We conduct a detailed investigation of correlations between real-time expressions of individuals made across the United States and a wide range of emotional, geographic, demographic, and health characteristics. We do so by combining (1) a massive, geo-tagged data set comprising over 80 million words generated in 2011 on the social network service Twitter and (2) annually-surveyed characteristics of all 50 states and close to 400 urban populations. Among many results, we generate taxonomies of states and cities based on their similarities in word use; estimate the happiness levels of states and cities; correlate highly-resolved demographic characteristics with happiness levels; and connect word choice and message length with urban characteristics such as education levels and obesity rates. Our results show how social media may potentially be used to estimate real-time levels and changes in population-scale measures such as obesity rates.
Abstract For city planners, public experimentation has become an attractive tool to “look into the future”, increasingly including novel technologies: Actors test novel mobility options, such as autonomous driving on urban roads to receive real-world feedback on their prototypes; and digital technologies are used to create virtual spaces of experimentation to explore interventions in urban space before implementation. Paying explicit attention to the performative character of experiments and the mechanisms by which they make envisioned futures more plausible than others, we build on the concept of “techniques of futuring” (ToF) to better understand the role of experiments in urban transformations. We ask: How do urban experiments perform mobility futures and how does the performance make these futures plausible? We provide empirical insights on two cases of experimental environments in Munich: a living lab for autonomous driving and an urban digital twin for novel bicycle infrastructure design. We identify three core performative mechanisms by which urban experimentation contributes to making certain futures plausible: picturing the vision, preparing the city, and persuading the public. These mechanisms show how experiments involving novel technologies can become powerful in underpinning the presented visions of future mobility. At the same time, they call for caution when the allure of these mechanisms outplays alternative ways of deliberating and creating mobility futures.
Aesthetics of cities. City planning and beautifying, Cities. Urban geography
Abstract Urban planning is challenging especially rapidly developing areas, making it imperative for decision-makers to be transparent, fair, and data-driven. This study looks at how planning decisions are made in local government in Australia. It compares two cases in Wyndham City where communities asked for the creation of new suburbs. The research uses evidence from council records and voting outcomes. It shows how one vote changed the final decision in both cases. In one case, a vote went against what the community wanted. This finding shows how personal bias and poor judgment can appear in traditional systems of governance. The study finds that technology-assisted decision-making (TADM) can improve openness, fairness, and accountability. The use of new technologies can make decision-making more consistent and more based on evidence. It can also help reflect public views more accurately. The study concludes that TADM should become part of urban governance. It recommends more research and real-world testing to build systems that support fair and sustainable planning outcomes.
Cities. Urban geography, Urban groups. The city. Urban sociology
Dagmara Helena Brzeziecka, Bartosz Piziak, Karolina Thel
The aim of the article is to analyse the activities of Urban Living Labs (ULL) in Poland from
the perspective of supporting the realization of sustainable development goals at the local level. The article is based on an analysis of Internet materials (1,907 research units from social media and websites) of
Polish Urban Labs on various types of activities they perform. The analysis of the materials helped to assess the way in which Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) concepts are implemented as part of the
urban innovations developed at Urban Labs. It helped to identify the most important directions of SDG
implementation, as well as to propose a typology of urban labs in this regard. The main conclusions of the
research concern the different strategies for concentrating ULL activities around the SDGs, as well as the
emergence of three speeds of ULL in terms of their involvement in SDG implementation. The “great absentee,” i.e. the undervaluing of sustainable energy topics in ULL activities in Poland, was also revealed.
A large number of communities are impacted annually by the increasing frequency of tornado hazards resulting in damage to the infrastructure as well as disruption of community functions. The effect of the hazard geometry (center and angle of tornado path as well as the tornado width) is studied herein on how it influences the recovery of physical and social systems within the community. Given that pre-disaster preparedness including mitigation strategies (e.g., retrofits) and policies (e.g., insurance) is crucial for increasing the resilience of the community and facilitating a faster recovery process, in this study, the impact of various mitigation strategies and policies on the recovery trajectory and resilience of a typical US community subjected to a tornado is investigated considering different sources of uncertainties. The virtual testbed of Centerville is selected in this paper and is modeled by adopting the Agent-based modeling (ABM) approach which is a powerful tool for conducting community resilience analysis that simulates the behavior of different types of agents and their interactions to capture their interdependencies. The results are presented in the form of recovery time series as well as calculated resilience indices for various community systems (lifeline networks, schools, healthcare, businesses, and households). The results of this study can help deepen our understanding of how to efficiently expedite the recovery process of a community.
Disasters and engineering, Cities. Urban geography
The study of urban spatial structure is currently one of the most popular research fields in urban geography. This study uses Lanzhou, one of the major cities in Northwest China, as a case area. Using the industry classification of POI data, the nearest-neighbor index, kernel density estimation, and location entropy are adopted to analyze the spatial clustering-discrete distribution characteristics of the overall economic geographical elements of the city center, the spatial distribution characteristics of the various industry elements, and the overall spatial structure characteristics of the city. All of these can provide a scientific reference for the sustainable optimization of urban space. The urban economic geographical elements generally present the distribution trend of center agglomeration. In respect of spatial distribution, the economic geographical elements in the central urban area of Lanzhou have obvious characteristics of central agglomeration. Many industrial elements have large-scale agglomeration centers, which have formed specialized functional areas. There is a clear “central–peripheral” difference distribution in space, with an obvious circular structure. Generally, tertiary industry is distributed in the central area, and secondary industry is distributed in the peripheral areas. In general, a strip-shaped urban spatial structure with a strong main center, weak subcenter and multiple groups is present. Improving the complexity of urban functional space is an important goal of spatial structure optimization.
The threat of flooding in cities is often compounded by political and economic decisions made on watershed management, land development and water infrastructure and provisioning. It has also become a point of conflict between cities? objectives for development and modernization, and the struggles of marginalized residents living in low-lying coastal and riverine areas to remain in place. Flooding takes on different forms depending on one's point of view. It is a biophysical issue, involving geology, geography, meteorology and ecology. It is one of urban governance, involving planning and maintenance of infrastructure and land use. And it is sociopolitical, involving historical social and spatial marginalization and contestation. This article, based on mixed-methods research in Jakarta, Indonesia, traces the conceptual and physical contours of urban waterscapes across these conflicting ideas and narratives. It brings into dialogue theories of urban political ecology, landscape ecology and environmental ethnography to explore the interrelationships between biophysical and sociopolitical factors behind urban flooding. In the article the focus is on the varying materialities and scales involved, including the ecological scales of the watershed, the infrastructural scales associated with flood protection, and the urban scales of planning, governance and social activism. The article concludes with a proposition for a multidimensional approach to thinking and acting on problems of urban ecological change.
Abstract In many domains we see a proliferation of claims made about how we can predict and measure the future city, how we make visible its form and shape its settlement. This paper synthesises contemporary debates in data analytics, anthropology, geography and the history of urban thought to consider the context of such claims making around urban futures and the promise (and promises) of attempts to make visible the urban as a ‘lab’ or ‘observatory’ through which we might ‘see like a city’. Building on a ‘systems of systems approach’ the paper develops an original PEAK Urban conceptual framing of this new subdiscipline and addresses the potential for academic research to inform the capacity of cities to anticipate and reshape the challenges that characterise 21st century urban life through interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary engaged scholarship that situates the new urban sciences within a context of an experimental urbanism that makes visible the trade offs and the ethical dilemmas of the future city.
This study examines patterns and relations between gentrification and urban schooling across U.S. cities using longitudinal data from 2000 to 2014. The first section presents new statistics on the incidence and distribution of gentrification occurring around urban schools in the United States as a whole. Of the roughly 20% of urban schools located in divested neighborhoods in the year 2000, roughly one in five experienced gentrification in their surrounding neighborhood by 2014. However, there exists considerable heterogeneity in the prevalence of gentrification across U.S. cities, with exposure rates ranging from zero in some cities to over 50% in others. The second section finds evidence that gentrification is associated with declining enrollment at neighborhood schools, especially when gentrifiers are White.
ABSTRACT Studies of the connections between urban geographies and studentification have an international signature across continents. Yet, the transformative effects of student populations in China are under-stated within theorizations of urban change, despite unprecedented demands for student housing. In this paper, we explore neighborhood change in Haidianlu within Beijing. With an original focus on off- and on-campus student accommodation, we show that studentification processes are fueled by predilections to live off–campus and the production of student-oriented housing. The significance of our discussion is to assert that less-regulated student lifestyles are reinforcing urban geographies of socio-spatial segregation and are illustrative of the effects of the privatization of housing and land markets in China. The concept of studentification is pivotal to theorize how cross-cutting relations between the expansion of higher education and marketization of housing markets are reshaping Chinese cities to become more exclusionary, and comparative to other geographies of global studentification.
ABSTRACT Drawing on an original database created to assess the early emergence of a disruptive industry, this paper analyzes the urban economic geography of eleven ride-hailing firms, each with a market valuation in excess of $1 billion. The paper investigates the locations of headquarters and secondary offices, exploring patterns and drawing connections to the literatures on world cities, innovation, and agglomeration. The paper concludes that ride-hailing demonstrates familiar patterns of urban concentration and agglomeration, privileging a select number of superstar cities. The analysis highlights new geographic features associated with world cities engaged in the digital platform economy – namely, heightened concentration of headquarters and secondary office locations, combined with the global dispersal of service offerings. Finally, the urban geography of these powerful firms has implications for how we think about the world cities literature, the platform economy, and the larger challenges of innovation and inequality in the global urban economy.
This study exposes and maps a hitherto little ‐ known dimension of China's urban geography – that of shrinkage, directly affecting one in 10 of its cities. Urban shrinkage is revealed to be a growing concern for the most populous country on earth, with the absolute number of shrinking cities rising by 71% from 164 in the 1990s to 281 in the 2000s. By developing its own definition of the city as an urban area (UA) in the Chinese political ‐ administrative context, this paper builds a morphologic taxonomy of China's shrinking cities. This reveals the overall net population loss across Chinese shrinking cities more than doubling since 1990, reaching 7.3 million inhabitants in 2010. Sixty ‐ eight Chinese UAs, mostly in north ‐ eastern China, are found to have been shrinking continuously since 1990. Despite the multifaceted and entangled make ‐ up of urban shrinkage, the paper identifies four distinct causes of this geographical phenomenon in China: (1) state ‐ incubated reindustrialisation and economic restructuring, impacting upon 63% of all shrinking UAs; (2) the country's new economic geography, with the underlying centripetal forces of agglomeration pushing around 34% of all shrinking cities towards marginalisation; (3) state ‐ propelled demographic change, leading to natural population decline in 26% of Chinese shrinking cities; and (4) state ‐ sponsored mega ‐ shrinkage, responsible for urban population loss in almost 20% of all the cases. This study further provides a theoretically informed reflec-tion on the peculiarity of shrinkage in China and its public policy implications.