Violeta Berdejo-Espinola, Richard A. Fuller, Renee Zahnow
Abstract Feeling unsafe is an important barrier to spending time in nature and, therefore, gaining the benefits that such experiences offer. Some research suggests that dense vegetation in green spaces can impede visibility, create hiding places for would-be offenders and reduce perceptions of safety among visitors. Drawing on household survey data from 356 residents of a metropolitan area in Paraguay, we measured perceptions of safety, social disorder, and physical disorder. We objectively measured urban green space biophysical characteristics using satellite-derived indicators such as tree cover, grass cover, and green space size. We found limited evidence that tree cover was associated with perceptions of safety, and while grass cover was positively associated with perceptions of safety in urban green spaces, this positive effect was moderated by green space maintenance. Physical disorder, including signs of poor maintenance, significantly reduced perceptions of safety. In our sample, perceived safety of green spaces did not significantly relate to frequency of visits to urban green spaces, suggesting safety must be considered alongside a suite of other factors when considering barriers and catalysts to spending time in nature. While acknowledging the limitations associated with using objective remote sensing metrics alongside subjective perceptual data, our results challenge the assumption that dense vegetation reduces the perceived safety in green spaces, and highlight the broad implications of physical disorder (including poor maintenance) and social disorder for impeding safety and potentially limiting the use of public nature spaces.
El artículo discute las productividades de un conflicto ambiental en torno a la laguna Francia, Resistencia, Chaco, judicializado en 2019 a partir de la interposición de una acción de amparo de vecinos contra el municipio, para frenar un proyecto inmobiliario que previsiblemente empeoraría las condiciones ambientales y de inundabilidad del barrio. El caso se inscribe en los procesos de extractivismo urbano inmobiliario, en los que el poder del Estado es puesto al servicio de las nuevas lógicas de acumulación por desposesión en áreas de interés ambiental. En particular, se analizan los modos de actuación del Estado en relación a sus responsabilidades en el marco de los derechos sociales y ambientales consolidados en Argentina a partir de la Reforma Constitucional de 1994.
Abstract Urban flooding threatens urban resilience and challenges SDGs 11 and 13. This study assesses urban building flood risk in Guangzhou by integrating flood susceptibility with building function vulnerability. Using a Random Forest (RF) model, it predicts flood susceptibility based on flood records, hydrological, topographical, and anthropogenic features. The Categorical Boosting (CatBoost) model identifies building functions using POI and AOI data. Results reveal significant spatial variations: central districts exhibit higher flood susceptibility, while peripheral areas remain less affected. Over half of the buildings are moderately vulnerable, with only a small fraction highly vulnerable. Based on flood susceptibility and functional vulnerability, Guangzhou is classified into three district types: central urban (Type I), intermediate urban (Type II), and suburban/rural (Type III). The study underscores the need for tailored flood risk management strategies to address these disparities and mitigate climate change-induced water hazards.
Usman Khalid, Muhammad Tahir Ali, Luke Okafor
et al.
Environmental degradation is one of the potentially unforeseen consequences of sanctions, yet few studies have investigated how sanctions affect the environment. For instance, by restricting the acquisition of more efficient technologies, sanctions can strain natural resources and erode environmental performance. Therefore, this study investigates the moderating effects of trade integration on the underlying links between several types of sanctions (i.e., military, arms, trade, financial, and travel) and the environmental quality of the target country. A rich dyadic dataset consisting of 214 sender countries/states, 135 target countries/states, and 28,532 country pairs is used for the empirical analysis. A multi-way panel fixed effects model is employed for the empirical analysis. This approach allows us to control for the unobserved sender and target country-specific as well as time-specific characteristics that might affect environmental performance. The results show that most sanctions result in the deterioration of the environmental quality. In contrast, trade sanctions promote the environmental quality of the target country. We also find that sanctions adversely impact the ecological aspect of the environment while positively influencing the climate change aspect of environmental quality. The results also show that greater bilateral trade interdependence between the sender and the target country helps to mitigate the adverse impacts of most sanctions. The findings of this study suggest that the real effects of sanctions on environmental quality cannot be empirically disentangled if several types of sanctions are clubbed under the umbrella of ‘sanctions’ and captured using a single dummy variable, as is often done in the extant literature. Policies that encourage greater economic integration, such as trade liberalization with multiple countries, can be used strategically by a country to reduce threats of being sanctioned or vulnerabilities to the negative effects of sanctions on the environment.
Cities. Urban geography, Urbanization. City and country
Abstract Urban growth boundaries (UGBs) have been adopted worldwide as a policy tool to control urban sprawl. However, the delineation of recently piloted UGBs in rapidly urbanizing areas of China has methodologically relied mainly on local officials’ personal willingness and urban planners’ work, thus lacking sufficient scientific evidence and reliable quantitative analysis. To fill this gap, this study simulates the spatial pattern of land use based on the CLUE-S model and land development suitability assessment. The principal advantage of this method lies in the innovative combination and effective balance of the central government’s dual requirements of arable land protection and intensive urban development in a rapidly urbanizing country. Moreover, we argue that the village collective—China’s rural land owners—should be treated in its entirety in land development policy-making, and we accordingly adjust the simulation results with village administrative boundaries in the UGB delineation to guarantee its effective implementation. Shenyang metropolis in Northeast China is taken as a case study. The results show that urban expansion and farmland shrinkage are two major features of future land use change in Shenyang; the most striking growth of urban land takes place mainly in the central city, especially in the northeast and southwest sectors. Despite slight variations in the growth rate, predominating directions, main sources, and ecological effects, urban development in Shenyang shows quite similar patterns under different development scenarios. Therefore, UGBs delineated on the basis of these scenarios are almost identical in the basic outline, with changes only in marginal areas. This novel method is proven to be effective in delineating UGBs in urbanizing China and has referential significance for urban growth management in other developing countries.
Urbanization offers several opportunities for the growth of economic, social, and technology sectors, offering benefits to society in terms of better living and healthcare facilities, as well as employment opportunities. However, some major downsides of urbanization are overcrowding and environmental degradation. In order to realize sustainable and environmentally friendly urbanization, there is an urgent need for comprehensive land use planning and of urban settlements by giving due consideration to create and sustain urban green spaces (UGS) such as parks, gardens, roadside vegetation, etc. UGS play a vital role in reducing air pollution, mitigating climate change, and providing various ecosystem services. UGS are being deteriorated substantially due to booming urbanization in developing countries such as India. This review is focused on highlighting the many challenges in creating and maintaining UGS in the Indian context. It is a compilation of available reports on problems linked with poor land use and/or planning of urban settlements. The challenges associated with the management and maintenance of UGS are described. The poor and irregular watering of many existing UGS is one of the major issues among several others requiring immediate attention to resolve the problem of deteriorating UGS in some cities of India. As the groundwater resources are rapidly depleting because of ever increasing water demand, UGS are being dispensed with poor and irregular watering resulting in their deterioration. A list of possible solutions and prospects of UGS in cities aiming to become smart cities soon are discussed in this review. Efficient wastewater treatment and a non-potable reuse system are possible solutions for better prospects of UGS, and therefore, optimism of better cities with low to null urban heat island effect.
Future population projections of urban agglomerations furnish essential input for development policies and sustainability strategies. Here, working within the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) and using a simple urban-growth model, we estimate population trends throughout the 21st century for ~20,000 urban agglomerations in 151 countries. Our results suggest that urban growth in this century will produce increasingly concentrated cities, some growing to enormous sizes. We also demonstrate that, although detailed urbanization trajectories differ for different SSP scenarios, in all cases, the largest projected agglomerations of the future are more populous than the largest agglomerations today. Our projection strategy advances urban-population research by producing urban-size projections—for agglomerations around the world—that correctly obey empirically observed distribution laws. Although our method is very simple and omits various aspects of urbanization, it nonetheless yields valuable insight into long-term SSP-specific urbanization trends to inform discussion of sustainable urban policies.
This paper undertakes a critical analysis of participation as employed in planning for the Mukuru informal settlements in Nairobi, Kenya. In 2017, these settlements were declared a Special Planning Area (SPA) by the Nairobi City County Government, which triggered a participatory process aimed at developing an integrated development plan for the settlements. The SPA process, examined here as a mode of city-making, is understood as a political project that was aimed at reorienting power relations in the city and redefining the conditions of urban citizenship. It enabled the entry of the inhabitants of Mukuru into official domains of participation from which they engaged with other stakeholders in identifying pressing issues within the settlements, leading to co-produced interventions. The paper examines how participation was understood and tested in the SPA, its transformative aspects and some pitfalls that undermined the process.
Challenges due to the rapid urbanization of the world — especially in emerging countries — range from an increasing dependence on energy to air pollution, socio-spatial inequalities and environmental and sustainability issues. Modelling the structure and evolution of cities is therefore critical because policy makers need robust theories and new paradigms for mitigating these problems. Fortunately, the increased data available about urban systems opens the possibility of constructing a quantitative ‘science of cities’, with the aim of identifying and modelling essential phenomena. Statistical physics plays a major role in this effort by bringing tools and concepts able to bridge theory and empirical results. This Perspective illustrates this point by focusing on fundamental objects in cities: the distribution of the urban population; segregation phenomena and spin-like models; the polycentric transition of the activity organization; energy considerations about mobility and models inspired by gravity and radiation concepts; CO2 emitted by transport; and finally, scaling that describes how various socio-economical and infrastructures evolve when cities grow.This Perspective describes how statistical physics helps understand some of the key aspects of cities: their spatial structure and social organization, the distribution of their population, urban mobility and how some critical factors vary with population.
Abstract Over 1 billion people currently live in slums, with the number of slum dwellers only expected to grow in the coming decades. The vast majority of slums are located in and around urban centres in the less economically developed countries, which are also experiencing greater rates of urbanization compared with more developed countries. This rapid rate of urbanization is cause for significant concern given that many of these countries often lack the ability to provide the infrastructure (e.g., roads and affordable housing) and basic services (e.g., water and sanitation) to provide adequately for the increasing influx of people into cities. While research on slums has been ongoing, such work has mainly focused on one of three constructs: exploring the socio-economic and policy issues; exploring the physical characteristics; and, lastly, those modelling slums. This paper reviews these lines of research and argues that while each is valuable, there is a need for a more holistic approach for studying slums to truly understand them. By synthesizing the social and physical constructs, this paper provides a more holistic synthesis of the problem, which can potentially lead to a deeper understanding and, consequently, better approaches for tackling the challenge of slums at the local, national and regional scales.
Abstract The world has experienced widely distributed urbanization from local to global scales in the past decades. Urban expansion can bring multiple benefits for urban inhabitants, however it can also result in a series of environmental and ecological issues, such as carbon emission, air pollution, and biodiversity loss. Therefore, it is urgently required to conduct timely and quantitative monitoring of the dynamics of urban areas worldwide to support sustainable policy making for urban management and development, such as guiding rational urbanization in developing countries, uncovering inequality of global urbanization, and understanding the consistency of urbanization and population growth. However, we still lack high resolution information on the characteristics of global urban dynamics over the past decades. To fill this gap, we quantified spatiotemporal patterns of urban expansion from 1985 to 2018 in 501 large cities worldwide based on the 30 m fine resolution Global annual Artificial Impervious Area dataset. We then assessed the spatiotemporal patterns of urban expansion using the annual growth rate indicator. Our results showed that: (1) The total (mean) impervious surface area in these cities increased obviously from 50,778 (101.35) km2 in 1985 to 150,145 (299.69) km2 in 2018, i.e. the total (mean) impervious surface area tripled from 1985 to 2018. (2) cities in developed countries or high-income countries (e.g. North American and European cities) have a much higher impervious surface area than cities in developing countries or low-income countries (e.g. Asian and African cities). (3) cities in North America and Europe that are dominated by developed or high-income and upper-middle-income countries have lower annual growth rate of impervious surface than cities in Africa and Asia, which are dominated by low-income and lower-middle-income countries. In addition, cities in China and India experienced very high urban expansion rates during the past decades based on the annual growth rate indicator. The findings of this study could provide supporting information for land management and sustainable development for cities around the world.
Lara Sucupira Furtado, Ticiana Linhares Coelho da Silva, Marianna Gonçalves Fontenele Ferreira
et al.
Smart Governance is a key pillar of the Smart City movement and an important pathway to achieving Sustainable Development Goals through digital transformation and technologic tools. However, the digital transformation is highly contextual and solutions from the Global North may not be adequate to the reality of developing countries. We present how digital tools and policies, as part of the broader agenda for digital transformation, can touch upon several sustainability goals when focused on benefitting vulnerable citizens. Examples come from observing the process, stakeholders and products developed during the Digital Transformation of Ceará between 2019 and 2022. We build a framework that further links those examples with the SDGs and the Brazilian Letter for Smart Cities, a national set of guidelines towards equitable smart transitions. By setting the framework vis-a-vis a grounded experience, we seek to present seven components which can be adapted to other contexts as drivers of a Smart and Sustainable Governance. We argue that, by applying those elements to build digital tools that help governance, it is possible to create solutions that are inherently tied to SDGs.
Urbanization. City and country, Political institutions and public administration (General)
This paper takes the example of “notobowl (Notodon)”, which was created as a new “local dish” in the Oku-Noto region, a peripheral area at the tip of the Noto Peninsula, Japan, to showcase how local chefs selected local ingredients to serve on bowls of rice to promote the local characteristics of the Noto (or Oku-Noto) region. This research focuses on small-scale family businesses, in the context of globalization and the global market economy. Each restaurant used products that it had already been selling locally by recommodifying them with a Notodon theme, so that they could be sold in a larger market area. I conducted semi-structured interviews with restaurant managers and other people who were part of the production process. The interviews focused on how each restaurant came up with its original dish, which considered the restaurant’s location, its existing operation, and the influence of outside actors. The interview questions also inquired about the effects of commodifying localness on small family businesses in peripheral areas. The interviews indicated that local small-scale businesses led the promotion of Notodon. The restaurants followed their own procedures when they served their local dishes, they encouraged tourists to consume their Notodon.
Cities. Urban geography, Urbanization. City and country
Karunarathna Atapattu Mudiyanselage Ruwanmali Priyanwada ATAPATTU, E. A. Nadeeka M. EDIRISINGHE, Sarath P. NISSANKA
et al.
Colombo is the commercial capital of Sri Lanka, with a high population, buildings, and vehicles. Therefore, it is vital to observe the spatial distribution of vegetation types and changes in the green cover of Colombo city to identify priority areas to improve green cover. This study was carried out to estimate the changes in green cover in Colombo Municipal Area (CMA) and its postal zones over 10 years using remote sensing techniques. The green cover was categorized into trees, shrubs, Playgrounds (PG)/Grasslands, wetlands, rooftops, and Ipomoea cover. Accordingly, total green cover increased up to 26.17% from 22.36% during the period of 2012–2022. During the past decade, except for the PG/Grasslands, all other vegetation types have been reduced. Five of the 15 postal zones in the CMA’s green cover have decreased during the past 10 years, including Colombo 04, 05, 06, 09, and 13. The highest green cover was recorded in Colombo 07, while the lowest green cover was present in Colombo 11. The outcome of the study emphasizes that CMA is moving towards greening and sustainability even with the expansion of built-up areas and urban populations.
Urbanization. City and country, Environmental sciences
Malaysia has rapidly modernized, with most of the population now residing in cities and the remainder in rural or remote areas. The amount of municipal solid waste generated has increased in tandem with the country's rapid urbanization in response to that statement. Due to a lack of connectivity in rural areas, there may be insufficient infrastructure for a proper waste management system. As a result, illegal waste dumping was common, and landfills' massive volumes of waste may contribute to greenhouse gas emissions. The Malaysian government has responded by taking the necessary steps to upgrade the country's current waste management system in order to better manage municipal solid waste disposal. This research looks at how energy recovery from accumulated waste can be used as a renewable energy source, as well as the current issues, challenges, and proposed solutions. Methane gas produced as a byproduct of waste decomposition in landfills or disposal sites was used to generate electricity more efficiently and sustainably, resulting in a positive economic and environmental outcome.
El presente artículo plantea analizar la transición ecológica global y sus implicancias en la escala local de la cuenca del salar de Atacama en Chile. Como punto de partida, se reflexiona en torno a la transición hacia la movilidad eléctrica que articula un proceso de extractivismo de litio que genera degradación ambiental, afectando la disponibilidad hídrica y las formas de relación con la naturaleza del pueblo indígena lickanantay. El artículo se divide en cuatro partes: en la primera, fundamentalmente de revisión documental en torno al nuevo modelo de desarrollo sustentable, analizamos cómo este se articula a un proceso extractivista en países de la periferia del desarrollo. En la segunda, examinamos datos estadísticos para comprender la importancia de Sudamérica como fuente de litio en los flujos económicos de escala global. En tercer lugar, profundizamos en el trabajo de terreno en cuanto a un análisis de discurso de la introducción de nuevos actores y la confrontación de estos a la perspectiva del pueblo lickanantay. Finalmente, proponemos un análisis desde la matriz teórica de la ecología política para indagar la gobernanza hídrica e identificar implicancias del proceso de degradación medioambiental constatadas a partir de los relatos de actores indígenas sobre el proceso de transformación.
Climate resilience varies significantly based on gender and on location in different physical and social spaces. A qualitative study exploring conditions of the urban poor in Khulna, Bangladesh demonstrates how the appropriation of private, parochial and public spaces by residents of informal settlements influences their capacity to cope with climate risks. Because of the spatial implications of the predominant patriarchal system, women remain vulnerable in private spaces. The parochial spaces they use for productive work also leave them exposed and sensitive to climate hazards. On the other hand, men, who make greater use of public spaces, still have negligible capacity to take any anticipatory and reactive actions in response to risks there. This paper, which provides a comparison to earlier research in Dhaka, argues that gendered constraints in both inhabiting and shaping spaces is an underlying cause of differential climate resilience; alternatively, planning climate-resilient spaces can be seen as a fundamental change contributing to transformative adaptation.