This article examines how the processes of gentrification and touristification associated with the globalization of Madrid's economy have increased the existing socio-spatial inequalities in the city. Focusing on Lavapiés neighborhood, which is one of the most iconic historical neighborhoods of the Spanish capital, this article presents a mixed methods research based on both data extraction from official sources and conducting 22 semi-structured interviews. Findings show how the interplay between gentrification and touristification in Lavapiés has reinforced the process of expulsion of neighbors while local institutions promoted the neighborhood as the most cosmopolitan in Madrid. The final part of the article concludes that Madrid has moved in recent years towards a dual city model where the interplay between the gentrification and touristification of the historic center is the main driver of the suburbanization of poverty in contemporary Madrid.
Aesthetics of cities. City planning and beautifying, Urban groups. The city. Urban sociology
Starting from the relationship between urban planning and mobility management, TeMA has gradually expanded the view of the covered topics, always remaining in the groove of rigorous scientific in-depth analysis. This section of the Journal, Review Notes, is the expression of continuously updating emerging topics concerning relationships between urban planning, mobility, and environment, through a collection of short scientific papers written by young researchers. The Review Notes are made of five parts. Each section examines a specific aspect of the broader information storage within the main interests of TeMA Journal. In particular, the Urban planning literature review section presents recent books and journals on selected topics and issues within the global scientific panorama. For the first issue of TeMA Journal volume no. 18, this section provides a critical overview of recent reports and documents on climate change, published by different types of stakeholders. This review examines the landscape of climate change reporting through a comparative lens, focusing on key findings, strengths, weaknesses, and implications of selected publications. This contribution aims to examine reports produced by International Governmental Organizations (IGOs), analyzing their approach, findings, and potential limitations.
Transportation engineering, Urbanization. City and country
In the mediaeval Church in England, half of the diocesan cathedrals were also monastic communities; this phenomenon was virtually unique in the Church worldwide. Even after the Reformation, the monastic character of cathedrals continued to have a profound influence on the liturgy of the Church of England and on cathedrals as places to maintain the daily worship of God in solemn and musical form; to be homes for libraries and scholarship, and to be places of retreat and contemplative prayer. Norwich Cathedral was the last of these monastic cathedrals to be established (1096) and the first of the monastic cathedrals to be dissolved (1538). Particularly since the mid-nineteenth century, it has self-consciously been recovering a Benedictine character to its mission and ministry, most recently in the reconstruction of three monastic buildings lost since the Reformation: the Library reading room, the Refectory, and the Hostry. These buildings, while modern in design, build upon the remaining monastic fabric and echo the proportions and materials of their monastic predecessors, exemplifying the monastic vows of stability, obedience, and conversion of life. The Cathedral’s Benedictine principles extend to its ethos as an employer and commercial enterprise.
Aesthetics of cities. City planning and beautifying, Urban groups. The city. Urban sociology
As extreme heat events intensify due to climate change and urbanization, cities face increasing challenges in mitigating outdoor heat stress. While traditional physical models such as SOLWEIG and ENVI-met provide detailed assessments of human-perceived heat exposure, their computational demands limit scalability for city-wide planning. In this study, we propose GSM-UTCI, a multimodal deep learning framework designed to predict daytime average Universal Thermal Climate Index (UTCI) at 1-meter hyperlocal resolution. The model fuses surface morphology (nDSM), high-resolution land cover data, and hourly meteorological conditions using a feature-wise linear modulation (FiLM) architecture that dynamically conditions spatial features on atmospheric context. Trained on SOLWEIG-derived UTCI maps, GSM-UTCI achieves near-physical accuracy, with an R2 of 0.9151 and a mean absolute error (MAE) of 0.41°C, while reducing inference time from hours to under five minutes for an entire city. To demonstrate its planning relevance, we apply GSM-UTCI to simulate systematic landscape transformation scenarios in Philadelphia, replacing bare earth, grass, and impervious surfaces with tree canopy. Results show spatially heterogeneous but consistently strong cooling effects, with impervious-to-tree conversion producing the highest aggregated benefit (-4.18°C average change in UTCI across 270.7 km2). Tract-level bivariate analysis further reveals strong alignment between thermal reduction potential and land cover proportions. These findings underscore the utility of GSM-UTCI as a scalable, fine-grained decision support tool for urban climate adaptation, enabling scenario-based evaluation of greening strategies across diverse urban environments.
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.
Urban time series, such as mobility flows, energy consumption, and pollution records, encapsulate complex urban dynamics and structures. However, data collection in each city is impeded by technical challenges such as budget limitations and sensor failures, necessitating effective data imputation techniques that can enhance data quality and reliability. Existing imputation models, categorized into learning-based and analytics-based paradigms, grapple with the trade-off between capacity and generalizability. Collaborative learning to reconstruct data across multiple cities holds the promise of breaking this trade-off. Nevertheless, urban data's inherent irregularity and heterogeneity issues exacerbate challenges of knowledge sharing and collaboration across cities. To address these limitations, we propose a novel collaborative imputation paradigm leveraging meta-learned implicit neural representations (INRs). INRs offer a continuous mapping from domain coordinates to target values, integrating the strengths of both paradigms. By imposing embedding theory, we first employ continuous parameterization to handle irregularity and reconstruct the dynamical system. We then introduce a cross-city collaborative learning scheme through model-agnostic meta learning, incorporating hierarchical modulation and normalization techniques to accommodate multiscale representations and reduce variance in response to heterogeneity. Extensive experiments on a diverse urban dataset from 20 global cities demonstrate our model's superior imputation performance and generalizability, underscoring the effectiveness of collaborative imputation in resource-constrained settings.
Kunihiko Fujiwara, Ryuta Tsurumi, Tomoki Kiyono
et al.
Three-dimensional urban environment simulation is a powerful tool for informed urban planning. However, the intensive manual effort required to prepare input 3D city models has hindered its widespread adoption. To address this challenge, we present VoxCity, an open-source Python package that provides a one-stop solution for grid-based 3D city model generation and urban environment simulation for cities worldwide. VoxCity's `generator' subpackage automatically downloads building heights, tree canopy heights, land cover, and terrain elevation within a specified target area, and voxelizes buildings, trees, land cover, and terrain to generate an integrated voxel city model. The `simulator' subpackage enables users to conduct environmental simulations, including solar radiation and view index analyses. Users can export the generated models using several file formats compatible with external software, such as ENVI-met (INX), Blender, and Rhino (OBJ). We generated 3D city models for eight global cities, and demonstrated the calculation of solar irradiance, sky view index, and green view index. We also showcased microclimate simulation and 3D rendering visualization through ENVI-met and Rhino, respectively, through the file export function. Additionally, we reviewed openly available geospatial data to create guidelines to help users choose appropriate data sources depending on their target areas and purposes. VoxCity can significantly reduce the effort and time required for 3D city model preparation and promote the utilization of urban environment simulations. This contributes to more informed urban and architectural design that considers environmental impacts, and in turn, fosters sustainable and livable cities. VoxCity is released openly at https://github.com/kunifujiwara/VoxCity.
Over the past two decades, e‑participation has become increasingly relevant as a result of digitization and the evolution of information and communication technologies. Yet the perspectives of providers and users with regard to the requirements on an e‑participation system are not sufficiently considered jointly. This paper investigates the requirements and challenges of users and providers. The study is based on a mixed methods approach with an online survey of those responsible for e‑participation processes in various administrative and planning areas as well as semi-structured expert interviews. In addition, we conducted proband tests to investigate the usability of digital citizen participation tools. The results show that accessibility, retrievability, effectiveness, interaction in the digital arena, security, technical specifications, resources, media literacy and the use of participation as a basis for profound decision-making are key requirements for e‑participation systems. These demands requirements are interrelated and influence the quality and effectiveness of participation processes. To meet these requirements, we propose an e‑participation ecosystem that integrates the different dimensions of digital participation and takes into account the interaction between actors, demands and contextual conditions.
Cities. Urban geography, Urbanization. City and country
Given the rapid development of China’s new urbanization, cities with different locations and varying functional positioning, resource endowments, and development stages have insufficient scientific and applicable technical tools for implementing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). City managers and policymakers must urgently establish SDG benchmarks to diagnose city development. Moreover, successful experiences from similar cities regarding sustainable development and self-improvement must be learned from to promote diversified, sustainable development across the country. Furthermore, emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, big data and 5G are widely used in smart cities. Therefore, there is a growing need for “knowledge-based, personalized and intelligent” technologies to support monitoring, evaluation, and decision-making processes facilitating sustainable development in cities. This paper uses standardization as the theoretical support and technical basis. This approach can help clarify the sustainable development processes in China and clarify the evaluation results of and provide data on horizontal city comparisons, which can be used to develop evaluation technology for sustainable development in cities and construct a standardized system. The results provide a standard framework for intelligent assessment and decision-making regarding cities’ sustainable development capabilities in China. Evaluating major international standardization institutions reveals that the practices of Chinese national standards should be fully absorbed and integrated to guide the evaluation of smart, resilient, and low-carbon cities. To this end, an indicator library of city sustainable development is proposed to provide standard evaluation technology methods. Finally, analyzing the response relationship of the indicator library to SDGs reveals the need for a standardized knowledge map of sustainable development assessment techniques and methods from the perspective of integrated management for sustainable development in cities.
ظهرت أهمية استخدام تكنولوجيا المعلومات والاتصالات (ICT) في الخدمات التي تقدمها المدن لساكنيها خلال العقد الماضي خاصة في الدول المتقدمة، وقد ساهم ذلك في تطور مجتمعاتها ورفع مستوى كفاءة معيشتهم. امتد هذا الاتجاه وهو تحويل المدن وخدماتها إلى مدن "ذكية" إلى جميع الدول بما فيها الدول النامية. أظهرت الدراسات أن تكلفة البنية الأساسية الذكية المرتفعة قد تعيق استخدامها في الدول النامية والفقيرة أو أنه سيقتصر استخدامها على فئات محددة من المجتمع. وحيث أن هدف المدن الذكية هو تحسين جودة حياة المواطنين فكان هناك حاجة لدراسة أساليب أو حلول لتطبيق التكنولوجيا في الدول النامية بشكل يناسب ويحسن جودة حياة مجتمعاتها. تتبع الدولة المصرية حاليا سياسات تتوافق مع اتجاه المدن الذكية على المستوى العلمي والتطبيقي، فقد تم تجهيز بنية أساسية ذكية ببعض مدن الجيل الرابع، وكذلك وضعت خطط لتقديم بعض الخدمات باستخدام تكنولوجيا المعلومات والاتصالات بالمدن القائمة. وحيث أن مصر تصنف من الدول النامية، فكان من الواجب عمل دراسة لإمكانية استفادة جميع فئات المجتمع الحضري المصري من هذه الخدمات بل ورفع مستوى معيشته من خلالها. يقترح البحث بعض الحلول الاستراتيجية والإجرائية التي تمكّن حصول جميع فئات مجتمع المدينة المصرية على الخدمات الذكية وسبل حل مشاكله باستخدام التكنولوجيا، من خلال استنباط ايجابيات وسلبيات المدينة المصرية الذكية ومجتمعاتها، وكذلك دراسة بعض التجارب الدولية المشابهة للحالة المصرية في هذا الصدد، وباستشارة المتخصصين في المجالات ذات الصلة، يضع البحث أنسب الحلول لمجتمع المدينة المصرية وأكثرها قابلية للتطبيق.
The importance of using (ICT) has emerged over the past decade, this has contributed in developing the societies and raise their quality of life, especially in developed countries. The transformation of cities and their services into "smart" has spread all over the world, including developing countries. Studies have shown that the high cost of smart infrastructure may either hinder its use in developing and poor countries or limit its use to specific levels of society. Therefore, there was a need to come up with solutions to apply new technologies in developing countries that suit and improve the quality of life of their societies.
Egypt currently is setting policies in order to be executed in smart cities. Smart infrastructure has been equipped in some new cities, and some services were transformed to be smart in existing cities. Since Egypt is classified as a developing country, it was necessary to study the possibility of benefiting all levels of the Egyptian urban society from these services and raising their quality of life.
The research suggests some strategic and procedural solutions that enable all levels of Egyptian cities communities to acquire the smart services and solve their problems using technology.
By extracting the pros and cons of the Egyptian city and its communities, as well as studying some international experiences similar to the Egyptian case, that used technology to solve their citizens problems, in addition of consulting specialists in related fields, the research sets the most appropriate and applicable solutions for the Egyptian smart city that suit their communities.
Cities. Urban geography, Urbanization. City and country
This paper revisits the case of Canaan – a massive informal settlement that emerged in the wake of the devastating 2010 earthquake in Haiti – in order to examine the often-forgotten aftermath of international aid programming in an urban, fragile-state context. Originally categorized as an (informal) internal displacement site, Canaan continued to expand in the years following the quake, reaching an estimated population of 300,000 by 2016. Using a qualitative case study of Canaan conducted nearly 15 years after its creation, the paper makes two interrelated arguments: first, that the ways in which the United Nations’ “durable solutions” framework is frequently understood and applied may be unrealistic and even deleterious for state–society relations in some fragile urban contexts. Second, even calls to shift (urban) internal displacement programming to a more development footing is far from a panacea if these interventions are not designed to be more politically nuanced, context-sensitive and modest about what can be achieved in such complex environments.
Keith Burghardt, Johannes H. Uhl, Kristina Lerman
et al.
Despite the rapid growth of cities in the past century, our quantitative, in-depth understanding of how cities grow remains limited due to a consistent lack of historical data. Thus, the scaling laws between a city's features and its population as they evolve over time, known as temporal city scaling, is under-explored, especially for time periods spanning multiple decades. In this paper, we leverage novel data sources such as the Historical Settlement Data Compilation for the U.S. (HISDAC-US), and analyze the temporal scaling laws of developed area, building indoor area, building footprint area, and road length and other road network statistics for nearly all metropolitan areas in the U.S. from 1900 to 2015. We find that scaling exponents vary dramatically between cities as a function of their size and location. Three notable patterns emerge. First, scaling law exponents imply many, but not all, metropolitan areas are becoming less dense and indoor area per capita increases as cities grow, in contrast to expectations. Second, larger cities tend to have a smaller scaling exponent than smaller cities. Third, scaling exponents (and growth patterns) are similar between nearby cities. These results show a long-term trend that could harm urban sustainability as previously dense populations are rapidly spreading out into undeveloped land. Moreover, the regional similarity of long-term urban growth patterns implies that city evolution and sustainability patterns are more interconnected than prior research has suggested. These results help urban planners and scientists understand universal, long-term patterns of city growth across the US.
Buildings are primary components of cities, often featuring repeated elements such as windows and doors. Traditional 3D building asset creation is labor-intensive and requires specialized skills to develop design rules. Recent generative models for building creation often overlook these patterns, leading to low visual fidelity and limited scalability. Drawing inspiration from procedural modeling techniques used in the gaming and visual effects industry, our method, Proc-GS, integrates procedural code into the 3D Gaussian Splatting (3D-GS) framework, leveraging their advantages in high-fidelity rendering and efficient asset management from both worlds. By manipulating procedural code, we can streamline this process and generate an infinite variety of buildings. This integration significantly reduces model size by utilizing shared foundational assets, enabling scalable generation with precise control over building assembly. We showcase the potential for expansive cityscape generation while maintaining high rendering fidelity and precise control on both real and synthetic cases.
This theoretical paper aims to provide an extensive overview of the adoption of smart cities in Saudi Arabia. With rapid urbanization and the increasing need for sustainable and efficient urban development, smart city initiatives have gained significant attention globally. Saudi Arabia, being one of the fastest-growing economies in the Middle East, has recognized the potential of smart cities in enhancing the quality of life, optimizing resource management, and promoting economic growth. Through an in-depth analysis of existing literature, this paper explores the key drivers, challenges, and opportunities associated with the adoption of smart cities in Saudi Arabia. It also discusses the roles of various stakeholders and presents a comprehensive roadmap for the successful implementation of smart city initiatives in the country.
The paper critically reviews communicative and agonistic planning theories from the viewpoint of a systemic turn in deliberative democracy theory. While the approach reveals complementarities between the theories, it also argues that each theory is vulnerable to criticism because of an ‘institutional gap’. The theories are found to complement each other in addressing planning conflicts at different dimensions. Communicative planning theory deals with conflicts between different stakeholders’ interests in planning processes. Agonistic planning theory, in turn, concentrates on conflicts from a more ontological dimension, related to the (implicit) conflict between hegemonic and marginalized discourses and related identity-forming processes of inclusion and exclusion in planning policies and governance. The institutional gap of communicative planning theory is argued to reside in its focus on situational deliberation that largely ignores the institutional dimension of rules and norms of democratic conduct. Agonistic pluralism, in turn, does engage with the dimension of democratic institutions, but in an overly critical manner, making it difficult for agonistic planning theory to address the dynamic interplay between institutional reconfiguration and policy stabilization in planning. This is argued to be the institutional gap of agonistic planning theory. The paper calls for further work in the field of planning theory to incorporate a systemic approach to deliberative democracy and thereby tap into the dialectics of institutional and situational dimensions of planning.
Cities. Urban geography, Urbanization. City and country
The rapid urbanization trend in most developing countries including India is creating a plethora of civic concerns such as loss of green space, degradation of environmental health, clean water availability, air pollution, traffic congestion leading to delays in vehicular transportation, etc. Transportation and network modeling through transportation indices have been widely used to understand transportation problems in the recent past. This necessitates predicting transportation indices to facilitate sustainable urban planning and traffic management. Recent advancements in deep learning research, in particular, Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), and their modifications in spatial data analysis such as CityGAN, Conditional GAN, and MetroGAN have enabled urban planners to simulate hyper-realistic urban patterns. These synthetic urban universes mimic global urban patterns and evaluating their landscape structures through spatial pattern analysis can aid in comprehending landscape dynamics, thereby enhancing sustainable urban planning. This research addresses several challenges in predicting the urban transportation index for small and medium-sized Indian cities. A hybrid framework based on Kernel Ridge Regression (KRR) and CityGAN is introduced to predict transportation index using spatial indicators of human settlement patterns. This paper establishes a relationship between the transportation index and human settlement indicators and models it using KRR for the selected 503 Indian cities. The proposed hybrid pipeline, we call it RidgeGAN model, can evaluate the sustainability of urban sprawl associated with infrastructure development and transportation systems in sprawling cities. Experimental results show that the two-step pipeline approach outperforms existing benchmarks based on spatial and statistical measures.
Khoirunurrofik Khoirunurrofik, Faris Abdurrachman, Utomo Noor Rachmanto
Government interventions to limit the spread of the COVID-19 disease have decreased mobility, which, in turn, impacts aggregate economic activity. Understanding mobility during the COVID-19 pandemic may serve as a proxy for understanding its economic impact. This study aims to examine the relationship between pre-existing socioeconomic factors and the economic impact of COVID-19 using aggregate mobility data, particularly from emerging economies with a dominance of informal workers within economic activities. This study will utilize the public mobility dataset to provide an exploratory picture of the socioeconomic and policy determinants of mobility during the pandemic, focusing on Indonesia. The exploratory analytical findings indicate that the impact of COVID-19 on the economy, as indicated by mobility data, is highly correlated with various prior socioeconomic determinants. Moreover, more prosperous and urbanized areas have a larger formal sector, employ more people in manufacturing and/or tourism, possess a more educated labor force, and are more digitally connected; they tend to experience more significant decreases in mobility. The study has provided lessons to developing countries with a vast informal sector size and the gap in access to digital technology to design a more effective, timely, and well-targeted policy response in dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic.
Urbanization. City and country, Political institutions and public administration (General)
In response to challenges posed by urbanization, David Bollier from the University of Southern California raised a new idea for city planning: a comprehensive network and applications of information technologies. IBM later echoed the idea and initiated its Smart Planet vision in 2008. After that, the smart city concept was quickly adopted by major cities throughout the world, and it has gradually evolved into a strategic choice by ambitious cities. This paper looks into the smart city trend by reviewing how the concept of smart city was proposed and what the essence of a smart city is. More specifically, the driving forces of the smart city development in China are investigated, and the key differences of smart cities between China and other countries are summarized. Finally, four big challenges to build future smart cities are discussed.
This paper discusses the geography of the electoral successes of the right-wing populist party Alternative for Germany (AfD) in the national election to the German parliament in September 2017. Unlike other studies that reduce the electoral pattern to differences between “the city” and “the country,” we do not accept the empirical observation of an urban-rural divide as a sufficient explanation. By doing so, this paper proposes a theorization of the urban and the rural as social relationships that can be dialectically differentiated through the all-encompassing urbanization process and which materialize through space. This approach draws on Henri Lefebvre’s work on urbanization and his understanding of “the urban” and “the rural” and integrates it with Theodor W. Adorno’s notion of “the provincial” to better characterize “the rural” as a form of social relationship in which the culturally familiar, authenticity, and a lack of difference and reflection dominate. Recent theoretical discussions of anti-politics—understood as both a mode of making political claims and a political strategy that negates arguments, negotiations, and compromise, starting instead with absolute, non-negotiable positions— inform this paper as well. Based on this theoretical foundation, we argue that the rural is the breeding ground for anti-politics and AfD votes. A discussion of three places where the AfD was particularly successful supports our argument: the more peripheral, small-town administrative district of Western Pomerania-Greifswald and the two large-city districts of Mannheim-Schönau and Pforzheim-Haidach.