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The disruptive effects of the COVID-19 pandemic has rapidly shifted how individuals navigate in cities. Governments are concerned that travel behavior will shift toward a car-driven and homeworking future, shifting demand away from public transport use. These concerns place the recovery of public transport in a possible crisis. A resilience perspective may aid the discussion around recovery – particularly one that deviates from pre-pandemic behavior. This paper presents an empirical study of London's public transport demand and introduces a perspective of spatial resilience to the existing body of research on post-pandemic public transport demand. This study defines spatial resilience as the rate of recovery in public transport demand within census boundaries over a period after lockdown restrictions were lifted. The relationship between spatial resilience and urban socioeconomic factors was investigated by a global spatial regression model and a localized perspective through Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR) model. In this case study of London, the analysis focuses on the period after the first COVID-19 lockdown restrictions were lifted (June 2020) and before the new restrictions in mid-September 2020. The analysis shows that outer London generally recovered faster than inner London. Factors of income, car ownership and density of public transport infrastructure were found to have the greatest influence on spatial patterns in resilience. Furthermore, influential relationships vary locally, inviting future research to examine the drivers of this spatial heterogeneity. Thus, this research recommends transport policymakers capture the influences of homeworking, ensure funding for a minimum level of service, and advocate for a polycentric recovery post-pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the timelines of large transportation infrastructure delivery, from first proposal to construction and opening in London, UK and Toronto, Canada. The goal of the paper is to identify both how long it takes projects to go from idea to delivery, the relative time of different stages in the delivery process, and if projects with long timelines see physical or technological changes in their design. This work contributes to two ongoing discussions around the speed of infrastructure delivery, one that argues infrastructure moves too slowly and major efforts are needed to speed delivery and another that argues that good infrastructure thinking requires time to breathe and care should be taken in rushing through the delivery process. Detailed delivery timelines from initial proposal to construction or operation are developed for 26 transportation projects (16 in Toronto and 10 in London) between the years 2000 and 2018. For each project the timelines of inception, approval, planning, procurement, environmental assessment, construction and operational phases are identified and compared. Long informal gestation periods are identified for many projects, particularly for linear projects. In many instances the informal gestation period dwarfs the time projects spent in formal planning. This research highlights the need to expand the conception of timeliness of infrastructure delivery to include the lengthy periods of informal debate and planning that can span years and build up community expectations about the imminence of a project, even before it has received formal assessment or approval. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the recent editions of Olympic Summer Games. It examines the changes and political, economical and cultural dimensions of mega-events, underlining the links among life, culture, mediascapes and cultural identities. The analysis starts with London Olympic Games 2012 and continues with the Games in Rio 2016: the primary changes in urban infrastructures and the social, political and economical transformation of the two cities together with the great impact of Olympic ceremonies in media images are introduced in the paper, with a particular reference to the symbolic representations of opening and closing ceremonies. The above mentioned events are an imaginative tour, which links knowledge, heritage, history and global values, demonstrating the interrelation between sport and other social spheres. Sport mega-events seem to create infinite world, connected with global and local culture. The opening and closing ceremonies represent also new symbolic values, and some 'economies of imagination', which reform urban infrastructures and open new social identity and heritage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the generative capacity of activist movements defending their community assets from commodification or closure to produce new forms of social infrastructure. We explore this through the case study of activism along the Westway, a motorway in West London. The area has a strong tradition of community activism, particularly in the 1960s and the 2010s. Through a Participatory Action Research approach, we elaborate a historical account of the formation of social infrastructure under the Westway and surrounding spaces. In doing so, we develop a framework—processes, alliances, and capacities—to understand how communities and activist groups contesting the loss of community spaces can generate new forms of social infrastructure—both physical spaces such as play spaces or cultural venues, and social and caring relationships such as friendships or support networks. These informal spaces and alliances can shed light on how to build alternative, bottom‐up forms of social infrastructure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we develop a situated and intersectional urban political economy approach to social infrastructure. This approach contrasts with a growing body of liberal urban geography, which offers an optimistic account of how shared spaces afford encounter and social connection. We present four arguments about why such outcomes cannot be assumed, which are informed by a case of contested redevelopment in the London borough of Haringey. First, social infrastructures express power relations, enacting distinct visions of "the social", that are at times premised on the denigration of other forms of collective life as anti‐social. Second, elite social infrastructures are increasingly central to speculative urban development, serving to procure consent for, and valorise, investment. Third, other social infrastructures are essential networks of social reproduction and survival, especially for diverse working‐class communities: demolition and displacement mean infrastructural disruption. Finally, unequal political economies of social infrastructure are a realm of structural antagonism over urban citizenship (un)making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Planning transport infrastructure development involves high levels of uncertainty due to socioeconomic, environmental, and technological changes. Methodologies currently used in transport planning often have minimal consideration for adaptiveness, leading to costly redesigns or cancellation of entire projects. Presented herein is the investigation of the applicability of dynamic adaptive policy pathways, which is a methodology predominantly used in the field of flood-risk planning, to long-term transport infrastructure planning. Specifically, the paper investigates whether this methodology could facilitate ongoing adaptation to variations in service demand and capacity. It demonstrates this by examining future demand and capacity of road and rail travel between Manchester, United Kingdom, and London using publicly available data and information sources. The study shows that dynamic adaptive policy pathways is useful for identifying periods of time of significant capacity vulnerability for the examined transport network in the coming decade. The method is demonstrated to be valuable for identifying the points in time when policy-makers will have to make decisions and for assessing the impact of transport mode switching. This can have implications of cost-saving and improved service delivery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary cities are thick with infrastructure. In recognition of this fact a great deal of recent work within urban studies and urban geography has focused on transformations in the governance and ownership of infrastructural elements within cities. Less attention has been paid to the practices through which urban infrastructures are inhabited by urban dwellers. Yet in all sorts of ways infrastructures are realised through their use and inhabitation. This paper argues for the importance of attending to the ways that infrastructures are reinterpreted through use. Focusing on a case study of commuter cyclists in London, it explores the ways in which cyclists accommodate themselves to (and are in turn accommodated by) the infrastructural orderings of London's streets. Confronted by the obduracy of a road infrastructure designed primarily for motorised traffic, cyclists show a diverse range of approaches to negotiating movement through the city on bikes. The paper describes how this negotiation can be understood in terms of the more or less skilful processes of navigation, rule following, rule making, and rule bending. This involves a polymorphous mix of practices, some common to driving, others to walking, and yet others unique to cycling. In conclusion, the paper suggests that transformations of infrastructures found within cities need to be understood as much through emergent changes between their elements, and that close attention to how infrastructures come to be inhabited offers productive avenues for thinking about ways to improve them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how financialization changes the financial ecologies of urban water infrastructure provision, and the consequences of these impacts. It begins by illustrating the current state of research on the financialization of infrastructure, and then details the method for contributing towards this literature. A comparative approach, based on the financial ecologies of urban infrastructure, is introduced and explained. The changing financial ecologies of London (UK) and Mumbai (India) are presented by means of a twin approach that examines, on the one hand, new state-level initiatives that introduce municipal bonds into their respective countries, and, on the other, highly individualized financial constructs that aim to enable similar, large water infrastructure projects in the two cities. The findings include the importance of local knowledge and the expertise needed to translate these knowledges/risks between actors in the financial ecology. Faults in these processes lead to compromised decision-making, which is largely enabled by weak oversight. Closer scrutiny and more transparent tendering processes are recommended as policy tools to overcome these shortcomings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the dramatic increase in the number of cyclists, cycling safety has become a critical issue worldwide. It is important to ensure a safe, comfortable, and continuous cycling environment for cyclists. However, the safety effects of discontinuities in cycle network have been greatly ignored in the literature. This study aims to investigate the safety effects of discontinuities in cycle network inside and between Traffic Analysis Zones (TAZs) in London. Bayesian hierarchical spatial model is employed using the number of accesses as spatial weights. Covariates, including cycle network characteristics, road network characteristics, exposure variables, cycle-related facilities, traffic characteristics, and environmental conditions are also considered in the model. The results reveal that the discontinuities in cycle network are significantly associated with cycle crashes. For inside-TAZ level, "discontinuity in cycle lane class" and "standard deviation of cycle link length" have positive effects on cycle crashes. For between-TAZs level, the discontinuities in cycle lane accesses, and cycle lanes and tracks density are positively associated with cycle crashes. The results emphasize the importance of minimizing the discontinuities in cycle network, not only inside the TAZ but also between TAZs. This study also provides several practical implications for future cycling infrastructure planning and construction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study analyses the expected utilization of an urban distribution grid under high penetration of photovoltaic and e-mobility with charging infrastructure on a residential level. The grid utilization and the corresponding power flow are evaluated, while varying the control strategies and photovoltaic installed capacity in different scenarios. Four scenarios are used to analyze the impact of e-mobility. The individual mobility demand is modelled based on the largest German studies on mobility "Mobilität in Deutschland", which is carried out every 5 years. To estimate the ramp-up of photovoltaic generation, a potential analysis of the roof surfaces in the supply area is carried out via an evaluation of an open solar potential study. The photovoltaic feed-in time series is derived individually for each installed system in a resolution of 15 min. The residential consumption is estimated using historical smart meter data, which are collected in London between 2012 and 2014. For a realistic charging demand, each residential household decides daily on the state of charge if their vehicle requires to be charged. The resulting charging time series depends on the underlying behavior scenario. Market prices and mobility demand are therefore used as scenario input parameters for a utility function based on the current state of charge to model individual behavior. The aggregated electricity demand is the starting point of the power flow calculation. The evaluation is carried out for an urban region with approximately 3100 residents. The analysis shows that increased penetration of photovoltaics combined with a flexible and adaptive charging strategy can maximize PV usage and reduce the need for congestion-related intervention by the grid operator by reducing the amount of kWh charged from the grid by 30% which reduces the average price of a charged kWh by 35% to 14 ct/kWh from 21.8 ct/kWh without PV optimization. The resulting grid congestions are managed by implementing an intelligent price or control signal. The analysis took place using data from a real German grid with 10 subgrids. The entire software can be adapted for the analysis of different distribution grids and is publicly available as an open-source software library on GitHub. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to investigate the timing of land value uplift associated with an extension to an existing light rail transport system. It seeks to understand the amount of land value increase on residential properties at different stages of the infrastructure delivery process of the Tyne and Wear Metro (TWM) system in the North East of England. This is to shed light on the potential use of land value capture methods for subsequent extensions. Whilst there has been substantial international research into transport related land value capture methods, this tends to take place in atypical capital cities with buoyant land markets and/or entire transport systems. This is reflected in England, where research is less frequent in major conurbations outside of Central London, which are more typical of urban areas in this country. In response, the intention is to shed new light on this situation by updating historical research into the impact of the TWM. Its primary focus is the longitudinal performance of the 2002 Sunderland Metro Extension (SME). This historical appraisal of impact is sinnicant because it is important to understand when and how much uplift is generated. This in turn helps to evidence any justifications for subsequent extensions and funding via Land Value Capture. This study uses a novel time based analysis to quantify differences in property prices before, immediately after and fifteen years after the Sunderland Metro Extension (SME) was constructed. The original results show that property values increased immediately after the extension becomes operational, though no significant results were found 15 years later. • Land value impact in sub-optimal locations. • Land value uplift appears to occur immediately after construction. • Findings suggest that land value capture instruments should target capture immediately after construction of light rail extensions in sub-optimal locations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

[Display omitted] • Scalable real-time video detection pipeline using traffic cams. • Built upon YOLOv3 and Docker. • Results in London are consistent with existing traffic patterns. With CCTV systems being installed in the transport infrastructures of many cities, there is an abundance of data to be extracted from the footage. This paper explores the application of the YOLOv3 object detection algorithm, trained on the COCO dataset, to the Transport for London's (TfL) JamCam feed. The result, open-sourced and publicly available, is a series of easy to deploy Docker pipelines to create, store and serve (through a REST API) data on identified objects on that feed. The pipelines can be deployed to any Linux machine with an NVIDIA GPU to support accelerated computation. We studied how different confidence thresholds affect detections of relevant objects (cars, trucks and pedestrians) in London JamCam scenes. By running the system continuously for three weeks, we built a dataset of more than 2200 detection datapoints for each camera (~6 datapoints an hour). We further visualized the detections on an animated geospatial map, showcasing their effectiveness in identifying traffic patterns typical of an urban city like London, portraying the variation on different object population levels throughout the day. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Thames Tideway Tunnel (TTT), often referred to as the Thames super sewer, is currently one of the largest infrastructure projects underway in any European city. Costing an estimated £4.2 billion, the sewer connects London's Victorian sewerage network with the Thames Wastewater Treatment Works at Beckton. The latter facility has been described as the UK's Water–Energy–Food nexus poster child, for its combination of desalination facilities, green energy generation and wastewater treatment. While physically connected to the Beckton plant, the TTT is, paradoxically, designed with an apparent disregard for the water–energy nexus. If the Beckton plant represents a nexus-based vision of integration – what Macrorie and Marvin (2016) refer to as Mode 2 Urban Integration – the TTT harks back to a view of urban integration carried from the Victorian era through to the present moment. What unites the two projects, and what undergirds the transformation of the hydrosocial cycle, is a financial model more focused on the extraction of rents from Thames Water's consumers. Thames Water's dismissal of genuinely integrated alternatives appears guided more by the financialisation of the urban integrated ideal than by what is needed to respond to London's broader environmental needs. Contesting the project, therefore, will involve slicing through the various claims to integration, going beyond the many proposals for evidence-based alternatives, and capturing the transformations being wrought by finance's entry into infrastructure provision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: How engineering in the context of urban socio‐environmental challenges is practically and effectively mobilized has been the subject of some debate. Numerous professional bodies have encouraged engineers to approach socio‐environmental issues through increased engagement with, and accountability to, the public through effective participatory practices. This article presents a close empirical analysis of a major engineering project in London to argue that engineering has a more complex relationship with social, political and environmental conditions than the idealistic participatory conception supposes. In fact, the spatial, technical and economic arrangements of engineering practice may limit the potential for public participation. Through a detailed analysis of the example of the London Water Ring Main (from around 1988 to 1994), this article shows how myriad sometimes conflicting engineering issues and responsibilities interfered with key elements of effective participation. Therefore, although increased public engagement in engineering may be desirable in theory, substantial professional, institutional and political change may have to occur before this is possible in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]