Hasil untuk "City population. Including children in cities, immigration"

Eduardo González

Abstract This article examines media narratives surrounding the deaths of two child refugees—Alan Kurdi in the Aegean Sea (2015) and Valeria Martínez-Ramírez (2019) in the Rio Grande—to explore how journalistic coverage constructs affect, politics, crisis, and blame in the context of forced displacement. Moving beyond U.S. and European media–centric analyses, the study adopts a comparative approach that centers national and local news media in Turkey and Mexico, the last sites of departure before these deaths occurred. Drawing on a discourse analysis of 328 Turkish (N = 213) and Spanish-language (N = 115) news articles spanning diverse political orientations, the article investigates how these tragedies were framed and understood. The findings reveal two dominant thematic patterns: discourses of responsibility and blame, and humanitarian and religious narratives that function as unifying agents across racial, ethnic, and national divides. By decentering Global North media perspectives, this study contributes to comparative migration scholarship and underscores the importance of localized media contexts in shaping understandings of refugee deaths and humanitarian crises.

B. O. Adegebo, A.A. Fadiya

Scientific reports on climate-related health risks contain large amounts of information and academic jargon that are often difficult to understand by non-experts. Effectively communicating the health consequences of climate change in simplified contexts remains crucial for raising local awareness and enhancing individual and community response to climate-related health initiatives, especially in tropical cities. Using two purposefully designed semi-structured questionnaires administered to 150 respondents randomly selected across targeted groups, including children and adolescents, adults, and the elderly in Ado-Ekiti, an emerging city in Southwest Nigeria, this study investigates the communication tools that can most effectively disseminate information on climate-related health risks on a more personal level. It examines the communication barriers that limit people’s access, understanding and attitudes toward climate-related health information. The study’s findings could provide valuable insights that can improve how climate-related health concerns and mitigation policies are communicated to local communities, ultimately reducing population health risks.

F. Mansouri, A. Elias

Abstract As super-diversity becomes a normalized socio-demographic fact in contemporary societies, the issue of managing its complex manifestations has become a salient feature of academic and policy debates around the world. Recently, these debates have particularly centred on what would constitute an optimal approach to managing group diversity and intercultural relations, in a context of global migration challenges, pandemic-related inequalities, rising levels of racism, and international conflicts. While much of the recent literature has focused on whether the two dominant approaches, multiculturalism and interculturalism, offered distinct alternatives, there has been little agreement so far, both at the theoretical and policy levels, on the specific direction future diversity governance should take. This article critically examines this contested discourse by reframing diversity as a multi-layered state of being and knowing, that can be understood beyond mere factual differences among ethno-cultural groups. This reframing is pursued by laying out an interactive framework between the hardware and software of pluralism, centred around key normative articulations in relation to cultural recognition, social justice, intergroup solidarity, and political representation. Such a multi-level approach envisages intercultural understanding being realized not against but within a broader of multicultural context and policy setting.

Adéla Volejníková, Anna Šťastná, Jiřina Kocourková

Cross-border reproductive care (CBRC) represents a growing component of assisted reproductive technologies (ART), particularly in Europe. This article presents a descriptive, register-based analysis of CBRC in Czechia, focusing on the volume of ART cycles, the countries of origin of patients, and treatment types in comparison with domestic patients. We analysed 176,588 ART cycles recorded in the Czech National Registry of Assisted Reproduction (NRAR) between 2016 and 2019. Patients were classified by country of residence, nationality, and insurance status. Descriptive statistics were used to identify patterns in terms of patient characteristics and treatment choices. The analysis was contextualised with reference to national ART legislation in selected source countries. The findings revealed that nearly 40 percent of ART cycles in Czechia are attributable to CBRC, making the country one of Europe’s leading destinations for cross-border fertility treatment. The largest groups of CBRC patients are from Germany, Italy, Slovakia, the UK, France, Serbia, Ireland, and Hungary. Women who seek CBRC in Czechia are significantly older than their Czech counterparts, with a modal age of 41 years compared to 38 years, respectively, for IVF/ICSI cycles and 43 years compared to 38 years, respectively, for cycles in which a woman receives donated eggs. Moreover, the treatment preferences of CBRC patients differ markedly: they are more likely to undergo frozen embryo transfer (FET) cycles (37 percent vs. 30 percent among Czech patients) and egg receipt (OoR) cycles (32 percent vs. 3 percent among Czech patients). The study provides a unique, data-driven perspective on the dynamics of cross-border reproductive care in Czechia, drawing on comprehensive national registry data. By identifying key source countries and differences in treatment preferences, it highlights Czechia’s growing role in the European reproductive care landscape and sheds light on how legal, demographic, and economic conditions shape cross-border patient mobility in Europe.

Oula Kadhum

Abstract This paper examines the role of morality in migration and transnationalism, focussing on the case of Russian anti-war migration and activism against the full-scale invasion of Ukraine and Putin’s regime. Drawing on moral philosophy and psychology, I argue that Russian departure and activism can be conceptualised as moral migration and transnationalism, defined as “decisions, reasoning, judgements and acts of resistance motivated by obligatory concerns for others’ welfare, rights, fairness and justice”. Applying this to Russian anti-war activism abroad, the paper underlines how the act of migration can be conceptualised as a form of moral protest, especially for citizens from authoritarian states and autocratic regimes. It also emphasises the role of morality in transnational mobilisation choices and causes activists take up, as well as the moral dilemmas and controversies these present for anti-war communities and movements. By foregrounding the significance of morality, this study seeks to redress its neglect in migration and transnationalism scholarship and underscores the importance of moral theory in the analysis of international politics. Additionally, the paper introduces a new case study of anti-war activism and mobilisation among Russia’s emergent anti-war migrant communities in London, Madrid, and Tbilisi, thereby illuminating a critical yet under-researched dimension of the geopolitics of Russian opposition movements.

Lun Li

Abstract The Canadian population is increasingly aging and diversifying. The proportion of racialized older immigrants among older Canadians is projected to be about 25 percent after 2030. However, Racialized older immigrants experience greater social isolation and loneliness when compared to their Canada-born counterparts. Social resilience, understood as the maintenance of positive social relationships and interactions, is essential to reduce social isolation and loneliness. Thus, this study explores the strategies to promote social resilience for racialized old immigrants in Canada. A stakeholder engagement project was conducted in September 2024, including five focus groups with Chinese, Southeast Asia, South Asia, Black and Muslim communities in a metropolitan city in western Canada. Stakeholders in each focus group included community-based racialized older immigrants, service providers to older immigrants, and scholars in immigration studies. Four main groups of strategies were identified from the focus group discussion, including 1) Empowering racialized older immigrants through various learning programs and volunteering opportunities, 2) Developing awareness of the situation of racialized older immigrants within the family, 3) Increasing community-based programs, such as intergenerational projects and neighborhood activities, to enable social interaction and participation for older immigrants, and 4) Advocate for society-level changes (e.g., inclusiveness, public fundings) to support racialized older immigrants. Findings of the project reveal the urgent need to promote social resilience for racialized older immigrants. Multiple levels of strategies were proposed and discussed, with an emphasis on resilience from the society level. The project supports the idea of “social resilience is the resilience of society.

Kangning Huang, Mingzhen Lu

A longstanding puzzle in urban science is whether there's an intrinsic match between human populations and the mass of their built environments. Previous findings have revealed various urban properties scaling nonlinearly with population, yet existing models of city built mass are still dominated by per-capita linear thinking. Our analysis of >3,000 cities globally reveals universal sublinear scaling of city mass with population at both the city (\{beta}=0.90) and neighborhood levels (δ=0.75). This means that larger cities and denser neighborhoods achieve economies of scale with less per-capita built mass. Our theoretical framework further shows that city-level scaling emerges naturally from within-city disparities. This multi-scale understanding redefines "over-built" and "under-built" conditions as deviations from expected scaling patterns, implying either excessive environmental impacts or inadequate living standards. Effective urban policy thus requires moving beyond simple per-capita assumptions, adopting scale-adjusted metrics and managing cities as nested, complex systems.

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.

Thomas Lechner, Ben Watson, Uri Wilensky et al.

We propose a method to procedurally generate a familiar yet complex human artifact: the city. We are not trying to reproduce existing cities, but to generate artificial cities that are convincing and plausible by capturing developmental behavior. In addition, our results are meant to build upon themselves, such that they ought to look compelling at any point along the transition from village to metropolis. Our approach largely focuses upon land usage and building distribution for creating realistic city environments, whereas previous attempts at city modeling have mainly focused on populating road networks. Finally, we want our model to be self automated to the point that the only necessary input is a terrain description, but other high-level and low-level parameters can be specified to support artistic contributions. With the aid of agent based simulation we are generating a system of agents and behaviors that interact with one another through their effects upon a simulated environment. Our philosophy is that as each agent follows a simple behavioral rule set, a more complex behavior will tend to emerge out of the interactions between the agents and their differing rule sets. By confining our model to a set of simple rules for each class of agents, we hope to make our model extendible not only in regard to the types of structures that are produced, but also in describing the social and cultural influences prevalent in all cities

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.

O. Boyarchuk, Vita Perestiuk, T. Kosovska et al.

Introduction Pulmonary endotheliopathy and microvascular immunothrombosis play a key role in acute COVID-19. Moreover, persistent endotheliopathy and heightened coagulability frequently occur in individuals recovering from COVID-19, suggesting the intriguing possibility of their role in the development of long COVID. The aim of our study was to investigate the coagulation profile in patients with COVID-19 based on age and their role in the development of long COVID. Methods We conducted a prospective single-center cohort study from September 2022 to August 2023. The study involved 190 patients younger than 18 years who were hospitalized at the Ternopil City Children's Hospital, Ukraine due to COVID-19. Patients underwent determination of coagulation profile in addition to the general clinical examination. After discharge from the hospital, patients were monitored for the presence of long COVID symptoms. Among the 157 participants who consented for follow-up, 62 patients (39.5%) had long COVID symptoms according to the WHO definition, while the rest (95 patients) did not have symptoms of long COVID (fully recovered). Results The study revealed the normal count of platelets in the majority of patients (86.8%), whereas abnormalities in the coagulation profile were revealed in 94.5% of children with COVID-19, and these changes were age-dependent. The patients were mostly presented with increased activated partial thromboplastin time (69.1%), prothrombin time (PT) (39.8%) and D-dimer (45.0%). There was no significant difference between the median of platelet levels and coagulation profile indicators between the groups with long COVID and recovered. Among children who developed persistent long COVID symptoms there was a statistically higher percentage of abnormal PT values (53% versus 36.1%, p=0.0432), with no significant differences in other coagulation profile indicators. Abnormal PT along with female gender, comorbidities, especially allergic pathology, nutritional disorder, including obesity, were determined as potential risk factors of the long COVID development (Odds ratio - 2.0611; 95% 1.0179-4.1737, p=0.0445). Conclusions The study highlights the need for more extensive research into the coagulation profiles of pediatric populations, considering age-specific factors. This could enhance our understanding of thromboinflammation in COVID-19 and its potential contribution to the development of persistent symptoms.

Katharine P. Playter, E. Hurley, Kendall Lavin-Parsons et al.

Adolescents aged 15 to 19 years have the second highest fatal drowning rate of any age group, second only to toddlers aged 12 to 36 months. This risk is amplified in black, indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC), and those of low socioeconomic status. Worcester, MA is a diverse city with over 40% of residents identifying as BIPOC and 20% living below the poverty line. The city has multiple natural bodies of water available for recreation, putting Worcester residents, particularly adolescents, at high risk of drowning. It is known that swimming lessons provided to adolescents significantly improve their swimming skills, however many programs are tailored to young children and are not appropriate for adolescents. Students from the University of Massachusetts T.H. Chan Medical School (UMass Chan), in collaboration with community partners, developed a water safety and swim education program tailored to Worcester adolescents as a means for an age-appropriate swim experience and education, community engagement, and injury prevention. Water Safe Worcester (WSW) was established as a city-wide injury prevention program that included swim lessons offered by medical students at the Central Community Branch YMCA in Worcester, MA. Instructors included UMass Chan medical students, graduate students, and staff. Adolescent YMCA members were invited to participate in lessons free of charge. Lessons were 90 min and emphasized a 3-fold approach: (1) expand knowledge of water safety and what to do in an emergency, (2) increase swimming skills, and (3) reduce fear of water. The overall attendance for the 2023 spring and summer sessions offered was 73 students, including multiple swimmers who attended more than one session. A total of 12 volunteers participated, which included 9 first-year medical students, one PhD student, one research assistant, and one surgery resident from UMass Chan. WSW demonstrated promising outcomes during its swim education classes, suggesting that WSW is a successful model to promote water safety, reduce the risk of drowning, and expand access to life-saving skills to Worcester's at-risk adolescents. This program serves as a critical step toward health equity while also providing an avenue for public health and injury prevention exposure for medical students.

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.

A. Wigley, J. Lorin, D. Hogan et al.

While there has been great success in increasing the coverage of new childhood vaccines globally, expanding routine immunization to reliably reach all children and communities has proven more challenging in many low- and middle-income countries. Achieving this requires vaccination strategies and interventions that identify and target those unvaccinated, guided by the most current and detailed data regarding their size and spatial distribution. Through the integration and harmonisation of a range of geospatial data sets, including population, vaccination coverage, travel-time, settlement type, and conflict locations. We estimated the numbers of children un- or under-vaccinated for measles and diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis, within remote-rural, urban, and conflict-affected locations. We explored how these numbers vary both nationally and sub-nationally, and assessed what proportions of children these categories captured, for 99 lower- and middle-income countries, for which data was available. We found that substantial heterogeneities exist both between and within countries. Of the total 14,030,486 children unvaccinated for DTP1, over 11% (1,656,757) of un- or under-vaccinated children were in remote-rural areas, more than 28% (2,849,671 and 1,129,915) in urban and peri-urban areas, and up to 60% in other settings, with nearly 40% found to be within 1-hour of the nearest town or city (though outside of urban/peri-urban areas). Of the total number of those unvaccinated, we estimated between 6% and 15% (826,976 to 2,068,785) to be in conflict-affected locations, based on either broad or narrow definitions of conflict. Our estimates provide insights into the inequalities in vaccination coverage, with the distributions of those unvaccinated varying significantly by country, region, and district. We demonstrate the need for further inquiry and characterisation of those unvaccinated, the thresholds used to define these, and for more country-specific and targeted approaches to defining such populations in the strategies and interventions used to reach them.

Andreas Hackl

The global spread of online work opportunities has inspired a new generation of market-based aid that connects forcibly displaced people to a transnational internet economy. Because refugees face barriers to making a livelihood online, aid organisations and private enterprises support them by building bridges across digital divides, connectivity problems or skill gaps. They thereby become intermediaries and brokers that facilitate connections between refugees and online income opportunities, which often lack decent working conditions and adequate protections. Because digital livelihood initiatives lack the power to reshape these conditions and the value of work in the internet economy, they fail to become mediators with a transformative impact. The result is that the internet economy reshapes livelihoods provision far more than aid can reshape its disempowering effects, despite successes in driving forward refugees’ digital inclusion. Based on more than three years of research including interviews, field visits and surveys, this article foregrounds the current risks that result from the inclusion of refugees into precarious forms of online gig work. To ensure a decent future of work for refugees in the internet economy, the current push for digital livelihoods will require an equally strong push for stronger protections, inclusive regulations and rights.

Ludovica Gambaro, C. Katharina Spiess, Katharina Wrohlich et al.

Employment among mothers has been rising in recent decades, although mothers of young children often work fewer hours than other women do. Parallel to this trend, approval of maternal employment has increased, albeit not evenly across groups. However, differences in attitudes remain unexplored despite their importance for better understanding mothers’ labour market behaviour. Meanwhile, the employment of fathers has remained stable and attitudes towards paternal employment do not differ as much as attitudes towards maternal employment do between socio-economic groups. This paper examines attitudes towards maternal and paternal employment. It focuses on Germany, drawing on data from the German Family Demography Panel Study (FReDA). The survey explicitly asks whether mothers and fathers should be in paid work, work part-time or full-time, presenting respondents with fictional family profiles that vary the youngest child’s age. Unlike previous studies, the analysis compares the views of respondents with different origins: West Germany, East Germany, immigrants from different world regions, and second-generation migrants in West Germany. The results highlight remarkable differences between respondents from West and East Germany, with the former group displaying strong approval for part-time employment among mothers and fathers of very young children and the latter group reporting higher approval for full-time employment. Immigrant groups are far from homogenous, holding different attitudes depending on their region of origin. Taken together, the results offer a nuanced picture of attitudes towards maternal and paternal employment. We discuss these findings in relation to labour markets participation in Germany. * This article belongs to a special issue on “Family Research and Demographic Analysis – New Insights from the German Family Demography Panel Study (FReDA)”.

Anastasia Asikainen

Abstract While a great deal of research has been conducted on implications of integrative policies targeted at migrants, later-life migrants and their relational and spatial negotiations and enactments of the policy-driven discourse of integration, and the dynamics under which it is interpreted remains understudied. Older migrants are presented as ‘special cases’ in the Finnish integration policy and are discussed mainly in relation to their social and health care needs. Integration is the model and aim for migrant settlements in Finland, however the aim to integrate possesses intrinsic value. Therefore, they need to make sense of what integration is for them in their everyday lives. This paper focuses on the interpretations and mundane enactments of ‘integration’ in a voluntary sector-organised meeting place for later-life Russian-speaking migrants in Finland. By comparing the views of different actors within the meeting place (steering group, organisers and attendees), the paper presents a nuanced understanding of the dynamics under which the later-life migrants negotiate their positions in the Finnish community of value, vis-à-vis the expectations of integration. The paper argues that ‘doing integration’ as a category of practice is an emergent feature in places where it is possible to negotiate integration as a lived experience. Drawing from participant observations, interviews, and applications and reports gathered in a meeting in the capital region of Finland, the paper foregrounds the lived and contested experiences of finding a sense of belonging in dialogue with the omnipresent discourse of integration. The paper concludes that the interpretations of the policy-driven discourse of integration are context-bound and negotiated in a set of relationships.

Tobias Gummer, Pablo Christmann, Tanja Kunz

Dyadic surveys aim to interview pairs of respondents, such as partners in a relationship. In dyadic surveys, it is often necessary to obtain the anchors’ consent to contact their partners and invite them to a survey. If the survey is operated in self-administered modes, no interviewer is present to improve the consent rate, for example, by providing convincing arguments and additional information. To overcome the challenges posed by self-administered modes for dyadic surveys and to improve consent rates, it is important to identify aspects that positively influence the likelihood of anchors giving consent to contact their partners. Ideally, these aspects are in the hands of the researchers, such as the survey design and aspects of the questionnaire. Thus, in this study, we analyzed the relationship between anchors’ survey experience and their willingness to consent to surveying their partners in self-administered modes. Based on data from the German Family Demography Panel Study (FReDA), we found that the anchors’ perceptions of the questionnaire as “interesting” or “too personal” were related to consent rates. These relationships were consistent across different survey modes and devices. Effects of other aspects of the questionnaire, such as “important for science” and “diverse” varied between modes and devices. We concluded with practical recommendations for survey research and an outlook for future research. * This article belongs to a special issue on “Family Research and Demographic Analysis – New Insights from the German Family Demography Panel Study (FReDA)”.

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.

Kristen Jeffers, Albert Esteve

Educational expansion and the closing of gender gaps in education are key objectives in national and international policy agendas. Monitoring progress towards these goals requires comparable data across countries and over time. The availability of international census and survey microdata allows for cross-national comparisons of education participation and completion. However, we lack systematic analyses of how trends vary across data sources and of the extent to which these data sources offer a consistent account of progress in education. In this paper, we examine coherence in estimates of educational attainment among women aged 25 to 29 in 75 countries across the three main repositories of international population microdata: IPUMS International, the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) and the Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS). Coherence analysis of 535 census and survey observations from 1960 to 2017 shows high levels of consistency overall but also identifies observations misaligned with trends. Results provide practical information to the research community about the validity of comparative investigations using three important data sources for demographic studies. The data also serve as benchmarks for assessing the quality of education information obtained in data sources not included in our analysis and the trend alignment of future estimates.