increase in the use of renewable sources for final energy consumption, a 32,5% reduction in primary energy consumption compared to the trend scenario, an increase of 15% of cross-border electricity interconnection capacity on installed electricity generation capacity. In Italy, the Integrated National Plan for Energy and Climate 2021-2030, drawn up by the Ministry of Economic Development, the Ministry of the Environment, Land and Sea and the Ministry of Infrastructure and Transport, identifies objectives, trajectories and measures that represent our country’s commitment to achieving the European targets by 2030.
In this reference framework, the energy transition, that is the transformation of the electricity system, implies a series of challenges to be faced while maintaining the current high levels of service quality and avoiding an excessive increase in costs for the community.
Among the enabling factors of this transformation we can identify on the one hand the new digital technologies, which allow to collect information at low cost (IoT, smart meter), to transfer large data streams with reliable connectivity solutions (optical fiber, 5G) and to store and analyze data effectively (advanced analytics), on the other hand investments in innovation projects that bring together new digital solutions allowing to face the challenges of the energy context through a transition based on the integration of renewable sources, strengthening of transmission capacity, resilience of infrastructures. «We are witnessing a rethinking of the methods of managing networks, especially distribution networks, which must pass from passive to active. This direction of evolution is identified, at an international level, with the term Smart Grid2, implying highly innovative structures and operating methods that are also able to cope with the numerous problems related to the management of Diffused Generation, the promotion of energy efficiency and greater involvement of end users […]. Now it is no longer enough just to satisfy the growing demand for electricity, but we must respond to new needs that can only be solved thanks to the use of ICT» (Delfanti, 2011; Silvestri, 2011).
The current centralized and top-down distribution of energy will become more and more obsolete and will eventually disappear. In the new era, companies, administrations, homeowners will be able to become producers as much as consumers of their own energy (prosumers), the so-called “distributed generation”, by aggregating and collecting renewable energy generated locally and distributing it through smart grids (Mazzari, 2011).
Smart grids use wireless sensors, software and utility computing that allow to observe and control how much energy is consumed, to increase the generation and storage capacity of RES energy, to improve the quality and operational safety of the entire electricity distribution system, to allow the active participation of users in the market through the integration of all users connected to the grid.
In this regard, analyst Jesse Berst affirmed that smart meters can be considered as an invention equal to the telephone system, the transcontinental railway, the internet (Palma, 2011).
These preliminary considerations are useful for understanding the role played by COGEPA Telecommunication S.p.A., an engineering, design, construction and maintenance company of telecommunications networks, technological systems, networking and low, medium and high voltage energy transport systems. The number of the Address Book has identified the Company as a qualified interlocutor whose reference market is represented by telephone operators, large infrastructures and Public Administrations.
In the following pages, through a dialogue with Eng. Luca Palermo, Commercial Director of COGEPA Telecommunication S.p.A., we will develop some reasoning on Smart Grids and the role of digital technologies, and on how the company’s know-how has allowed to anticipate the opportunities offered by technological innovations while respecting the environment in an energy saving and efficiency optics.
In questo quadro di riferimento la transizione energetica, nella fattispecie la trasformazione del sistema elettrico, implica una serie di sfide da affrontare mantenendo gli attuali elevati livelli di qualità del servizio ed evitando un aumento eccessivo dei costi per la collettività.
Tra i fattori abilitanti di questa trasformazione si possono individuare da un lato le nuove tecnologie digitali, che consentono di raccogliere informazioni a basso costo (IoT, smart meter), di trasferire grandi flussi di dati con soluzioni affidabili di connettività (fibra ottica, 5G) e di stoccare e analizzare i dati in maniera efficace (advanced analytics), dall’altro gli investimenti in progetti di innovazione che mettono insieme le nuove soluzioni digitali permettendo di affrontare le sfide del contesto energetico attraverso una transizione basata sull’integrazione delle fonti rinnovabili, il rafforzamento della capacità di trasmissione, la resilienza delle infrastrutture. «Si assiste a un ripensamento delle modalità di gestione delle reti, soprattutto di distribuzione, che devono passare da passive ad attive. Questa direzione di evoluzione è identificata, a livello internazionale, con il termine smart grid2, sottintendendo strutture e modalità operative fortemente innovative che siano anche in grado di far fronte ai numerosi problemi legati alla gestione della Generazione Diffusa, alla promozione della efficienza energetica e a un maggiore coinvolgimento degli utenti finali […]. Adesso non basta più solo soddisfare la crescente domanda di energia elettrica ma bisogna rispondere a nuove esigenze risolvibili solo grazie al ricorso alle ICT» (Delfanti, 2011; Silvestri, 2011).
L’attuale distribuzione centralizzata e dall’alto verso il basso di energia, diverrà sempre più obsoleta fino a scomparire. Nella nuova era le aziende, le Amministrazioni, i proprietari di casa potranno diventare produttori tanto quanto consumatori della loro stessa energia, la cosiddetta “generazione distribuita”, aggregando e raccogliendo l’energia rinnovabile generata localmente e distribuendola per mezzo delle smart grid (Mazzari, 2011).
Le reti intelligenti utilizzano sensori wireless, software e utility computing che permettono di osservare e controllare quanta energia viene consumata, di aumentare la capacità di generazione e stoccaggio dell’energia da FER, di migliorare la qualità e la sicurezza di funzionamento dell’intero sistema di distribuzione di energia elettrica, di consentire la partecipazione attiva dell’utenza nel mercato attraverso l’integrazione di tutti gli attori connessi alla rete.
A tal proposito l’analista Jesse Berst ha affermato, riguardo ai contatori intelligenti, che possono essere considerati come un’invenzione pari al sistema telefonico, alla ferrovia transcontinentale, ad internet (Palma, 2011).
Aesthetics of cities. City planning and beautifying, Architectural drawing and design
Este trabalho visa apresentar o relato da formação de Arquitetos e Urbanistas como professores no Curso Técnico em Paisagismo do Colégio Politécnico da Universidade Federal de Santa Maria (UFSM), Rio Grande do Sul, Brasil. A presente experiência docente foi vivenciada no segundo semestre de 2019, durante o Estágio Supervisionado de Ensino III, do Programa Especial de Graduação de Formação de Professores para a Educação Profissional da UFSM, nas disciplinas de Projeto de Paisagismo I e III. Neste artigo, discutem-se criticamente os desafios pedagógicos do processo de ensino-aprendizagem, as etapas de planejamento de ensino e a autoavaliação docente. A partir disso, pode-se concluir que entre as particularidades da docência no Curso Técnico em Paisagismo, destaca-se a importância de atingir metodologicamente a competência do “saber fazer”, conduzindo assim os conhecimentos teóricos a uma abordagem transdisciplinar e efetivamente prática nas diversas escalas de atuação do Paisagista.
Aesthetics of cities. City planning and beautifying
Surja Sanyal, Vikash Kumar Singh, Fatos Xhafa
et al.
Food waste is a major challenge for the present world. It is the precursor to several socioeconomic problems that are plaguing the modern society. To counter the same and to, simultaneously, stand by the undernourished, surplus food redistribution has surfaced as a viable solution. Information and Communications Technology (ICT)-mediated food redistribution is a highly scalable approach and it percolates into the masses far better. Even if ICT is not brought into the picture, the presence of food surplus redistribution in developing countries like India is scarce and is limited to only a few of the major cities. The discussion of a surplus food redistribution framework under strategic settings is a less discussed topic around the globe. This paper aims at addressing a surplus food redistribution framework under strategic settings, thereby facilitating a smoother exchange of surplus food in the smart cities of developing countries, and beyond. As ICT is seamlessly available in smart cities, the paper aims to focus the framework in these cities. However, this can be extended beyond the smart cities to places with greater human involvement.
Elena Mussinelli, Andrea Tartaglia, Giovanni Castaldo
Starting from a theoretical framework, the essay explores the use of natural elements in public space design, highlighting the complexity of these components both for their cyclical and temporal characteristics and for their potential as structural elements for urban development within long-lasting temporal frames. The critical reflection focuses on the architectural trends that are characterised by an intensive and undifferentiated use of natural components in the urban project, proposing more sensitive and attentive approaches to environmental pre-existences and to the project’s character of necessity.
Aesthetics of cities. City planning and beautifying, Architectural drawing and design
In ‘ Self-organizing’ cities, decisions are based on the unhampered, peaceful, and honest choices of individuals, and governance, aside from penalizing coercive harm, is based on voluntary agreements. Self-organization has become an increasingly important topic in planning theory, as such processes enable urban systems to more effectively adapt to various stimuli and contextual needs over time. Self-organization may lead to emergent spatial configurations that are more in tune with individuals’ values and preferences than the prevailing top-down approaches. The purpose of this article is to analyse how current tax systems impede emergent spatial configurations and, additionally, to explore what kind of fiscal rules and instruments are more supportive of creative (i.e. dynamically productive) processes of self-organization. The main finding is that the use of behavioural rules (such as contractual covenants and easements) and principles of taxation that do not distort the decentralized creation of value, such as user fees, congestion charges, and repayment of rental value received such as land value taxation, are superior to currently dominant approaches.
The emergence of India as an urbanized nation is one of the most significant socioeconomic and political processes of the 21st century. An essential feature of India's urbanization has been the growth and persistence of informal settlements (slums) in its fast-developing cities. Whether living conditions in Indian urban slums constitute a path to human development or a poverty trap is therefore an issue of vital importance. Here, we characterize census data using the framework of urban scaling to systematically characterize the relative properties of Indian urban slums, focusing on attributes of neighborhoods such as access to basic services like water, sanitation, and electrical power. We find that slums in larger cities offer systematically higher levels of service access than those in smaller cities. Perhaps as expected, we also find consistent underperformance in service access in slums in comparison with non-slum neighborhoods in the same cities. However, urban slums, on average, offer greater access to services than neighborhoods in rural areas. This situation, which we quantify systematically, may help explain why Indian larger cities have remained attractive to rural populations in terms of living standards, beyond the need for an economic income premium.