Hasil untuk "Aesthetics of cities. City planning and beautifying"

Adriana Diaconu, Marta Pappalardo

This article examines the responses elicited by experiments addressing complex issues in housing. It explores how such experiments are implemented and their ability to facilitate or hinder dialogue beyond their initiators, decision-makers, and urban and real estate development professionals. The first theoretical part looks at the various definitions and typologies of urban experimentation, which reveal seemingly contradictory aspects regarding their implementation, resulting in an analytical grid. We then apply this grid to three housing development projects: two experiments on the energy transition and the third on metropolitan hospitality. This enables us to observe how these experiments are positioned between contradictory dynamics regarding their implementation, objectives and the actors involved. Our findings indicate that, while the creation of support and the enrollment of new participants are the most sought-after tools for addressing dissent in the cases studied, the processes for forming alliances diverge. Our perspective finally helps us understand the specific features of experiments conducted in housing projects that also aim to transform living practices.

Xufang LI, Xiangpin ZHOU, Feifan WENG

ObjectiveExpanding the coverage of territorial spatial planning to the whole territory and all elements provides an opportunity for the protection and development of historical heritage. The evolution of the cultural landscape of urban historical parks, an urban cultural heritage and an important territorial space, is a medium for the transformation, continuation and reconstruction of the modern city. Under the value orientation of the heritage protection system, strengthening the spatial connection and temporal order among heritage resources can cope with the dilemma of spatial homogenization and fragmentation of the cultural landscape.MethodsThis research takes Xiamen Zhongshan Park (the “Park”) as an example for the interpretation and value assessment of the historical layering process. It constructs a cultural landscape heritage layering model of Xiamen Zhongshan Park by combining ancient literature and the spatial interpretation of ancient maps, and employing the historic urban landscape (HUL) method. By systematically analyzing the characters of the cultural landscape, the distribution patterns of the kernel density of cultural landscape, the layering pattern, and the dynamic superposition of cultural connotations in different periods, the research analyzes the dynamics of the layering evolution of the Park’s cultural landscape. Through expert scoring, the historical importance and cultural influence, artistic aesthetics, social leadership, development potential, and heritage survival status of the cultural landscape heritage of Xiamen Zhongshan Park are assessed, and the value attributes (mainly ontological and reuse values) of such cultural landscape heritage are interpreted by constructing an assessment system.ResultsThis research shows that the layering evolution of cultural landscape in Xiamen Zhongshan Park went through five periods. The initial construction in the germination period formed a preliminary cultural landscape layering space of memorial, natural and landscape scenery sources, as well as special gardens, with cultural scenery sources distributed in a concentrated pattern across the northern, central, and southern areas of the Park. During the destruction period, the development of Xiamen Zhongshan Park stagnated due to the strong force of political power. During the recovery period, the purpose of park construction was to restore the original appearance and maintain the original functions on the basis of adding public facilities of commemorative significance, in an attempt to enhance the Park’s landscape and educational nature. During the recession period, with only some natural and landscape scenery sources remaining, showing a layering state of accumulation in the north and disappearance in the south. During the revival period, the memorial scenery sources, scenic buildings, and special gardens showed a uniform distribution of layering. The spatial functions of cultural landscapes are diversified, forming a multi-integrated cultural landscape layering state.By combing the characters of cultural landscape and the kernel density of cultural landscape distribution in different periods of the Park, the cultural landscape information of multiple periods is superimposed to generate a layering slicing map and a cultural connotation evolution map of the map. According to the results of the layering interpretation, five layering modes of recession, augmentation, juxtaposition, coverage, and regeneration of Xiamen Zhongshan Park are refined, and multiple layering modes are superimposed on each other in the continuous and dynamic evolution of the Park from the modern era to the present day. By retracing the evolution of the Park’s cultural landscape, the driving factors affecting the layering evolution of the Park’s cultural landscape are extracted. The location environment determines the Park’s landscape architecture, forming the initial state of the cultural landscape layering, the public’s demand influences the creation of space in the Park with the change of the times and thus affects the layering evolution, and the urban construction and social politics play a strong role in the layering of cultural landscape through relevant historical, economic, and political elements. In addition, the historical importance, cultural influence, artistic aesthetics, social leadership, and development potential of the Park’s scenic spots are significantly higher than their heritage survival status, which is related to the transformation of the elements in the cultural landscape layering model of Xiamen Zhongshan Park. In view of this, it is necessary to link the natural and cultural heritage resources in the Park, establish a systematic framework for interpreting the value of heritage, and revitalize the styles and features of historical landscapes.ConclusionThis research examines Xiamen Zhongshan Park as a living cultural landscape heritage, and explores the processes, patterns, and mechanisms of cultural landscape heritage superposition across different periods from a dynamic evolutionary perspective. By taking a holistic view of the Park’s heritage value and evolution, this research aims to establish an assessment system for assessing the values and identifying its defining characteristics of the Park’s cultural landscape heritage. The findings seek to inform strategies for the scientific management, comprehensive protection, and sustainable development of urban historical parks. Xiamen Zhongshan Park is not only a historical cultural artifact but also a symbol of urban heritage and modern identity. Analyzing the mechanisms of cultural landscape characterization and value assessment from the perspective of temporal accumulation offers a comprehensive approach to preserving value continuity and supporting the organic renewal of this historic park, bridging territorial spatial planning with heritage preservation.

Mohamed Shamroukh, Mohamed Alkhuzamy Aziz

National planning standards for public services in Egypt often fail to align with unique local characteristics. Addressing this gap, this study develops a tailored planning model for Qena City. Using a hybrid methodology (descriptive, analytical, and experimental), the research utilizes Python programming to generate an intelligent spatial analysis algorithm based on Voronoi Diagrams. This approach creates city-specific planning criteria and evaluates the current coverage of public facilities. The primary contribution of this study is the successful derivation of a localized planning standards model and the deployment of an automated algorithm to assess service efficiency. Application of this model reveals a general service coverage average of 81.3%. Ambulance stations demonstrated the highest efficiency (99.8%) due to recent upgrades, while parks and open spaces recorded the lowest coverage (10%) caused by limited land availability. Spatial analysis indicates a high service density in midtown (>45 services/km^2), which diminishes significantly towards the outskirts (<5 services/km^2). Consequently, the Hajer Qena district contains the highest volume of unserved areas, while the First District (Qesm 1) exhibits the highest level of service coverage. This model offers a replicable framework for data-driven urban planning in Egyptian cities.

Wenzhang Du

Deploying spatio-temporal forecasting models across many cities is difficult: traffic networks differ in size and topology, data availability can vary by orders of magnitude, and new cities may provide only a short history of logs. Existing deep traffic models are typically trained per city and backbone, creating high maintenance cost and poor transfer to data-scarce cities. We ask whether a single, backbone-agnostic layer can condition on "which city this sequence comes from", improve accuracy in full- and low-data regimes, and support better cross-city adaptation with minimal code changes. We propose CityCond, a light-weight city-conditioned memory layer that augments existing spatio-temporal backbones. CityCond combines a city-ID encoder with an optional shared memory bank (CityMem). Given a city index and backbone hidden states, it produces city-conditioned features fused through gated residual connections. We attach CityCond to five representative backbones (GRU, TCN, Transformer, GNN, STGCN) and evaluate three regimes: full-data, low-data, and cross-city few-shot transfer on METR-LA and PEMS-BAY. We also run auxiliary experiments on SIND, a drone-based multi-agent trajectory dataset from a signalized intersection in Tianjin (we focus on pedestrian tracks). Across more than fourteen model variants and three random seeds, CityCond yields consistent improvements, with the largest gains for high-capacity backbones such as Transformers and STGCNs. CityMem reduces Transformer error by roughly one third in full-data settings and brings substantial gains in low-data and cross-city transfer. On SIND, simple city-ID conditioning modestly improves low-data LSTM performance. CityCond can therefore serve as a reusable design pattern for scalable, multi-city forecasting under realistic data constraints.

Gaëtan Laziou, Rémi Lemoy

A good understanding of cities is crucial to implement urban planning policies leading to social and economic sustainability and an efficient use of resources. While urban concentration has been associated with both positive and negative effects, echoing debates on compact cities, few studies have documented how density evolves with city size. We fill this gap by investigating how the population density radial structure changes across the urban hierarchy. Our results uncover strong regularities in urban settlements. In terms of density, cities can be seen as exponential cones which evolve homothetically with city population. This rather simple but universal geometric structure of cities provides a new spatial scaling law, which is an important step forward in understanding how cities work and grow. Some deviations can be observed, which mainly oppose dense cities in the developing world and sprawled cities in high-income countries, associated with high energy use per capita. This suggests that urban lifestyle in wealthiest countries has come at the price of negative impacts on environmental outcomes. This research has a broad range of applications as it provides a powerful tool to compare cities of different sizes.

Francis Engwayo A Mgawadere, Mtafu Manda

Participation in urban planning is championed for entrenching democracy and development. Malawi passed the Local Government Act (1998) and Decentralization Policy (1998) to facilitate community participation in decision-making processes. Several studies have been conducted on decentralization and local governance on community participation. Little attention has been paid to examining the impact of the language used in planning processes on democracy and inclusivity envisaged in the law and policy. Using communicative action theory, the study examined challenges posed by language used in planning processes on inclusivity in the approval processes of urban plans. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews, focus group discussions, observations and document review and analyzed using thematic and discourse analysis. The findings show that while there is high participation at community planning levels, because planners communicate using local languages, participation is compromised in the service committees at city level where final planning decisions are made due to language barrier. Specifically, lack of sincerity, truthfulness, comprehensibility and therefore legitimacy are apparent. Planners are reluctant to simplify written language and translate planning jargon into local languages for councillors to understand. The study concludes that community participation in the urban planning process in Mzuzu fails to entrench democracy due to lack of inclusiveness owing to the language barrier at city level where final planning decisions are made. The study proposes a framework for inclusive participation in urban planning including the motivation, conditions for effective participation and outcomes of participation.

Simone Daniotti, Matte Hartog, Frank Neffke

Diversified economies are critical for cities to sustain their growth and development, but they are also costly because diversification often requires expanding a city's capability base. We analyze how cities manage this trade-off by measuring the coherence of the economic activities they support, defined as the technological distance between randomly sampled productive units in a city. We use this framework to study how the US urban system developed over almost two centuries, from 1850 to today. To do so, we rely on historical census data, covering over 600M individual records to describe the economic activities of cities between 1850 and 1940, and 8 million patent records as well as detailed occupational and industrial profiles of cities for more recent decades. Despite massive shifts in the economic geography of the U.S. over this 170-year period, average coherence in its urban system remains unchanged. Moreover, across different time periods, datasets and relatedness measures, coherence falls with city size at the exact same rate, pointing to constraints to diversification that are governed by a city's size in universal ways.

Dalila García Hernández, Salvador Adame Martínez, Carlos Alberto Pérez Ramírez et al.

La sociedad actual enfrenta una susceptibilidad que demerita la compleja construcción de la percepción del riesgo ante situaciones que, por su frecuencia, se normalizan. Estas se interiorizan hasta dejar de ser consideradas como negativas o peligrosas, ya que forman parte de la cotidianidad. Por ello, el objetivo de este artículo es analizar la transformación de la realidad desde los principios de la antropología, sugiriendo cómo la carga moral se presenta en la percepción que cada sistema social tiene sobre el riesgo. Esto se explica a través de la revisión y análisis derivados del mapeo sistemático disponible sobre la percepción de las inundaciones. El enfoque del estudio es analítico-reflexivo, a partir de la argumentación de los aspectos claves que inciden en la transformación del entorno. La aceptación o rechazo generado mediante el ejercicio de la percepción, independientemente del grado de vulnerabilidad que la sociedad ha concebido. Este análisis se centra en el contexto del sureste mexicano, donde se destaca cómo las inundaciones pueden generar pérdidas socioeconómicas de alto impacto. Desde la antropología, se logra profundizar en el argumento de la dinámica social real mediante, ejercicios analíticos. Esto se plantea a partir de la necesidad de responder a la pregunta: ¿Cómo se desarrolla la percepción del riesgo en un escenario de vulnerabilidad real, vinculándola con la incidencia de la realidad empírica?

Asma Mehan, Sina Mostafavi

This research project and exhibit, delves into the complex relationship between public exhibition, urban spaces, and socio-political norms in shaping urban thresholds within the two American and European metropolitan cities of Houston and Amsterdam. This study also investigates the transformative power of new media and emerging technologies in the production, circulation, and consumption of design, offering fresh perspectives on the influence of these technologies on urban design studies and digitally augmented physical spaces. By merging interdisciplinary research areas, including Design Computation and Fabrication, Urban Communities, and Spatial Justice, this project provides an immersive exploration into the co-production of liminal spaces, focusing on the participation of diverse publics and the dynamics of inclusion, exclusion, and recognition in two cities of Houston and Amsterdam. The main emphasis of this paper is on the critical urban studies and the role of emerging technologies in advancing the theoretical and methodological frameworks of the presented immersive installation project.

Shuo Wang, David C. Anastasiu, Zheng Tang et al.

The eighth AI City Challenge highlighted the convergence of computer vision and artificial intelligence in areas like retail, warehouse settings, and Intelligent Traffic Systems (ITS), presenting significant research opportunities. The 2024 edition featured five tracks, attracting unprecedented interest from 726 teams in 47 countries and regions. Track 1 dealt with multi-target multi-camera (MTMC) people tracking, highlighting significant enhancements in camera count, character number, 3D annotation, and camera matrices, alongside new rules for 3D tracking and online tracking algorithm encouragement. Track 2 introduced dense video captioning for traffic safety, focusing on pedestrian accidents using multi-camera feeds to improve insights for insurance and prevention. Track 3 required teams to classify driver actions in a naturalistic driving analysis. Track 4 explored fish-eye camera analytics using the FishEye8K dataset. Track 5 focused on motorcycle helmet rule violation detection. The challenge utilized two leaderboards to showcase methods, with participants setting new benchmarks, some surpassing existing state-of-the-art achievements.

Chenyi Cai, Biao Li, Qiyan Zhang et al.

Urban morphology, examining city spatial configurations, links urban design to sustainability. Morphology metrics play a fundamental role in performance-driven computational urban design (CUD) which integrates urban form generation, performance evaluation and optimization. However, a critical gap remains between performance evaluation and complex urban form generation, caused by the disconnection between morphology metrics and urban form, particularly in metric-to-form workflows. It prevents the application of optimized metrics to generate improved urban form with enhanced urban performance. Formulating morphology metrics that not only effectively characterize complex urban forms but also enable the reconstruction of diverse forms is of significant importance. This paper highlights the importance of establishing a bi-directional mapping between morphology metrics and complex urban form to enable the integration of urban form generation with performance evaluation. We present an approach that can 1) formulate morphology metrics to both characterize urban forms and in reverse, retrieve diverse similar 3D urban forms, and 2) evaluate the effectiveness of morphology metrics in representing 3D urban form characteristics of blocks by comparison. We demonstrate the methodology with 3D urban models of New York City, covering 14,248 blocks. We use neural networks and information retrieval for morphology metric encoding, urban form clustering and morphology metric evaluation. We identified an effective set of morphology metrics for characterizing block-scale urban forms through comparison. The proposed methodology tightly couples complex urban forms with morphology metrics, hence it can enable a seamless and bidirectional relationship between urban form generation and optimization in performance-driven urban design towards sustainable urban design and planning.

Matteo Bruno, Hygor Piaget Monteiro Melo, Bruno Campanelli et al.

Proximity-based cities have attracted much attention in recent years. The 15-minute city, in particular, heralded a new vision for cities where essential services must be easily accessible. Despite its undoubted merit in stimulating discussion on new organisations of cities, the 15-minute city cannot be applicable everywhere, and its very definition raises a few concerns. Here, we tackle the feasibility and practicability of the '15-minute city' model in many cities worldwide. We provide a worldwide quantification of how close cities are to the ideal of the 15-minute city. To this end, we measure the accessibility times to resources and services, and we reveal strong heterogeneity of accessibility within and across cities, with a significant role played by local population densities. We provide an online platform (\href{whatif.sonycsl.it/15mincity}{whatif.sonycsl.it/15mincity}) to access and visualise accessibility scores for virtually all cities worldwide. The heterogeneity of accessibility within cities is one of the sources of inequality. We thus simulate how much a better redistribution of resources and services could heal inequity by keeping the same resources and services or by allowing for virtually infinite resources. We highlight pronounced discrepancies among cities in the minimum number of additional services needed to comply with the 15-minute city concept. We conclude that the proximity-based paradigm must be generalised to work on a wide range of local population densities. Finally, socio-economic and cultural factors should be included to shift from time-based to value-based cities.

Milind Naphade, Shuo Wang, David C. Anastasiu et al.

The AI City Challenge's seventh edition emphasizes two domains at the intersection of computer vision and artificial intelligence - retail business and Intelligent Traffic Systems (ITS) - that have considerable untapped potential. The 2023 challenge had five tracks, which drew a record-breaking number of participation requests from 508 teams across 46 countries. Track 1 was a brand new track that focused on multi-target multi-camera (MTMC) people tracking, where teams trained and evaluated using both real and highly realistic synthetic data. Track 2 centered around natural-language-based vehicle track retrieval. Track 3 required teams to classify driver actions in naturalistic driving analysis. Track 4 aimed to develop an automated checkout system for retail stores using a single view camera. Track 5, another new addition, tasked teams with detecting violations of the helmet rule for motorcyclists. Two leader boards were released for submissions based on different methods: a public leader board for the contest where external private data wasn't allowed and a general leader board for all results submitted. The participating teams' top performances established strong baselines and even outperformed the state-of-the-art in the proposed challenge tracks.

Wenyu Han, Congcong Wen, Lazarus Chok et al.

City modeling and generation have attracted an increased interest in various applications, including gaming, urban planning, and autonomous driving. Unlike previous works focused on the generation of single objects or indoor scenes, the huge volumes of spatial data in cities pose a challenge to the generative models. Furthermore, few publicly available 3D real-world city datasets also hinder the development of methods for city generation. In this paper, we first collect over 3,000,000 geo-referenced objects for the city of New York, Zurich, Tokyo, Berlin, Boston and several other large cities. Based on this dataset, we propose AETree, a tree-structured auto-encoder neural network, for city generation. Specifically, we first propose a novel Spatial-Geometric Distance (SGD) metric to measure the similarity between building layouts and then construct a binary tree over the raw geometric data of building based on the SGD metric. Next, we present a tree-structured network whose encoder learns to extract and merge spatial information from bottom-up iteratively. The resulting global representation is reversely decoded for reconstruction or generation. To address the issue of long-dependency as the level of the tree increases, a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) Cell is employed as a basic network element of the proposed AETree. Moreover, we introduce a novel metric, Overlapping Area Ratio (OAR), to quantitatively evaluate the generation results. Experiments on the collected dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model on 2D and 3D city generation. Furthermore, the latent features learned by AETree can serve downstream urban planning applications.

Zhanpeng Huang

Does the national innovation city and smart city pilot policy, as an important institutional design to promote the transformation of old and new dynamics, have an important impact on the digital economy? What are the intrinsic mechanisms? Based on the theoretical analysis of whether smart city and national innovation city policies promote urban digital economy, this paper constructs a multi-temporal double difference model based on a quasi-natural experiment with urban dual pilot policies and systematically investigates the impact of dual pilot policies on the development of digital economy. It is found that both smart cities and national innovation cities can promote the development of digital economy, while there is a synergistic effect between the policies. The mechanism test shows that the smart city construction and national innovation city construction mainly affect the digital economy through talent agglomeration effect, technology agglomeration effect and financial agglomeration effect.

Patrícia Santos Pedrosa, Eliana Sousa Santos, Nuria Álvarez Lombardero et al.

Eduardo Graells-Garrido, Feliu Serra-Burriel, Francisco Rowe et al.

As cities expand, human mobility has become a central focus of urban planning and policy making to make cities more inclusive and sustainable. Initiatives such as the "15-minutes city" have been put in place to shift the attention from monocentric city configurations to polycentric structures, increasing the availability and diversity of local urban amenities. Ultimately they expect to increase local walkability and increase mobility within residential areas. While we know how urban amenities influence human mobility at the city level, little is known about spatial variations in this relationship. Here, we use mobile phone, census, and volunteered geographical data to measure geographic variations in the relationship between origin-destination flows and local urban accessibility in Barcelona. Using a Negative Binomial Geographically Weighted Regression model, we show that, globally, people tend to visit neighborhoods with better access to education and retail. Locally, these and other features change in sign and magnitude through the different neighborhoods of the city in ways that are not explained by administrative boundaries, and that provide deeper insights regarding urban characteristics such as rental prices. In conclusion, our work suggests that the qualities of a 15-minutes city can be measured at scale, delivering actionable insights on the polycentric structure of cities, and how people use and access this structure.

Yitian Chen, Kunlong Chen, Kunjin Chen et al.

We took part in the city brain challenge competition and achieved the 8th place. In this competition, the players are provided with a real-world city-scale road network and its traffic demand derived from real traffic data. The players are asked to coordinate the traffic signals with a self-designed agent to maximize the number of vehicles served while maintaining an acceptable delay. In this abstract paper, we present an overall analysis and our detailed solution to this competition. Our approach is mainly based on the adaptation of the deep Q-network (DQN) for real-time traffic signal control. From our perspective, the major challenge of this competition is how to extend the classical DQN framework to traffic signals control in real-world complex road network and traffic flow situation. After trying and implementing several classical reward functions, we finally chose to apply our newly-designed reward in our agent. By applying our newly-proposed reward function and carefully tuning the control scheme, an agent based on a single DQN model can rank among the top 15 teams. We hope this paper could serve, to some extent, as a baseline solution to traffic signal control of real-world road network and inspire further attempts and researches.

Irene Meta, Fernando M. Cucchietti, Diego Navarro et al.

Life, services and activities within cities have commonly been studied by separate disciplines, each one independent from the others. One such approach is the computer simulation, which enables in-depth modelling and cost-effective evaluation of city phenomena. However, the adoption of integrated city simulations faces several barriers, such as managerial, social, and technical, despite its potential to support city planning and policymaking. This paper introduces the City Physiology: a new conceptual framework to facilitate the integration of city layers when designing holistic simulators. The physiology is introduced and applied through a process of three steps. Firstly, a literature review is offered in order to study the terminology and the progress already made towards integrated modelling of different urban systems. Secondly, interactions between urban systems are extracted from the approaches studied before. Finally, the pipeline to carry out the integration strategy is described. In addition to providing a conceptual tool for holistic simulations, the framework enables the discovery of new research lines generated by previously unseen connections between city layers. Being an open framework, available to all researchers to use and broaden, the authors of this paper envisage that it will be a valuable resource in establishing an exact science of cities.

Erich Wolff, Felipe Munoz

This article interrogates the techno-politics of crowdsourced data in the study of environmental hazards such as floods, storms, wildfires, and cyclones. We highlight some of the main debates around the use of citizen-generated data for assessing, monitoring, and responding to disasters. We then argue that, compared to the number of articles discussing the quality of citizen-generated data, little attention has been dedicated to discussing the social and political implications of this kind of practice. While this article does not intend to present definitive answers, it outlines inevitable challenges and indicates potential directions for future studies on the techno-politics of disaster data collection. Within a techno-politics approach, we argue for a model of political participation that recognizes citizens providing data to shape cities as equal experts in the production of knowledge and decision-making, rather than external contributors collecting data for formal authorities. This political participation approach, we believe, would increase the dependence of formal scientific knowledge on citizens' daily-lived experiences, create horizontal collaborations among diverse stakeholders, in terms of respect and recognition, and increase the humanization of marginalized communities, particularly from the Global South.