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Urban settlements are made by spaces and buildings and also by financial, social and management aspects. However, considering a city as a built environment to be inhabited (what the Greeks called oikouméne) means considering also values, which escape the current conception of the exchange between human beings and instead pertain to the non-monetary spheres of simple use, of symbol, desire and gift. Attention to these issues requires a new type of competence. The Nanjing case of the XiaoXiHu project can be considered as a laboratory for new urban morphology studies and innovative project procedures, shared by researchers with different cultural horizons. China's return to ownership regimes is not only a paradigm shift in the conditions of finance and of market, but (perhaps paradoxically) also a rediscovery of precisely non-monetary economies and a possible consideration of the urban form as a common good. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The results show that (1) water bodies have a cooling effect on the surrounding environment, with the farthest cooling distance being 4,000 m, but the optimal cooling distance being 2,500 m. Keywords: Health and Medicine; Public Health EN Health and Medicine Public Health 1146 1146 1 05/02/23 20230505 NES 230505 2023 MAY 5 (NewsRx) -- By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at Health & Medicine Week -- Current study results on public health have been published. [Extracted from the article]

The city is a living organism, of which the emergence and development is one of the most representative complex phenomena in the social system. By the traditional method of urban science, it has been assumed that the city grows uniformly in a way. Accordingly, its morphology can be described by the traditional Euclidean geometry. Recent studies have proposed that the complex spatial phenomena related to the existing urban system are more suitable to be explained by fractal geometry. Urban morphology is an approximate fractal structure rather than a regular one, because its morphology is affected by many factors, such as topography, history, economic and political environment. In this article, we measured the degree of urban morphology deviating from the fractal by the multi-scale structural complexity method. By this method, it can find the difference in whole complexity among different cities as well as comparison in the local complexity of a city among different spatial scales. It was found that the multi-scale structural complexity is not only related to the vitality of the urban socio-economic development but also affected by the typical statistical indicators (such as the urban infrastructure). Interestingly, by constructing the mutual information network among cities, we found that there is a strong correlation between the whole complexity of typical cities, such as C h o n g q i n g and X i ′ a n , and B e i j i n g and M a c a o , that is to say, the construction or development of these cities may follow the same set of patterns. Moreover, there are also similarities (i.e., strong correlations) between the socioeconomic forms of the years, such as 2009 and 2013, which are either all stable or all depressed. Our research provides a new perspective for depicting the complexity of the urban system from different spatial scales. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Renyi's spectra of urban form depend on type of data. • Urban forms derived from classified images are monofractal. • Urban forms derived from population density are multifractal. • Urban forms derived from street intersections are weakly multifractal. • Hill's numbers provide means to visualize multifractality of 2D patterns. Morphologies of urban patterns display multifractal scaling. However, what data should be used to represent an urban pattern and its scaling? Here, we calculated Renyi's generalized dimensions (RGD) spectra using data corresponding to different urban modalities including urban land cover, urban impervious surface, population density, and street intersection points. All data are circa 2010 and we calculated their RGD spectra in six urbanized areas located across the United States. We calculated the RGD spectra by using Hill's numbers rather than statistical moments which leads to a clear interpretation of generalized dimensions and to spatial visualization of pattern's multifractality. The results show that patterns of different urban modalities in a given urbanized area are characterized by different RGD spectra and thus have different morphologies. In our six examples, we found that morphologies of patterns of land cover and impervious surface tend to be monofractal, patterns of street intersection points tend to be moderately multifractal, and patterns of population density tend to be strongly multifractal. Spatial visualization supporting this numerical finding is provided. Thus, when studying the multifractality of urban morphology, it is important to choose a modality that is appropriate to the goal of the investigation. Urban areas may have similar morphologies on the basis of one modality but dissimilar on the basis of another. We have found that two out of our six urban areas have similar morphologies on the basis of all four modalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]