Hasil untuk "Urban groups. The city. Urban sociology"

Junxiang Xu, Chence Niu, Divya Jayakumar Nair et al.

Recently, quantum computing has gained attention in urban studies as a tool for complex transport planning problems, but its role remains unclear. This paper reviews quantum computing research in urban transport planning and highlights major limits in scalability, robustness, constraint handling, and engineering feasibility.Stable and reproducible advantages of quantum optimisation in real urban systems have yet to be shown. By comparing quantum methods with established classical optimisation methods, it is found that decomposition methods, metaheuristics, and reinforcement learning already provide transparent, scalable, and policy-interpretable solutions for medium and large-sized urban transport networks. In contrast, the contribution of quantum methods largely lies in the exploratory analysis of limited, discrete combinatorial subproblems rather than full system-level optimisation. It is argued in this paper for a shift from technology-driven application narrative towards problem-driven method selection. From an urban transport planning perspective, we have identified the specific problem types where the exploratory use of quantum computing may be relevant, including critical link and node vulnerability identification, combinatorial screening of congestion and failure scenarios, disaster-related condition analysis, constrained path option selection, and small-scale facility location and investment option assessment. It is concluded that hybrid frameworks represent a more realistic pathway for integrating quantum computing into urban transport research, in which classical methods ensure systemlevel consistency and policy interpretability while quantum methods support local combinatorial exploration. Until stable engineering advantages are demonstrated, public agencies and researchers should prioritise method validation, scenario suitability, and cross-disciplinary collaboration.

Ayoub Guemouria, Abdelghani Chehbouni, Salwa Belaqziz et al.

The watershed represents a holistic system whose poor understanding of its multiple subsystems can lead to a pronounced water scarcity. This study aims to develop an innovative technique for managing water resources within the Souss-Massa watershed. It uses the System Dynamics (SD) methodology to analyze the interplay among the factors involved in water supply and demand. The results show that under the Business As Usual (BAU) scenario, water sustainability in this watershed is not assured. Groundwater drawdown (GWD) will increase significantly, with an estimated average decrease of −337 Mm3 for the period 2022 to 2050. To remedy this critical situation, several simulations were developed, each representing a distinct scenario. Scenario 1 improves irrigation efficiency by 10%, while scenario 2 achieves a 20% improvement. Scenario 3 builds on scenario 2 by doubling the volume of reused water. Scenario 4 extends scenario 3 by also doubling the volume of desalinated water. Scenario 5 combines the 10% improvement in irrigation efficiency from scenario 1 with a doubling of both reused and desalinated water volumes, along with a stabilization of irrigated areas. Scenario 6 adds a 7% increase in water supply to the measures in scenario 5. Finally, scenario 7 combines the 10% irrigation efficiency improvement from scenario 1 with a doubling of reused and desalinated water volumes, but reduces the irrigated area by 15%. This study is of crucial importance to decision-makers, as it provides them with strategies for promoting water-saving practices and, consequently, advancing the sustainable development agenda.

Qingyi Wang, Yuebing Liang, Yunhan Zheng et al.

Generative AI offers new opportunities for automating urban planning by creating site-specific urban layouts and enabling flexible design exploration. However, existing approaches often struggle to produce realistic and practical designs at scale. Therefore, we adapt a state-of-the-art Stable Diffusion model, extended with ControlNet, to generate high-fidelity satellite imagery conditioned on land use descriptions, infrastructure, and natural environments. To overcome data availability limitations, we spatially link satellite imagery with structured land use and constraint information from OpenStreetMap. Using data from three major U.S. cities, we demonstrate that the proposed diffusion model generates realistic and diverse urban landscapes by varying land-use configurations, road networks, and water bodies, facilitating cross-city learning and design diversity. We also systematically evaluate the impacts of varying language prompts and control imagery on the quality of satellite imagery generation. Our model achieves high FID and KID scores and demonstrates robustness across diverse urban contexts. Qualitative assessments from urban planners and the general public show that generated images align closely with design descriptions and constraints, and are often preferred over real images. This work establishes a benchmark for controlled urban imagery generation and highlights the potential of generative AI as a tool for enhancing planning workflows and public engagement.

Joseph Uguet, Nicola Tollin, Jordi Morató

Urban crises reveal the true essence of cities: their ability to either withstand disorder or collapse under its pressure. This article explores how antifragility principles can transforms urban disruption into levers for reinforcement and innovation. While resilience seeks to restore a lost balance, antifragility goes further: it pushes cities to improve through shocks. Across a critical analysis of post-crisis strategies and the identification of fifteen fundamental theoretical principles, this work proposes a new framework, structuring a proactive and evolutionary approach to urban development. Medellín, Singapore and Fukushima already illustrate this dynamic, showing that adversity can catalyse profound transformations. By integrating institutional flexibility, strategic diversity and self-organization, antifragility poses itself as an alternative to the limits of resilience. Can this model really redefine the way cities adapt to crises? This article paves the way for a decisive reflection to rethink urban planning in an uncertain world.

Hoai Nguyen Huynh

Urban mobility plays a crucial role in the functioning of cities, influencing economic activity, accessibility, and quality of life. However, the effectiveness of analytical models in understanding urban mobility patterns can be significantly affected by the spatial scales employed in the analysis. This paper explores the impact of spatial scales on the performance of the gravity model in explaining urban mobility patterns using public transport flow data in Singapore. The model is evaluated across multiple spatial scales of origin and destination locations, ranging from individual bus stops and train stations to broader regional aggregations. Results indicate the existence of an optimal intermediate spatial scale at which the gravity model performs best. At the finest scale, where individual transport nodes are considered, the model exhibits poor performance due to noisy and highly variable travel patterns. Conversely, at larger scales, model performance also suffers as over-aggregation of transport nodes results in excessive generalisation which obscures the underlying mobility dynamics. Furthermore, distance-based spatial aggregation of transport nodes proves to outperform administrative boundary-based aggregation, suggesting that actual urban organisation and movement patterns may not necessarily align with imposed administrative divisions. These insights highlight the importance of selecting appropriate spatial scales in mobility analysis and urban modelling in general, offering valuable guidance for urban and transport planning efforts aimed at enhancing mobility in complex urban environments.

Yitao Yang, Erjian Liu, Bin Jia et al.

Mobility is a fundamental feature of human life, and through it our interactions with the world and people around us generate complex and consequential social phenomena. Social segregation, one such process, is increasingly acknowledged as a product of one's entire lived experience rather than mere residential location. Increasingly granular sources of data on human mobility have evidenced how segregation persists outside the home, in workplaces, cafes, and on the street. Yet there remains only a weak evidential link between the production of social segregation and urban policy. This study addresses this gap through an assessment of the role of the urban transportation systems in shaping social segregation. Using city-scale GPS mobility data and a novel probabilistic mobility framework, we establish social interactions at the scale of transportation infrastructure, by rail and bus service segment, individual roads, and city blocks. The outcomes show how social segregation is more than a single process in space, but varying by time of day, urban design and structure, and service design. These findings reconceptualize segregation as a product of likely encounters during one's daily mobility practice. We then extend these findings through exploratory simulations, highlighting how transportation policy to promote sustainable transport may have potentially unforeseen impacts on segregation. The study underscores that to understand social segregation and achieve positive social change urban policymakers must consider the broadest impacts of their interventions and seek to understand their impact on the daily lived experience of their citizens.

Anqi Li, Zhiyong Wang, Jiazhao Zhang et al.

Urban micromobility applications, such as delivery robots, demand reliable navigation across large-scale urban environments while following long-horizon route instructions. This task is particularly challenging due to the dynamic and unstructured nature of real-world city areas, yet most existing navigation methods remain tailored to short-scale and controllable scenarios. Effective urban micromobility requires two complementary levels of navigation skills: low-level capabilities such as point-goal reaching and obstacle avoidance, and high-level capabilities, such as route-visual alignment. To this end, we propose UrbanVLA, a route-conditioned Vision-Language-Action (VLA) framework designed for scalable urban navigation. Our method explicitly aligns noisy route waypoints with visual observations during execution, and subsequently plans trajectories to drive the robot. To enable UrbanVLA to master both levels of navigation, we employ a two-stage training pipeline. The process begins with Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) using simulated environments and trajectories parsed from web videos. This is followed by Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (RFT) on a mixture of simulation and real-world data, which enhances the model's safety and adaptability in real-world settings. Experiments demonstrate that UrbanVLA surpasses strong baselines by more than 55% in the SocialNav task on MetaUrban. Furthermore, UrbanVLA achieves reliable real-world navigation, showcasing both scalability to large-scale urban environments and robustness against real-world uncertainties.

Tram Thi Minh Tran, Callum Parker, Marius Hoggenmüller et al.

Augmented reality (AR) has the potential to fundamentally change how people engage with increasingly interactive urban environments. However, many challenges exist in designing and evaluating these new urban AR experiences, such as technical constraints and safety concerns associated with outdoor AR. We contribute to this domain by assessing the use of virtual reality (VR) for simulating wearable urban AR experiences, allowing participants to interact with future AR interfaces in a realistic, safe and controlled setting. This paper describes two wearable urban AR applications (pedestrian navigation and autonomous mobility) simulated in VR. Based on a thematic analysis of interview data collected across the two studies, we found that the VR simulation successfully elicited feedback on the functional benefits of AR concepts and the potential impact of urban contextual factors, such as safety concerns, attentional capacity, and social considerations. At the same time, we highlighted the limitations of this approach in terms of assessing the AR interface's visual quality and providing exhaustive contextual information. The paper concludes with recommendations for simulating wearable urban AR experiences in VR.

Ammar Sohail, Bojie Shen, Muhammad Aamir Cheema et al.

As urban areas grapple with unprecedented challenges stemming from population growth and climate change, the emergence of urban digital twins offers a promising solution. This paper presents a case study focusing on Sydney's urban digital twin, a virtual replica integrating diverse real-time and historical data, including weather, crime, emissions, and traffic. Through advanced visualization and data analysis techniques, the study explores some applications of this digital twin in urban sustainability, such as spatial ranking of suburbs and automatic identification of correlations between variables. Additionally, the research delves into predictive modeling, employing machine learning to forecast traffic crash risks using environmental data, showcasing the potential for proactive interventions. The contributions of this work lie in the comprehensive exploration of a city-scale digital twin for sustainable urban planning, offering a multifaceted approach to data-driven decision-making.

M. Plotnikova

The article is devoted to the consideration and transformation of social and administrative problems of municipalities with low initiative of citizens. The empirical basis was the data of sociological research (surveys), conducted by the author in the urban district of Krasnoturinsk (Sverdlovsk region) before and after the announcement of partial mobilization. In the course of the study the social problems of the territory, the level of trust in the local authorities, interaction with them, as well as the dynamics of changes in these aspects under the influence of key political factors, in particular, the special military operation in Ukraine were considered. Activity and activity-activist approaches were applied, which allowed us to study the state of society in the context of radical changes as well as to study the formation and activity of socio-group communities on the territory of the municipality in the conditions of special operation. The author conducted expert interviews with officials of the Administration of the Northern Administrative District, the Administration of the City District of Krasnoturyinsk, the Chairpersons of the Public Chambers of the Serov and Krasnoturyinsk City Districts, and the representatives of newly-created local communities: Committee of Soldiers' Mothers of Serov urban district and veterans' organizations of Krasnoturinsk urban district on their interaction with the authorities and the settlement of conflicts. The study showed that even with low citizen initiative, the presence of an external factor (partial mobilization) stimulates residents to make decisions on social problems outside the competence of local government, while forming new social institutions, local communities. The author concludes that in the realities of the special operation, in addition to those existing on the territory of the municipality, new local communities, social institutions emerge, providing conditions of organizational and stimulating nature of further action, whose representatives, as leaders of public opinion, can claim to be included in the Public Chamber of the municipality during the subsequent selection procedures. This opens up another mechanism for identifying leaders of public opinion in a municipal territory with low citizen initiative to effectively organize the interaction between citizens and local government through the Public Chamber of the municipality, which, in turn, can both further contribute to relieving social tensions in the conditions of SSE, and in general improve the quality of life in the municipal territory.

Hao Han, Chen Shen, Kaiqin Li et al.

This study is a bibliometric analysis of urban studies publications from 2001 to 2021 that unravels the evolution and growing complexity of the field. Although developed regions still dominate and lead this area of inquiry, urban studies led by Asian scholars have increased dramatically over the last decade. There is also topic diffusion from developed regions to less-developed regions despite some unique emphases within each region caused by their local socio-economic-ecological contexts. Climate change adaptation and sustainable development, inequality, and urban governance are receiving growing attention globally. The findings suggest the rising importance of cross-continent knowledge transfer and multi-disciplinary collaboration, particularly among urban studies, sustainability policies and management, public administration, and development studies. Also, urban researchers need to pay more attention to issues faced by many growing cities in developing economies in Asia and Africa as more of the world's population will reside in those urban settings in the coming decades.

Caroline Leboeuf, Margarida Carvalho, Yan Kestens et al.

The recent promotion of sustainable urban planning combined with a growing need for public interventions to improve well-being and health have led to an increased collective interest for green spaces in and around cities. In particular, parks have proven a wide range of benefits in urban areas. This also means inequities in park accessibility may contribute to health inequities. In this work, we showcase the application of classic tools from Operations Research to assist decision-makers to improve parks' accessibility, distribution and design. Given the context of public decision-making, we are particularly concerned with equity and environmental justice, and are focused on an advanced assessment of users' behavior through a spatial interaction model. We present a two-stage fair facility location and design model, which serves as a template model to assist public decision-makers at the city-level for the planning of urban green spaces. The first-stage of the optimization model is about the optimal city-budget allocation to neighborhoods based on a data exposing inequality attributes. The second-stage seeks the optimal location and design of parks for each neighborhood, and the objective consists of maximizing the total expected probability of individuals visiting parks. We show how to reformulate the latter as a mixed-integer linear program. We further introduce a clustering method to reduce the size of the problem and determine a close to optimal solution within reasonable time. The model is tested using the case study of the city of Montreal and comparative results are discussed in detail to justify the performance of the model.

E. Almeida, Mariana Corrochano

This article presents the results of an international research project carried out in Italy and Canada, conducted by architects, landscape architects, sociologists and medical doctors. The study originated in the conviction that health and well-being are crucial objectives integrated within the notion of a sustainable city. For this reason, the configuration of urban space plays a decisive role in defining lifestyles and can contribute to improving the welfare of citizens. Many of today’s diseases are caused by a sedentary lifestyle; it is essential, therefore, to centre prevention on the promotion of physical well-being encouraging an active lifestyle, which can be achieved by changing the urban structure. With the aim of bringing about sustainable and healthy lifestyles, streets are in vogue. Streets are meeting and experimental places, theatres of everyday life and settings for cultural events. They provide crucial urban space for people and, in the context of urban studies, offer intellectual research nourishment to reflect on this fundamental element of the structure of the city. The research project presented here is aimed at encouraging active lifestyles, walkability and the use of public transport by facilitating accessibility to four sites in Rome and Montreal, and by exploring the potential leveraging of existing infrastructures and services. The research-based design proposals start with the idea of redeveloping the system of public spaces, beginning with the increase of bicycle and pedestrian routes in relation to schools, commerce, sports facilities and archaeological heritage. The goal is to build feasible, safe, recognisable and attractive routes and well-equipped public spaces in order to discourage the use of private vehicles, especially for short trips. The projects presented here are based on a systemic vision and make use of existing, but often abandoned or undervalued, spaces and resources.

Laura Westerveen, Ilona van Breugel, Ilke Adam et al.

Abstract This article analyses how states adapt generic policies to the increasing diversity that characterises contemporary European societies. More particularly, it zooms in on how migration-related diversity is mainstreamed into education policies in the Netherlands and Flanders and why we observe different policy trends in these two cases. We find that the focus on migration-related diversity largely faded in Dutch education policies in the period from 2000 to 2014. In Flanders, this trend towards ‘migration-related diversity retrenchment’ is less prevalent during this period, even though a similar evolution has started to take place more recently. These findings present a puzzle, as the most evident explanation for diversity retrenchment, namely the increasing politicisation of migration and diversity, cannot account for this difference since the Netherlands and Flanders are characterised by similar degrees of politicisation of migration-related diversity. Our findings thus call for an exploration of underemphasised explanations for diversity retrenchment. We show that the diverging degree of diversity retrenchment can be explained by the presence or absence of a sub-state nationalist project and diverging degrees of neoliberal retrenchment policies. Sub-state nationalism seems to have temporarily offered a buffer against the neoliberal retrenchment of migration-related diversity.

Sergey V. Ryazantsev, Irina N. Molodikova, Olga D. Vorobeva

The article analyses migration from border countries (the so-called overlapping area) of two migration subsystems — Eurasian (centred in the Russian Federation) and European (the European Union) from 1991 to 2021 (before the recent events in Ukraine). A step-by-step analysis of the migration situation in the countries of the former USSR — Belarus, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Ukraine and Estonia was conducted. The article examines bilateral and multilateral migration processes, analyses the main factors influencing their development and explores migration policy measures and their impact on the regulation of migration processes in the countries of the overlapping area. These countries, located between the two centres of major migration subsystems in Eurasia (Eurasian and European, or, in other words, between the Russian Federation and the core of the EU), are subject to their strong influence and ‘competitive gravitation’. The strength of this gravitation depends not only on pull and push factors but also on the attractiveness and non-attractiveness of the migration policies prevailing in these migration subsystems at a given point in time.

Yitao Yang, Bin Jia, Erjian Liu et al.

Revealing the structural properties and understanding the evolutionary mechanisms of the urban heavy truck mobility network (UHTMN) provide insights in assessment of freight policies to manage and regulate the urban freight system, and are of vital importance for improving the livability and sustainability of cities. Although massive urban heavy truck mobility data become available in recent years, in-depth studies on the structure and evolution of UHTMN are still lacking. Here we use massive urban heavy truck GPS data in China to construct the UHTMN and reveal its a wide range of structure properties. We further develop an evolving network model that simultaneously considers weight, space and system element duplication. Our model reproduces the observed structure properties of UHTMN and helps us understand its underlying evolutionary mechanisms. Our model also provides new perspectives for modeling the evolution of many other real-world networks, such as protein interaction networks, citation networks and air transportation networks.

C. Cannon

In this article, I synthesize insights from urban growth machine and risk society theories to advance scholarship that furthers an understanding of why and how environmental racism, in this case rebuilding a school on toxic land in a Black community, is produced during prolonged recovery to disaster. Using a single, embedded historical case, I focus on the redevelopment of the Booker T. Washington High School in the heart of New Orleans, LA with confirmed worrisome concentrations of highly toxic and carcinogenic elements and the associated health risks conferred to majority Black children who will attend. Using an explanation building technique, I find explanatory support for recovery machine theories that argue post-disaster funding is used to propel growth machine dynamics. In other words, reinvestment creates environmental risks that amount to environmental racism. Building on this theory, I illustrate through the case how redevelopment of post-disaster New Orleans manufactures environmental risk and how local groups experience that risk differently adding to sociological theorizations on the contested nature of risk. I discuss implications of the intersections of urban growth, environmental risk, and inequalities for cities.

E. Fudali, M. Podlaska, A. Koszelnik-Leszek

The paper presents an analysis of the ecological requirements and sociological-ecological relations of 403 species of vascular plants recorded in 82 mid-field woodlots located among crop fields in the agricultural outskirts of Wrocław. The aim of the research and analyses was to determine what is the species composition of these woodlots and whether they are ecologically more similar to those situated in environment of farmlands or urban wastelands. The authors assumed the latter. It was found that the mid-­ -field woodlots occupied less than 1% of arable land and were located exclusively in close proximity to the city’s administrative borders, and more than half of them were related to the hydrographic network of the area. Their flora, in general assessment, shows a great variety in terms of water requirements and has the features of woodlots described from typically agricultural areas. This applies to the dominance of forest, shrub and meadow species with a constant, usually not exceeding 20%, share of ruderal plants and a small number of weeds in crops. Thus, the assumption that the flora of the studied woodlots will show signs of ruderalization to a large extent has not been confirmed. 72% of species occurred in no more than 10 objects, which shows that the described ecological diversity of the flora studied is based on single or few locations. The most frequent species were nitrophilic and in over 50% they represented a group of shrub communities. The list of the species recorded with estimation of their frequency is provided.

Christine Lang, Andreas Pott, Kyoko Shinozaki

Abstract The introductory article of this Special Issue explores the potential of an organisational perspective in comparative migration studies and for migration studies more broadly. Although organisations shape migration processes and the in/exclusion of migrants and their descendants in multiple ways, their role has long received surprisingly little attention in migration studies. Taking stock of the research engaging with organisations, we outline the main contours of the literature and suggest several conceptual perspectives that migration scholarship may benefit from. Based on the contributions included in this Special Issue, which focus on different types of organisations in diverse empirical contexts, we discuss three main patterns of organisational practices influencing migration and migrants’ trajectories. These pertain to (1) decision-making about in/exclusion and underlying categorisations, (2) the (re-)production of ‘migrant figures’, and (3) rationalities and structures shaping organisational practices.