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Romanian cities are facing two opposing patterns of urban development that are common worldwide: a significant number of small cities are undergoing a process of shrinkage, while large cities are experiencing dense urban sprawl. This study examines the framework of the current legislation and urban codes that impact the growth of Romanian cities. The aim is to establish a critical analysis of the current urban codes of residential areas in Romania and to create a framework for an integrated neighbourhood tool of analysis for Romanian residential areas, using urban form as a starting point. This direction starts from the fact that international documents such as the "New Leipzig Charter" recommend a resilient and environmentally friendly approach to urban development, while current Romanian normative documents on resilience and sustainability focus mostly on buildings, ignoring a broader vision that includes the urban scale of the neighbourhood or city while considering the multidisciplinary requirement for understanding urban morphology and phenomena. Existing urban legislation in Romania is characterised by several deficiencies resulting from the fragmentation of outdated regulatory bodies in the field of urban planning. Furthermore, this study has demonstrated that urban indicators can serve as a versatile tool for the assessment and enhancement of residential areas in the country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The built environment has great influence over the sustainability of societies as well as over people's quality of life. Quality of life (QoL) is a broad concept that has different definitions across diverse bodies of knowledge. The social–cultural environment and the characteristics of the built environment influence people's perception of QoL. This study aims to identify and analyse the factors that impact QoL and sustainable development in the urban context. A systematic literature review was developed to understand QoL concepts and to identify urban indicators that contribute to the multidimensional evaluation of urban QoL. The results include (1) a holistic overview of QoL concepts and indicators; (2) the proposal of a holistic urban QoL concept; (3) the identification of urban QoL dimensions and indicators that contribute to urban QoL evaluation. The main contribution of this study is its discussion of the multidimensional nature of QoL, including objective and subjective dimensions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent decades, urban settlements have been greatly affected by globalisation, climate change, and economic uncertainty. When designing cities, these factors should be taken into account and adapted to the different contexts involved. The redevelopment of degraded urban areas is the first step toward achieving the sustainability aims set out in the Sustainable Development Goals. In this context, evaluation methods are required in the decision-making process, considering different social, economic, and environmental aspects to define the correct policies and actions for city redevelopment. In this paper, an evaluation methodology is proposed in order to obtain a priority scale of interventions for urban regeneration. Starting from on-site inspections to better know the current scenario, a set of indicators is established to evaluate the urban quality. Criticalities and potentials emerge through SWOT analysis and, with the ANP-BOCR method, the priority scale of the identified scenarios is defined. This decision-making approach was applied to the case study of the Rimini Canal Port, in the northeast of Italy, which is a degraded area of the city. This methodology is a tool that can be used in the future by decision makers (DMs) for the redevelopment of small port areas within similar urban contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The access to open government data has been a relevant topic for societies around the world, especially over the last ten years. This paper aims to analyze the indicators of the São Paulo City Observatory (ObservaSampa), confronting them with the ISO 3712x series (sustainable, smart, and resilient cities) standards, to assess if the former meet both open data principles and the ISO prescriptions. Bibliometric analysis, comparative analysis, cluster analysis, and principal component analysis (PCA) were the methods used in this research. From the comparative analysis, 18 indicators were identified as conforming and 41 as partially conforming. Thus, 20% of the ObservaSampa indicators adhere to the ISO standards. The PCA applied to the conforming indicators shows component 1 is related to socioeconomic dimensions, while component 2 refers to social policy, with both appraisals confirmed by cluster analysis. Measuring and presenting city data in compliance with indicator standards is relevant because they open the possibility of comparing different cities. However, there is still a lack of consensus on a common set of indicators to be accommodated within the current ISO standards system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the concept of urban pandemic vulnerability as a crucial framework for understanding how COVID-19 affects cities and how they react to pandemics. We adapted existing social and environmental urban vulnerability frameworks to assess pandemic impacts and responses, identifying the appropriate components and spatial, environmental and socio-demographic variables of interest. Pandemic vulnerability depends on exposure, sensitivity and adaptive capacity features, which occur in different combinations in different parts of a city. The model was applied to the Metropolitan Region of Amsterdam (MRA) to create a map of pandemic vulnerability. This map differentiates between affected areas according to the types of vulnerability they experience, and it accurately identified the most vulnerable areas in line with real-world data. The findings contribute to clarifying the challenges brought by COVID-19, identifying vulnerability thresholds and guiding planning towards pandemic resilience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sustainable development is a key component in urban studies. Earth Observation (EO) can play a valuable role in sustainable urban development and planning, since it represents a powerful data source with the potential to provide a number of relevant urban sustainability indicators. To this end, in this paper we propose a conceptual list of EO-based indicators capable of supporting urban planning and management. Three cities with different typologies, namely Basel, Switzerland; Tel Aviv, Israel; and Tyumen, Russia were selected as case studies. The EO-based indicators are defined to effectively record the physical properties of the urban environment in a diverse range of environmental sectors such as energy efficiency, air pollution and public health, water, transportation and vulnerability to hazards. The results assess the potential of EO to support the development of a set of urban environmental indicators towards sustainable urban planning and management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sustainable development is one of the biggest challenges for the future of our cities. With this in mind, eco-districts are essentially designed to respond to four challenges that place emphasis mainly on complexity and resilience by acting on aspects such as urban green spaces, mobility, energy, water management and waste management. In this study, the focus is on the concept of mixitè, from both a functional and social perspective, which is seen as a tool to increase the sustainability of urban settlements and bring benefits to the social, environmental and economic system. Despite the growing interest of research into the impacts of an urban land-use mix, there have been few methodological analyses on how to measure the functional mix in an urban environment. Therefore, the goal of this study is to define one or more indicators that are able to represent the diversity of the soil through their application to different areas. It is therefore possible to define a tool that helps to design, evaluate and support decision makers in urban planning choices. Indeed, it is important to understand how the soil mix, and subsequently the social mix, affects sustainability and how planners can take it into account in planning and developing urban policies. In this document: (a) we will highlight the theories and concepts underlying both functional and social mixitè; (b) the benefits it brings both to the city and to the individual; (c) a review of the main methods of measurement of the mixitè; (d) application and a subsequent comparison of the methods identified in case studies represented by three areas related to the establishment of the University of Salerno, in Italy, consisting of its two campuses as well as an adjacent site. The results obtained show that some of the indicators analyzed are more effective at representing the phenomenon of mixitè than others. Therefore, widening research, especially for those concerning the social mixitè, is advisable. Despite this, the results show that proper planning and management of urban devices bring about a series of advantages by increasing the sustainability and urban efficiency of settlements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Well-documented EO data repositories are required that provide guidance to non-EO experts in the use of EO data and products (a recent example of such an initiative is the EO Toolkit for Sustainable Cities and Communities: [[14]]). Keywords: urban planning; urban indicators; urban environment; social and economic indicators; urban growth; urban dynamics; urban land use; structure types; urban hazards EN urban planning urban indicators urban environment social and economic indicators urban growth urban dynamics urban land use structure types urban hazards 1264 1 04/10/21 20210401 NES 210401 1. Table 1 Urban planning indicators supported by Earth observation (EO) data within publications of the special issue (* based on EO data). Ease of access and well-documented datasets need to be combined with rich quantitative and qualitative data that can add contextual information and support urban information needs, e.g., building on citizen science approaches, to understand how to contextualise numeric data. [Extracted from the article]

Density-dependent population growth regulates long-term urban expansion and shapes distinctive socioeconomic trends. Despite a marked heterogeneity in the spatial distribution of the resident population, Mediterranean European countries are considered more homogeneous than countries in other European regions as far as settlement structure and processes of metropolitan growth are concerned. However, rising socioeconomic inequalities among Southern European regions reflect latent demographic and territorial transformations that require further investigation. An integrated assessment of the spatio-temporal distribution of resident populations in more than 1000 municipalities (1961–2011) was carried out in this study to characterize density-dependent processes of metropolitan growth in Greece. Using geographically weighted regressions, the results of our study identified distinctive local relationships between population density and growth rates over time. Our results demonstrate that demographic growth rates were non-linearly correlated with other variables, such as population density, with positive and negative impacts during the first (1961–1971) and the last (2001–2011) observation decade, respectively. These findings outline a progressive shift over time from density-dependent processes of population growth, reflecting a rapid development of large metropolitan regions (Athens, Thessaloniki) in the 1960s, to density-dependent processes more evident in medium-sized cities and accessible rural regions in the 2000s. Density-independent processes of population growth have been detected in the intermediate study period (1971–2001). This work finally discusses how a long-term analysis of demographic growth, testing for density-dependent mechanisms, may clarify the intrinsic role of population concentration and dispersion in different phases of the metropolitan cycle in Mediterranean Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The causal relation among building typology and building energy demand is a complex balance of climate, morphology, technology and use. The assessment of the relation between mass of building elements and energy demand in different housing typologies is the main goal of this study. A novel indicator, namely the Buildingmass, is introduced and tested in the Mediterranean climate region. Explorations on nine conventional housing typologies in Barcelona and Rome are carried out. Buildingmass evaluation is based on the calculation of the mass of building elements. Energy demand is assessed by modelling on multi-space dynamic thermal analysis tool. Our results point out that the Buildingmass has a strong relevance on energy, playing an important role in reducing heating and cooling demand in the Mediterranean city, as described by the proposed correlation (R2 = 0.88). Moreover, this indicator gives a more detailed characterisation of the housing stock of the Mediterranean city. The study aims at bridging the gap between urban physics and urban metabolism studies and fostering energy conservation measures for the built environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

3D geovisualization is essential in urban planning as it assists the analysis of geospatial data and decision making in the design and development of land use and built environment. However, we noted that 3D geospatial models are commonly visualized arbitrarily as current 3D viewers often lack of design instructions to assist end users. This is especially the case for the occlusion management in most 3D environments where the high density and diversity of 3D data to be displayed require efficient visualization techniques for extracting all the geoinformation. In this paper, we propose a theoretical and operational solution to manage occlusion by automatically computing best viewpoints. Based on user's parameters, a viewpoint management algorithm initially calculates optimal camera settings for visualizing a set of 3D objects of interest through parallel projections. Precomputed points of view are then integrated into a flythrough creation algorithm for producing an automatic navigation within the 3D geospatial model. The algorithm's usability is illustrated within the scope of a fictive exploratory phase for the public transport services access in the European quarter of Brussels. Eventually, the proposed algorithms may also assist additional urban planning phases in achieving their purposes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is much discussion regarding the Sustainable Development Goals' (SDGs) capacity to promote inclusive development. While some argue that they represent an opportunity for goal-led alignment of stakeholders and evidence-based decision-making, other voices express concerns as they perceive them as a techno-managerial framework that measures development according to quantitatively defined parameters and does not allow for local variation. We argue that the extent to which the positive or negative aspects of the SDGs prevail depends on the monitoring system's ability to account for multiple and intersecting inequalities. The need for sub-nationally (urban) representative indicators poses an additional methodological challenge—especially in cities with intra-urban inequalities related to socio-spatial variations across neighbourhoods. This paper investigates the extent to which the SDG indicators' representativeness could be affected by inequalities. It does so by proposing a conceptual framing for understanding the relation between inequalities and SDG monitoring, which is then applied to analyse the current methodological proposals for the indicator framework of the "urban SDG," Goal 11. The outcome is a call for (1) a more explicit attention to intra-urban inequalities, (2) the development of a methodological approach to "recalibrate" the city-level indicators to account for the degree of intra-urban inequalities, and (3) an alignment between methodologies and data practices applied for monitoring SDG 11 and the extent of the underlying inequalities within the city. This would enable an informed decision regarding the trade-off in indicator representativeness between conventional data sources, such as censuses and household surveys, and emerging methods, such as participatory geospatial methods and citizen-generated data practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]