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Climate change is having an immediate and devastating effect on archaeological sites in Florida. The Florida Public Archaeology Network's Heritage Monitoring Scouts (HMS Florida) program empowers local communities to document the impacts of climate change at sites throughout the state. Our ability to document sites shows humanity's resilience to climate fluctuations in the past while also making it clear that adaptation and mitigation of coastal areas in the face of modern anthropogenic climate change must be paramount. This article describes two case studies from coastal Florida that have served as visceral points of focus for local communities to see the impacts of climate change. At Shell Bluff Landing in the northeast part of the state a site stewardship program was developed to closely document changes in time starting in 2016 with alarming results. In the opposite corner of the state at Calusa Island, a private land trust was created to protect local natural environments from the impacts of development. The coastal island has subsequently seen massive loss due to erosion. The article concludes with actions archaeologists can take today to make the communities they work with more resilient, using a prioritization system developed with Palm Beach County as an example. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractScience skeptics have spent years attacking climate science, but it has only been recently that post-COVID-19 conspiracy theorists have directed their attention to local city planning, with misinformation campaigns throwing vitriol at the idea of the 15-minute city and denouncing planning best practices as a global form of social engineering with hidden agendas to restrict private freedoms. In this context, urban planners and practitioners need to understand the nature of conspiracy claims and distinguish legitimate concerns about the 15-minute city model. As science skeptics and conspiracy theories gain ground in all sectors of our societies, researchers and city planners need to communicate evidence-based decision making and address science-driven concerns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Application of the ecosystem services (ES) concept in urban planning has potential for improving environmental and human health outcomes in cities. We aimed to narrow an identified ES implementation gap by identifying the criteria for the practical fit of the ES concept in urban planning. We found that local relevance and adaptability within current planning approaches were core criteria for practical fit. If not met immediately, these criteria may be met over time through policy entrepreneurship. Further research in different locations and planning systems would increase understanding of the enabling factors for applying ES in urban planning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent decades, nature has been increasingly acknowledged in the urban environment for its importance to people's well-being and quality of life, as well as for its role in building sustainable cities. The idea of nature in cities and the conceptualization of 'green' (e.g. green structure, green fingers, green infrastructure, parks and ecosystem services) are correlated in planning approaches. This study explores the conceptualization of green by analysing the concepts used in the two regions of Oslo and Helsinki, and by investigating their current master and regional plans through quantitative and qualitative analyses. The findings exhibit a variety of green concepts and complementary features (between planning concepts introduced earlier and newer ones). Over the years, and in the light of evolving ideas of nature, the master and regional plans of both regions have set up a multi-functionality framework, more recently influenced by ecosystem services approaches. The study contributes to understanding the evolving conceptualization of green in urban and regional planning approaches. The discussion is linked to place-specific contexts and regulatory practices, and connected – to some extent – to the wider international debate and planning ideas that incorporate nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neighborhood governance demands ongoing communication between public and private actors. Area brokers, working as boundary spanners, are essential in this process. Their work was severely impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Social distancing measures hindered face-to-face (F2F) interaction rituals, such as informal conversations and participation meetings. Therefore, area brokers had to turn to communication technologies to mitigate this loss. This research explored how a shift from F2F to mediated communication, affected area brokers' effectiveness. In total, 21 sequential interviews and three focus groups were conducted with ten area brokers, acting as so-called boundary spanners, in Amsterdam during three phases of the pandemic. The analysis shows that, while mediated communication helped them to continue their tasks, the relational and functional affordances of communication technologies constrained boundary-spanning activities, impacting neighborhood governance. The paper raises two critical issues for neighborhood governance beyond the pandemic. First, mediated communication can aggravate existing inequalities in the ability of citizens to communicate with local government representatives. Second, although communication technologies are currently on the rise in local governance, they are only effective when coupled with discretionary space for boundary spanners to employ them in fitting ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The geography of economic opportunity and residential segregation are important factors driving racial disparities in employment outcomes. We present here the changing landscape of opportunity in large metropolitan areas in the United States to describe how the spatial structure of opportunity is evolving. Using decomposable inequality indices, we break down the spatial inequality of opportunity into two components: inequality within subareas (inner cities, inner suburbs, and outer suburbs) and inequality between subareas. According to our findings, economic opportunity is primarily driven by inequality within subareas. The situation is particularly evident in metropolitan areas where suburban employment is growing concurrently with the suburbanization of Black and Hispanic populations. Our findings suggest that the geography of metropolitan opportunity in the U.S. is changing in ways that will alter our traditional understanding of the relationship between race, space, and economic opportunity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Housing programs in India have rarely engaged with slum communities to understand slum-dwellers' housing needs and preferences as the tools to systematically understand them are lacking. Consequently, the programs are often designed and implemented without the slum community's participation. This paper demonstrates the usefulness of inviting slum residents to understand housing problems from their perspective by using in-depth interviews and focus group discussions in two slums of Odisha, India. We compare their priorities with the provisions of slum policies such as the Odisha Land Rights to Slum Dwellers Act 2017 to highlight that housing needs and challenges in slums are diverse, and preferences are often incremental that the current program has failed to recognize. We use problem structuring methods from decision sciences as our analytical framework that treats the slum residents as experts. Such an approach can potentially transform how we design housing programs and policies in the developing world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Housing policy in the United States has long been characterized by unequal investment in homeownership and low-income rental assistance, with implications for racial (and ethnic) inequality in access to stable housing. In this study, I examine socioeconomic status and neighborhood characteristics of non-Hispanic White and non-Hispanic Black adults with children receiving HUD rental assistance using a nationally representative linked survey-administrative dataset. Results show that Black and White adults who receive rental assistance tend to have similar (low) incomes, yet Black adults experience significantly higher levels of neighborhood disadvantage than White adults. Furthermore, living in poverty is a substantially stronger predictor of receiving HUD rental assistance for White than Black adults. The results support the notion that rental assistance programs are a last resort for White households, many of whom may benefit from historical federal government support for homeownership. Rental assistance serves as an important safety net for Black families but fails to provide significant improvement in the neighborhood environment. The results contribute to a comprehensive understanding of racial inequality in the impacts of U.S. rental housing policy and the historical legacy of racial exclusion in U.S. homeownership programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Community resources that meet the basic daily needs of residents have been primarily examined at the neighborhood level while the municipal-level contexts have been overlooked. Therefore, focusing on 180 municipalities in the Los Angeles–Long Beach Combined Statistical Area (CSA), this study explores whether municipal boundaries are influential in the spatial distribution of community resources—related to food, education, healthcare, recreation, and social service and civic organizations—and investigates the multilevel determinants of this distribution. Using the K-means clustering method, this study classifies municipalities into three groups by their socioeconomic, fiscal, and physical features. Then, by employing the analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) and multilevel logistic regression, this study finds an unequal distribution of community resources related to the municipal-level socioeconomic status (SES) when the community resources of adjacent municipalities are considered. The results of this study suggest that more contextualized policies based on municipal SES may address the spatial inequality of community resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While retrospective economic voting—that is, punishing or rewarding incumbent politicians for the performance of the economy—is well studied, much less is known about the electoral implications of the housing market across levels of government. Which, if any, levels of government are judged on the basis of real estate prices? This piece considers this question, using panel survey data and home assessment data from Calgary, Alberta, a city where housing prices have stagnated in recent years relative to other Canadian cities. We find that support for incumbents at both the local and provincial levels are related to impressions of the direction of the housing market. City councilors, however, are the only politicians who seem to be held accountable for the performance of the housing market. Our results suggest that, at the local level, housing prices are an important consideration for economic voting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The work of community-based organizations (CBOs), organizations that represent a particular community, can be an impetus for social change and advocacy. By drawing on the institutional entrepreneurship perspective, this study seeks to understand how CBOs attempt to challenge dominant carceral logics (referred to as a punishment-oriented mind-set) in operation across two fields: (1) the public-school system and (2) human service providers that work with sex workers. Utilizing a comparative case study design in the city of Chicago, this study discusses how CBOs leverage their legitimacy and relationships to identify contradictions within the carceral logics in city-wide fields and promote alternative solutions, namely restorative justice in public schools and decriminalization of sex work. CBO strategies and goals differed based on their field position and existing support, so we discuss how CBOs can advance alternate logics and promote change depending on their contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an era of austerity, co-production involving local government and community groups has taken on much greater significance worldwide, including in Japanese local government. However, the nature of local co-production differs widely across Japan, ranging from bona fide cooperation between municipalities and voluntary groups to de facto outsourcing of local government functions in pursuit of cost savings. This paper seeks to add to the scholarly literature on community co-production by examining two case studies in Yokohama City. In particular, we seek to show how "path-dependency" and local social capital play a significant role in the success of co-production in local government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information technologies, social media and the Internet of Things are tools that may encourage civic participation for the co-creation of public value and can strengthen the role of citizens in urban governance. This work seeks to explore of how social media and IoT based participation enhances the interaction between government and citizen, and for government, what capabilities are required for continuous citizen participation. The paper examines the power dynamics between government and citizens employing Giddens's theory of structuration as an analytical framework. In addition, dynamic capability theory has been applied to determine the capabilities of government needed for continuous civic participation, while proposing a citizen participation model for public value co-creation. The proposed model can serve as a framework for recognizing the vital role of citizens in public policymaking and public service provision in the smart era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is broad consensus regarding the fact that street art is a form of social, political and cultural protest and critique. However, rather than one single form, street art consists of a wide range of complex and contradictory styles featuring a diversity of interests, derivations and conflicts with underlying factors of both a structural and contextual nature. Taking as examples the cases of Pinacoteca aCel Obert and Pinta Malasaña, in Barcelona and Madrid respectively, this article explores the production of urban art and notes how, as part of plans to revitalize neighborhoods, it assumes different versions in harmony with the characteristics and circumstances of the surrounding areas. Using a qualitative methodology, it explores the conception, development and results of both projects, revealing the heterogeneity of explanatory factors, the complexity of their implementation, and the role, which is not exempt from conflict and rivalry, of street artists in the urban space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We analyse the construction of new Nordicities, as in new and guiding discourses for urban development which engage with a Northern location. Spatial planning and place branding are proposed as mutually reinforcing instruments to support the strategic positioning of cities located in northern climes. Planning in such an environment must take on board urban and landscape design, not merely for esthetics but as necessary tools to integrate scales of spatial organization, and to relate discursive Nordicities to spaces and spatial interventions which embody that discourse. Empirically, we draw on the city of Edmonton, Alberta, notable for its cold climate, increased planning ambitions, as well as recent initiatives towards embracing both the North and the winter. Different qualitative methods allow us to reconstruct changes in the understanding of the winter, the North, as well as changes in ideas on the role of planning and design. We argue that the deliberate construction of strategy around new Nordicities, adapted to local conditions and aspirations, and selectively incorporating foreign examples and external expertise, is a worthwhile pursuit for any northern community rethinking its relation to a northern context, and hoping to go beyond adaptation to the less pleasant features of climate and geography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chosen three times as the host city for the Summer Olympic Games (1940, 1964 and 2020), Tokyo's city layout is historically linked to the Olympics. Including the bid project for the 1960 and the 2016 Games, Tokyo has presented five Olympic projects, each time with five different urban visions which enlighten the nature of the past and present political Japanese regimes. The recurrence of the Olympic Games in the planning and growth of Tokyo leads to the idea of a major influence of the Olympics both on the physical evolution of the urban structure but also on that, immaterial, of its planning culture – or, in other words, on the representations, imaginary and practices of the institutional stakeholders of Tokyo's urban fabric. The aim of the paper is therefore double. First, it analyses each urban vision of the Games of 1940, 1964 and 2020. Secondly, it analyses the influence of each Olympic project on greater Tokyo's urban planning and regional development, as well as the influence of each Olympiad on the following ones. Doing that, the paper discusses the formalization of a planning culture through organizing the Olympics on the long run in Tokyo. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mega events are facing a disruption, despite their adaptative nature, in their continued 120-year growth in a context of environmental and energy crisis doubled by increased ethical and social expectations. We put forward the hypothesis, in the middle term, of a gradual disconnection between (1) mega events such as the Olympic Games and (2) a catalyst effect on urban regeneration and attractivity pursued by host cities; and over the long term, we explore a return to the past characterized by more modest and 'sustainable' Games. We first unveil how urban planning was implemented through the Olympic Games over the last 30 years to understand how Olympic urban mega projects have been increasingly questioned as risky and unsustainable and how IOC frameworks gradually adapted to articulate sustainability and legacy. Is it a return to the comparatively modest 1900, 1908, and 1924 and 1948 Olympics exemplified by the new quarters built after the failed 1992, 2008 and 2012 Paris bids? How do historiography and narratives compare Paris and London? Last, we analyse Paris 2024 as an example of disconnection between the Olympics and mega urban project, as included in an existing 30-year metropolitan project focusing limited new infrastructure on local needs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the growth of the Olympic Games against that of former host cities to understand whether this mega-event may have 'outgrown' its hosts. The increasing hosting requirements and governments' expansive use of mega-events as tools for urban development would suggest that the 'Olympic city' – a term we use for describing the size of the Olympics as hosted in different cities over the decades – has grown at a faster rate than former host cities. The analysis contrasts historical indicators that capture the evolving size of planning for the event based on four dimensions – sport, spectators, marketing and costs – as well as the urban dimension of hosting experiences (venues and infrastructure) with city trajectories based on demographic and economic indicators. This is done through a longitudinal analysis of former Olympic host cities from the 1960s and 1970s and from which continuous longitudinal data are available: Tokyo, Munich, and Montreal. The findings indicate that the Olympic city has grown more strongly than these former host cities, although not uniformly across trajectories. This gives evidence for the need to review the size of mega-event impacts if they ought to continue to generate interest in hosting them in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Olympic Games of 1940 were due to be organized in Tokyo, Japan, but because of the Sino-Japanese war, the event was hastily re-scheduled to be organized in Helsinki, Finland. The Second World War however interrupted the preparations. Instead of 1940, the Games were organized in Helsinki in 1952. It thus became necessary to prepare twice for the same event. During the 12 years that had passed, the political situation had become significantly different, while also views concerning architecture and urban planning had changed. The postponed Helsinki Olympics represent an intriguing case in the history of Olympic Games, that has remained relatively little researched. This paper proposes that this 12-year 'Olympic gap' brings to view on one hand the need to prepare twice, and on the other hand, the processual, slow nature of building and planning, which continued almost uninterrupted. A close reading of period newspaper articles, history of urban planning and architecture, as well as studies of the Olympic Games reveals tensions between architecture, planning, and politics on local, national, and international level, as they unravel in the context of preparing for the Helsinki Olympics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the urban consequences of failing to host Olympic Games. Using the example of Paris and its unsuccessful bids to hosts the Olympic Games of 1992, 2008 and 2012, the paper analyses the pre- and post-bid status of key projected 'Olympic' sites within the context of urban plans and aspirations of the city of Paris. The French capital attracts special attention because of the rapid succession of submissions that proved to be outbid by those presented to the IOC by the cities of Barcelona (1992), Beijing (2008) and London (2012). The paper will briefly outline the reasons for failing to attract the Games but will devote most of its space for an analysis of the siting of the planned Olympic Villages, which often form the most lasting of legacies of Olympic Games in host cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The VI International Seminar on Urban Form - Hispanic (ISUF-H) 2022, held at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, aimed to observe and rethink urban form, redefine challenges and paradigms, and share knowledge and research. The congress focused on the importance of urban form in resilience strategies, circular economy strategies, and sustainability strategies. It also explored the relationship between politics, urban planning, and academia. The congress addressed global challenges such as sustainability, self-sufficiency, and lifestyle-related health. Case studies and research were presented on topics such as healthy cities, urban regeneration, public spaces, green infrastructure, and urban informality. The closing plenary lecture discussed the trajectory of the debate on urban morphology and announced the next congress, which will focus on the principle of Good Living and indigenous perspectives. [Extracted from the article]

This paper examines the form, function and impact of previous Olympic security arrangements and their intersection with planning practice. Drawing from prior and ongoing empirical research investigating the security practices at summer Olympic Games, the paper argues that wider shifts towards 'total' security models comprising continually reproduced security motifs can be observed that are increasingly standardized, mobile, globalized and planned-in. For most Olympic organizers, preparations now necessarily include attempts to equate spectacle with safety and to 'design-out' terrorism by relying on highly militarized tactics and expensive and detailed contingency planning. Such securitizing practices have intensified in form and scale since 9/11, with such intensification set to continue at the XXXIII Olympiad in Paris, where a vast security infrastructure is being embedded into the large-scale and long-term master-plans for the central city. This represents a high point in spatial planning practice through embracing principles of security-by-design where Games-time security infrastructure, whilst providing effective protection, becomes a less visible but permanent, physical legacy that can also contribute to local programmes of regeneration, climate resilience and crime prevention. The paper concludes by reflecting upon what the continual evolution of security infrastructure means for the balancing of planned-in security and spectacle at future Olympiads. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Land-cover classification based on remote sensing technology has been adopted for decision-making concerning agricultural development, urban planning, and ecosystem protection in arid oasis zones. The semantic segmentation method based on deep learning, as a new paradigm, can effectively overcome the limitations of traditional pixel-based and object-based methods and obtain good classification results from high spatial resolution (HSR) remote sensing images. However, how to extract the exact category boundary and realize the high precision mapping is still a problem. This paper proposes a novel high-resolution feature pyramid attention network (HRFPANet) for land-cover classification. It effectively integrates the advantages of multi-scale feature extraction, attention mechanism, and feature fusion and alleviates boundary inconsistency, roughness, and category fragmentation associated with previous semantic segmentation models. The experimental results show that the mIoU score of HRFPANet is 79.5%, which is 11.5% and 2.6% higher than that of PSPNet and UPerNet, respectively. It proves the proposed model can be used for qualified land-cover mapping in arid oasis zones. Our source code is available at . [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last decades, many scholars have studied competition between cities and entrepreneurial urban policies. Coming from the evolving field of competition research, we are interested in how competition between cities is constructed and, for this purpose, examine the competition imaginary of Vienna, a city known less for its entrepreneurial policies than for its social welfare policies. The paper employs critical discourse analysis of Viennese policy papers from 1985–2015, a period particularly shaped by the process of competitization. The analysis shows that Vienna's social and welfare policies are also decisive for the city's positioning in city competition and rankings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a potential to allocate road space dynamically over time when demands are complementary or disputed. A workshop with experts was performed to discuss the practicability of implementing dynamic solutions in urban areas. The workshop aimed to identify possible dynamic solutions, select streets for intervention, and systematize and rank street-level criteria for different dynamic road space allocation solutions. The results suggest that street-level site selection criteria can be classified into three typologies (functional, geometric, and layout) and vary across solutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper presents a field study analysing how pedestrians walked for leisure purposes in a familiar urban area, and why they walked as they did. Using mobile-based GPS, the walking trajectories of 44 participants were recorded, followed by the administration of a post-walk survey. Results show that participants gravitated towards five distinct paths that were similar in length (three shorter and two longer paths), yet observably different with respect to specific street features. Correspondingly, participants rated street features associated with these differences as factors that either attracted them towards, or repelled them away, from walking in specific streets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing from a case study in Finland, the paper analyses the performative practice of urban development projects in order to win public support for the desired future. The role of famous architects as agents of urban change is pivotal. This raises the concern of how the performative trend in planning cuts down the public discussion of possible alternative futures. The analysis uses the concept techniques of futuring and follows the repetition of performative action. It is relevant to ask if the role of the public is to engage in the story presented instead of engaging in the planning process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the increasing number of female students enrolling and graduating from the Department of Urbanism at Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Iran, this study aims to mainstream gender into urban planning pedagogy. This is achieved by analyzing a case study comprising 47 survey responses and seven follow-up interviews. Among other factors, respondents' perspectives on gender are more influenced by their personal experiences rather than the objective knowledge acquired through the Department's curriculum. Recommendations for the department to mainstream gender into the pedagogy are (1) mainstreaming gender issues in urban planning curriculum, (2) promoting gender-balanced department climate, (3) innovating around teaching methods, and (4) increasing awareness about the profession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasingly, cities and municipalities are involved in urban experimentation to meet current societal challenges. The expectations on local authorities to implement new ways of dealing with current challenges are high and raise questions of municipal capacity and governance structures, challenging more traditional ways of planning and policymaking. In this paper we have analysed three urban experiments related to transport and mobility in three Swedish municipalities and how they are governed and planned for. The study builds on qualitative interviews and document analysis. Our results show that the municipalities are working with urban experiments on different scales. All experiments are top-down experiments run by the municipalities, with limited citizen involvement. All experiments have become part of placemaking activities in the municipalities with the aim to support and promote both future visions and municipal sustainability work related to transport and planning. However, to date, the experiments have had limited outcomes, and planners express a concern for implementation and limited knowledge transfer within and between cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pakistan is urbanising at an extremely high pace and if this urbanisation is left unplanned, it can not only increase the vulnerability of its residents, but it can be the source of high GHG emissions, thereby increasing vulnerability to climate change. Moreover, not all city inhabitants are equally vulnerable to climate change and Pandemics like Covid-19. This study estimated the vulnerability ranking of urban union councils of Rawalpindi through a composite index without assigning weights, considering 20 physical, economic, social and institutional indicators as drivers of vulnerability, with an emphasis on climate change and the outbreak of chronic diseases. A survey is conducted from the urban residents of Rawalpindi, to measure the vulnerability towards climate change and the outbreak of Covid-19. The sample size was 440 households. The results showed that union councils of New Katarian-II, Dhaman and MC Stadium B Block were less vulnerable as compared to other areas of Rawalpindi with the lowest vulnerability ranking of MC Stadium B Block as 404 and the most vulnerable ranking of Dhok Ratta, UC-2 as 895. Densely populated areas of Dhok Ratta were more vulnerable to high chronic disease exposure and death rates. This study concluded that high population density and composition, low healthcare facilities in slums coupled with low income were the main reasons for chronic disease outbreaks in urban areas. Urban planning or master plans can be a solution for such densely populated areas and high-rise buildings with green infrastructure can reduce the impact of the heat island effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of deep learning-based high resolution remote sensing image sea and land segmentation method has become prevalent in various fields such as environmental monitoring, resource assessment, and urban planning. However, the segmentation process faces challenges due to the complex coastline and the similarity in spectral colour difference between the sea and land in certain areas. The remote sensing images obtained from satellites often exhibit unclear boundaries between the sea and land, as well as intricate coastlines. Consequently, the segmentation of sea and land becomes a difficult task. The existing sea-land segmentation methods have limitations in accurately segmenting long and narrow waters, as well as areas with low differentiation between sea and land. In this paper, we propose a new sea-land segmentation method called SRMA (Swin-Res-Multi-Attention). SRMA performs parallel feature extraction using a dual-branch parallel: Swin-Transformer branch and ResNet branch. The combination of Swin-Transformer's self-attention and ResNet's residual design helps reduce the loss of feature information, thereby avoiding incorrect segmentation in regions with low distinctness. To improve overall stability, we introduce the MCA (Multiscale channel attention module) module, which combines feature information from different scales. The multi-scale pyramid design of MCA module ensures stability and improves segmentation accuracy in narrow waters. Experimental results on a public dataset demonstrate that our model outperforms existing methods. Additionally, we evaluate the model's performance in complex scenarios by creating a new dataset that includes a complex urban water body and cloud interference. The results showcase the robustness and superiority of our model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes how urban development and property management strategies shape and accelerate new-build speculation (i.e., speculation mechanisms attached to the development of newly built real estate projects) in Phnom Penh (the capital of Cambodia), a city experiencing a growing financialization of its real estate markets. By discussing dominant conceptions of property speculation within critical research in geography and urban studies, the article shows that speculation has primarily been seen as a fictitious and unproductive form of capital accumulation rather than as an effective mechanism of urban production. Analyzing the development of mixed-use, large-scale, and condominium projects, the article argues that not only does property speculation participate in shaping real estate development but also that the production and management of real estate projects "engineer" property speculation and the spatialization logics of real estate financialization. Four main mechanisms of new-build speculation are identified: the design of speculative urbanity, the refining of the liquidity of real estate assets, the spatialization of speculation, and the production of territorial investment platforms. Ultimately, the article discusses how the intensification of the construction of large-scale, mixed-use, and condominium projects in Global South cities is supporting a speculative turn of urban development in so-called frontier markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The quest for sustainable urban development requires innovative planning approaches more apt to cater for transformative action. Based on a case study approach, this study aims to explore the potential for local planning to develop practical approaches able to accelerate the transition towards sustainable urban development. To guide spatial development towards sustainability, the analysis of the results shows that local planners need to envision a process design as to advance the understanding of how a site or area can be developed. The act of process design involves pending between processes of contextualization (i.e. exploring five distinguishable domains of planning inquiry) and concretization (i.e. deciding upon a course of action by executing activities that form a process trajectory). Regarding the potential of local planning to develop transformative approaches, it is concluded that: (i) local planners possess capabilities that allow them to probe the future of places and produce insights about prospective change, (ii) the transformative capacity of local planning practices is bound to the development of the identified domains of planning inquiry and (iii) forthcoming evaluations organized around the act of process design can reveal insights regarding the possibilities to put the notion of sustainability into practice at the local level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper utilises Lefebvre's conceptual triad of space to propose a model of migrants' welcome. This model's application in the context of migration in urban areas requires a simultaneous engagement with social practices, representation and representational aspects of space, countering this way an otherwise essentialised notion of welcome. Utilising this framework in our research with migrants and non-migrant residents in five boroughs in Liverpool, UK, showed that welcome rests on the plane of urban inequalities, which affect the ethics of sharing resources, accepting and enabling the other. A multi-scalar dialectical dynamic of welcome emerges between the discursive notions of welcome as deployed in the everyday encounters and the way welcome is experienced and rephrased in the public domain or lamented in the private one. Dispersal and urban planning policies should regard migrants as stakeholders of welcome at local level for the purpose of migrants' inclusion and managing social change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After 5 decades of the Urban Affairs Association, more than 4 decades of the Journal of Urban Affairs (JUA), and with the departure of an editorial team, this seems an opportune moment to assess the contribution made by the journal to the field of urban affairs. This paper takes both an historical and analytical approach to this evaluation, detailing the institutional challenges associated with the journal's production, coupled with identification of key themes in its catalog of papers. The historical exploration of defining articles and notable authors provides a retrospective of the key urban issues that have defined the JUA over the last 4 decades. We also undertake a content analysis of the JUA, utilizing Web of Science data, which dates back to 1993. This bibliometric analysis sheds further light on influential JUA authors, articles and topics, as well as key conceptual, intellectual, and social patterns and trends in the journal over the last four decades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examined the extent to which cities' climate change adaptation plans, in U.S. cities broadly and in shrinking cities, discuss health equity/justice, including injustices related to green spaces. Using content analysis of 88 cities' climate change adaptation plans, we coded for health, equity/justice, parks/green space, and joint usage of these terms. We made comparisons of keyword usage between shrinking and non-shrinking cities to examine how shrinking cities—with overlapping vulnerabilities and industrial legacies—differ from stronger market cities. Although health (97%) and equity/justice (81%) were common, only half of the cities discussed health and equity/justice concurrently, with overrepresentation from shrinking cities. Parks/green space were discussed alongside these themes in 28% of cities. Health equity emerged more in shrinking cities and recent plans (e.g., since 2018), suggesting recent shifts toward equity. Many cities vaguely described health equity solutions, necessitating clearer solutions for injustices, including parks/green space as climate adaptation and health infrastructure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While literature indicates that municipal rat management approaches are often unsuccessful, a lack of research comparing strategies makes the breadth of opportunities and challenges associated with different approaches uncertain. Here, we explored the municipal rat management policies and programs in seven cities in the United States of America. Rat policies were attained by collecting rat management-related municipal codes in each city. Information on rat programs was obtained through interviewing program stakeholders. Analysis followed a qualitative framework method to identify and describe themes associated with the structure and function of management approaches. Municipal codes served as a foundation for municipalities by outlining when, where, how, and by whom rat problems should be addressed. Programs employed the primary people responsible for performing on-the-ground management and they acted as a municipal "brain," organizing the city's strategy. We identify opportunities and barriers for other municipalities to consider in the design of their own rat management strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public spaces are central to social interactions and cohesion, overall urban life, and therewith sustainable urban development. They can play key roles in increasing social interactions and women's empowerment. The literature lacks empirical research on the state of women's use of public spaces and these spaces' effects on women's social interactions and empowerment in Middle Eastern cities in the Kurdistan Region, where women historically enjoyed greater freedom. This paper addresses this gap by presenting insights from a comparative cross-border study with women in two Kurdish cities, Sanandaj and Sulaimani. In doing so, the paper contributes an empirically based theorization of urban public place-making, and debates its effects on the empowerment of women in the context of Kurdish urbanisms. The study developed a survey instrument to measure women's interactions with and in public spaces and their related empowerment in these two cities across five main factors. Despite the local women's limited interaction with and in the public spaces of these two Kurdish cities, the findings show a strong positive relationship between women's interactions in public spaces and their empowerment. The results also suggest that socio-political and related socio-spatial changes have contributed to a decreased relevance of traditional meeting and leisure spaces but have increased the use of malls as commodified spaces, particularly in Sulaimani. The study debates the specificities of urban public spaces in Kurdish cities, and commonalities as well as differences compared with developments elsewhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are several cases of twin cities worldwide. In Europe, most of them came to attention after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when divided twin cities were still located on opposite sides of the Iron Curtain. Since then, many cases have been investigated, especially focusing on their functional and institutional integration, which turns out to be fundamental for their development. In this paper we deal with the case of Reggio Calabria and Messina, two large cities which face each other on the two banks of the Strait of Messina. Despite their proximity, they are poorly connected: socioeconomic interactions (e.g., commuting flows) are limited, and institutional coordination is lacking. However, they have a remarkable integrative potential, based on their complementary characteristics. By conducting a Delphi investigation, a technique which to date has never been used in this field, we analyze the potential, the scenarios, and the strategies to achieve the integration of these twin cities. Our findings show that integration may give back centrality to these two urban areas. This is a feasible scenario, which can be expected to materialize in a relatively short time even without full institutional coordination, focusing on transport services rather than on other infrastructural options (e.g., the Messina Bridge project). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Creative placemaking strategies are widely adopted by urban planners, local governments, and business communities in hopes to revive economically struggling urban areas. These strategies seek to attract pedestrian traffic by facilitating arts and cultural activities in underutilized urban spaces. While these are seemingly innocuous and uncontroversial urban design strategies, I argue that a particular creative placemaking tactic called 'activation' is a compassionate revanchist policy that is touted as a caring approach but, in practice, functions to mask visible poverty to advance a capital project in a revitalizing urban space. Drawing from a case study of a downtown revitalization project in London, Ontario (Canada), I show how a private placemaking consultant narrates and legitimizes this policy to city councillors as well as how the downtown business association rationalizes and enacts activation strategies. This demonstrates that private placemaking consultants are powerful actors who transfer and legitimize simplistic spatial solutions as a panacea to a local 'urban crisis'. Activation does not resemble punitive tactics that exclude and criminalize homelessness, it rather aims to dissolve the homeless within the fabric of the revitalizing urban environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate change requires forward-looking policy responses. Developing such responses can be challenging for governments and, therefore, specific long-term institutions have been proposed for overcoming short-termism. However, the impacts of such institutions have been underexplored. In this paper, we analyze the influence of a long-term institution, the Dutch Delta Programme, on local governments' decisions. The paper results are based on an analysis of climate adaptation strategies, investment plans and adaptation projects and interviews with policymakers, across seven Dutch municipalities. Results indicate that while local adaptation strategies are largely forward looking, adaptation projects tend to focus on solving present-day issues. We found that the Delta Programme enabled local governments to make forward-looking decisions and policies, by: (1) providing knowledge about climate vulnerabilities, (2) creating a broader framing of the issue of climate change, and (3) providing guidance for developing local climate adaptation policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Automatic building detection from remote sensing images holds significant applications in various domains, including cartography, land-use change detection, urban planning, and 3D intelligent city construction. Driven by the innovation of deep learning technology, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have emerged as a powerful framework for automatic interpretation, exhibiting hierarchical feature generation and robust representation for building extraction. However, the inherent computational limitations of convolutional operators hinder the acquisition of an effective global receptive field. Recent advancements in deep learning have witnessed the adoption of the multi-head self-attention (MHSA) mechanism by Transformer, presenting the superiority of global context construction. Nonetheless, this network structure encounters difficulties in effectively modelling two-dimensional spatial structure features with scale variation in semantic segmentation and often has huge parameters with high algorithm complexity. To address the above problems, this paper proposed a hybrid deep neural network synergistically harnessing the superiority of CNN and Transformer to extract buildings from remote sensing images. Meanwhile, an improved MHSA mechanism is developed to facilitate the construction of multiscale global representations, concurrently reducing computational complexity. Furthermore, the cross-level MHSA modules the semantic correlation between the deep and shallow-level features to refine spatial fine-grained information. The proposed method was comprehensively evaluated on two building datasets via quantitative analysis and visualization. The experimental results confirmed that the developed network and modules outperform other state-of-the-art methods and can effectively improve the accuracy (93.4% F1-score on the WHU dataset, 89.38% F1-score on the CAMB dataset) with high efficiency for building extraction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When natural image detection methods are applied to remote sensing images, their detection performance is often unsatisfactory due to the random distribution of objects, complex backgrounds, and significant scale changes. In order to better detect objects with complex backgrounds and significant scale changes in remote sensing images, this study presents SGMFNet, a remote sensing image object detection network based on spatial global attention (SGA) and multi-scale feature fusion (MFF). The SGA inserted into the backbone network can better model context information, suppress irrelevant background, and build powerful feature information, making it easier for subsequent MFF to extract scale-invariant information from adjacent feature layers. This study evaluates the performance of SGMFNet on remote sensing datasets DIOR, NWPU VHR-10, and RSD-GOD. Quantitative and qualitative results on three datasets demonstrate the superiority of SGMFNet in remote sensing object detection and its outperformance compared with other state-of-the-art methods. Therefore, SGMFNet can assist in high-precision urban planning, military monitoring, and other tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The prioritisation of public facilities' maintenance is a necessary but complex task due to the need of considering both physical and socio-economic criteria. This study addresses this problem by quantifying the improvement in the delivery of social benefits that the corrective maintenance of an urban area's public facilities could yield. Based on this, a decision framework is proposed to design and schedule corrective maintenance plans at a municipal scale. The methodology integrates multi-criteria assessment with an analytical method for evaluating the contribution of an area's public facilities to its sustainable urban development based on their type of social infrastructure and their maintenance condition. The decision framework is implemented as a software to facilitate its application to a case study, consisting in building urban regeneration strategies aligned with governmental guidelines. The results revealed that decision-making is more efficient when considering the facilities' type of social infrastructure. In addition, a cost-efficient prioritisation of corrective measures yields better results than neglecting the economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Segregation has many negative consequences for marginalized populations, including increased poverty, low-quality housing, and decreased access to quality education, employment, and food stores. This study illuminates how food and transportation infrastructures exacerbate these inequalities and whether ride-hail services like Uber and Lyft help affected populations access food stores. As a descriptive understanding of the intersection between food, transportation, and racial and ethnic residential segregation in Chicago, Illinois, this study analyzes two questions: (1) how often are ride-hail trips crossing food desert census tract boundaries and (2) are ride-hail trips that access food deserts also accessing neighborhoods that contain supermarkets? Using spatial analyses of data from the city of Chicago, the American Community Survey, food store locations, and the USDA food access atlas, this study finds that ride-hail services are accessing food desert neighborhoods at a very low rate, and very few rides access food desert and supermarket-containing neighborhoods in the same trip. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the different values that stakeholders associate with parklets: small open spaces temporarily installed onto curbside car-parking spaces. It explores the growing debate in policy, research and the media around parklets’ value for the public and for the hospitality businesses that host most of them. The paper aims to inform policy deliberations around parklets by identifying and analyzing the diverse values that have been associated with them. It locates these values within the key policy concerns that shape the broader practices of temporary and tactical urbanism: urban intensity, community engagement, innovation, resilience and place identity. It evaluates whether parklets can have detectable and achievable impacts on different policy aims associated with them: whether the various specified policy values are strong, weak, wishful or hidden. The findings illuminate the contours of policy debates around parklets and indicate why certain policy objectives have been better served by parklets than others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Land cover information is becoming more important in urban planning, change detection, and management. The fusion of point clouds and images increases the accuracy of land use classification by utilising the advantages of both modalities. Similar structures such as buildings and roads, low and high vegetation, and impervious and bare regions are not too much discriminative. Models fail to discriminate these classes leading to misclassifications, false detections, and unreliable land cover maps. Therefore, this research proposes the fusion of dense point clouds and multi-spectral images based on a dual-stream deep convolutional model by adding vegetation and elevation information to spectral information. To fuse both modalities' features, a dual-stream deep neural network based on Deeplabv3+ architecture is implemented. In addition, the Xception (Extreme Inception) model is considered as a backbone and feature extractor. The model performance is evaluated with F1-Score and Overall Accuracy. 93.4% Overall Accuracy and F1-Score are achieved after adding height and vegetation information to the model. Results indicate improvements in all indexes, meaning that data fusion with the proposed model outperforms the existing state-of-the-art models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The urban fabric can be characterised as an ever-evolving assemblage operating on multiple scales; constantly being constituted and reshaped by internal and external elements, not making it possible to regard any place as an isolated entity at a specific scale. Through an overview of relational place theory, this paper aims to theoretically discuss how local planning practices need to include a relational and multi-scalar approach to cope with complex urban and rural realities if they wish to create development in local places. To unfold this, the paper reveals some of the empirical implications of such a multi-scalar urban reality, by analysing how two selected Danish municipalities seek to relate to, respond to and comply with the networked and relational reality of place in their planning practices. The empirical work builds among others on students' field work and the cases expose the importance of working with totalities, relations and networks on multiple scales; however, they also reveal the challenges related to the manifestations of such a practice. The paper argues that, despite the challenges associated with this practice, the current complex global interconnectedness of places calls for an increased focus on strategic municipal planning approaches that are both multi-scalar and place-sensitive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of Urban Air Mobility (UAM), an on-demand aviation service using air vehicles for urban short-distance trips, such as electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft (eVTOL), has recently drawn public attention as one of possible solutions to traffic congestion in metropolitan areas. We present an optimal planning framework for fleet size and vertiport numbers using generalized cost models of UAM trip chains with two different ground access modes for first and last mile trips, including taxis and robotaxis (i.e. autonomous taxis or shared autonomous vehicles). As it is a relatively new and untested mode of transportation, our research aims to provide a decision-making tool for initial UAM system planning and analysis of its economic feasibility, appropriately considering its unique characteristics, such as high free-flow speed, low circuity, needs for ground access, and specific cost factors, such as vertiport and electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft costs. Through a parametric study, we quantitatively examine the necessary conditions for UAM, with or without ridesharing, to become more economically viable than other ground-only modes. The study confirms that UAM can have potential economic benefits especially in large cities with longer average trip lengths and severe traffic congestion, where the average ground vehicle speed is low. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An "urban" subfield exists in virtually every social science discipline, but these subfields seldom engage one another. We asked scholars from five urban subfields to respond to questions about the state of urban research within their discipline. This article consists of their consequent essays and reflections on their responses. The questions posed included the discipline's conception of "urban," the main concerns motivating the subfield, the primary methodologies pursued, the extent to which their subfield interacted with or was informed by research in other urban subfields, and the main concepts or approaches it had to offer to other subfields or might take away from them. In our reflections, we particularly note the intellectual and institutional difficulties in creating a broader field of urban research or of engaging in truly inter-disciplinary research. We also highlight the desirability of greater engagement across these subfields through encouraging a "republic of conversation" among them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]