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The process of metropolitanisation of the Gdańsk area is facilitated by public discourse involving local and regional politicians, media, and inhabitants. The discussion is based upon historical narrations, but also local ambitions, hopes and emotions, as well as infrastructural projects and investment attractiveness. Foucault suggests that modern power is a dispersed set of micro-practices, many of which operate through the normalising gaze of surveillance regimes. Gdańsk metropolitan cooperation, competition and encounters make the core of the paper; local and regional unifying initiatives and processes are accompanied by examples of separatism, identity conflicts, and political disagreements

Rail transport is an environmentally friendly form of passenger transport which can be utilized effectively also in urban and suburban transport systems. The paper describes the urban and suburban rail transport system including comparison of selected Czech (Prague, Brno and Ostrava) and German metropolitan regions (Munich, Nuremberg and Dresden). Its aim is to analyze the importance of various factors influencing the differences between the situation in Germany and in the Czech Republic. Therefore, the research question is whether these differences are primarily caused by a different liberalization stage, or whether they are a result of other factors such as available infrastructure, investment level, rail transport services budget, structure and activity of ordering bodies and coordinators or geographical context. The supply of city and suburban rail transport is quite good in Germany and in the Czech Republic, although trains in Munich, Nuremberg and Dresden run more frequently, faster and are better interconnected with car transport. German rail transport sector is at a higher stage of liberalization, and tendering procedures are the preferred selection method for contractor carriers. However, a degree of liberalization of the railway sector is not the key marker indicating a better standard of urban and suburban rail transport in Germany because it is the high standard which is achieved as the consequence of the professional activity of the ordering bodies and train service coordinators in combination with geographical conditions, available financial sources and effective transport infrastructure. On the other hand, the importance of liberalization cannot be totally overlooked as tenders are a tool for the ordering bodies to strongly affect the price and quality of transport services in their area. The supply of better quality and attractive transport to passengers could increase the usage of rail transport in metropolitan regions and could have indirect but important socio-economic impacts

Wars were and still are an intrinsic element in the history of mankind. They bring glory to the victorious, the bitterness of failure to the defeated, and always destruction and suffering to ordinary people, but at the same time they have had a great impact or even shaped the culture of societies. In many places all over the world, as well as in Poland, relics from wars, battlefields, fortifications and weapons are unique and an extraordinary attraction that might bring in tourists. This type of tourism is known as military heritage tourism. In Łódź and its vicinity there are many military sites that might potentially become an attraction. They are mostly related to the great but forgotten Battle of Łódź that took place during the Great War. However, are they attractive enough to create a tourism product?

With an expected accelerated urbanization process until 2050, China is facing big challenges of mitigating CO2 emissions, especially in the eastern coastal metropolitan regions. Since cities are the hubs for innovation regarding new technologies and infrastructures, investments and governance, they are playing an important role in decision-making and implementation processes on the way to a decarbonized economy and society. The national and provincial administrations in China have already started to address the issue of energy system transition toward a low-carbon pathway, but long-term integrated transition plans are not yet available on a regional level. In our paper, we therefore consider the main challenges of the energy system transition, such as efficiency improvement, coal reduction, decarbonization of transport, and multisector electrification with regional integration, focusing on two eastern coastal metropolitan regions of China. A systematic review of current near-term policies reveals how far these challenges have already been addressed on different administrative levels and which gaps may exist from an external perspective. Based on the current decision- and policy-making processes among national, regional, provincial and municipal levels, policy implications are identified with regard to an effective energy system transition in eastern China.

Metro Detroit has long been one of the most socially divided metropolitan regions in the United States. While the north-western suburbs are among the wealthiest in the nation, the region’s urban core has struggled with the nation’s post-industrial transition. Despite benefiting from various intra-regional ties, people from Metro Detroit’s suburbs often share negative stereotypes about the city at the region’s core and attempt to distance themselves from it. This article analyses surveys from 140 residents of the Metro Detroit region in order to understand better intra-regional perceptions of Detroit proper. Rather than the hypothetical neighbourhoods of varying racial diversity often found in perceptions research, surveys asked residents about real places in their home region. Asking about actual locations helped answer the research question behind this article: is residential location associated with neighbourhood perceptions? While race continues to influence neighbourhood perceptions, findings show that residential location is also a significant factor. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Annual US pedestrian and bicyclist fatalities involving motor vehicles have each increased by 30% in just six years, reaching their highest levels in two decades. To provide information to reverse this trend, we quantified pedestrian and bicyclist fatality rates in 46 of the largest US metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) during two five-year time periods: 1999–2003 and 2007–2011. We divided the annual average number of pedestrian and bicyclist fatalities during 1999–2003 from the Fatality Analysis Reporting System by the annual estimates of pedestrian and bicycle trips, kilometers traveled, and minutes traveled from the 2001 National Household Travel Survey (NHTS) and the annual average number of fatalities from 2007 to 2011 by similar estimates from the 2009 NHTS. The five most dangerous regions for walking during 2007–2011 averaged 262 pedestrian fatalities per billion trips while the five safest averaged 49 pedestrian fatalities per billion trips. The five most dangerous regions for bicycling averaged 458 bicyclist fatalities per billion trips while the five safest averaged 75 bicyclist fatalities per billion trips. Random-effects meta-analysis identified eight metropolitan regions as outliers with low pedestrian fatality rates, six with high pedestrian fatality rates, one with a low bicyclist fatality rate, and five with high bicyclist fatality rates. MSAs with low pedestrian and bicycle fatality rates tended to have central cities recognized as Walk Friendly Communities and Bicycle Friendly Communities for investing in pedestrian and bicycle projects and programs. Random-effects meta-regression showed that certain socioeconomic characteristics and high pedestrian and bicyclist mode shares were associated with lower MSA fatality rates. Results suggest that pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure and safety programs should be complemented with strategies to increase walking and bicycling. In particular, safety initiatives should be honed to reduce pedestrian and bicyclist fatality risk in immigrant communities and to make pedestrian travel safer for the growing senior-age population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Post–World War II population growth outside Washington, D.C., brought the Potomac River’s watershed under metropolitan oversight. This article examines the history of Loudoun County, Virginia, an agricultural area thirty miles upstream from the District of Columbia, as it faced six proposed urban infrastructure projects between the 1940s and late 1970s. Tracing the history of these proposals reveals the complex interplay between the federal government and its agencies, urban interest groups, local governments, and grassroots environmentalists as each shaped this hinterland’s integration into the Washington metropolis. By underscoring the persistent conflicts between environmental activism, rural boosterism, and metropolitan development within one particular region, this article argues that this process of urban and suburban expansion was often fragmentary, and ultimately dependent as much on national political trends as it was on fragmented regional power structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The fluidity of capital in today's globalization has not been unnoticed. While it intervenes in the spatial configuration of the territory and in the management of the institutions of public power, it is making the metropolitan regions resemble between them, due to the omnipresence of certain "constitutive tendencies." De Mattos (2006) provides five trends that qualify the city as a polycentric, informal / unequal, business oriented, made for the automobile and artifact city. Three additional trends are proposed from this article with the descriptions: city without memory, wasted city and orchestrated city. As a great conclusion, it is argued that the framework of the globalized economy favors the "deterritorialization" of power. At the local level, it is exercised with laxity towards figures of transnational power and agrees to participate as a partner of large capital interested in maximizing surplus values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Motorization and increased levels of car ownership have partly contributed to traffic congestion and air pollution, which is a prime concern in the era of climate change. Therefore, vehicle ownership-related topics have been extensively explored by transportation scholars, economists, and planning researchers. However, relatively fewer scientists have investigated the spatial patterns and socioeconomic factors of car ownership simultaneously within a large geographic scale. Thus, the goal of this article is to illuminate how high levels of auto ownership may cluster spatially and what factors relate to such phenomena by developing an integrative framework and applying it in three counties in South Florida (US). Specifically, this study first evaluated whether vehicle ownership is spatially autocorrelated using Global and Local Moran's I statistics. It then justified significant factors associated with car ownership by employing Poisson and Corrected Poisson regression models. The findings, using raw data, show that there exist locally spatial clusters of the households with high levels of automobile ownership, while globally the patterns of auto ownership are statistically random. Furthermore, the results suggest that the number of drivers, the number of workers, household income level, housing tenure, the proximity to schools, and net house density significantly influence car ownership levels. The results can assist urban planners and local governments in developing planning schemes that aim at transit, cycling, walking, and other non-motorized travel modes, thereby furthering environmentally friendly communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Volatile driving, characterized by hard accelerations and braking, can contribute substantially to higher energy consumption, tailpipe emissions, and crash risks. Drivers’ decisions to maintain speed, accelerate, brake rapidly, or jerk their vehicle are largely constrained by their unique regional and metropolitan contexts. These contexts may be characterized by their geography, roadway structure, traffic management, driving population, etc. This study captures how people generally drive in a region using large-scale vehicle trajectory data, implying how energy is consumed and how emissions are produced in regional transportation systems. Specifically, driving performance in four U.S. metropolitan areas (Los Angeles, San Francisco, Sacramento, and Atlanta) is compared, taking advantage of large-scale behavioral data (78.7 million seconds of speed records), collected by in-vehicle global positioning systems (GPSs) as part of regional surveys. Comparative analysis shows significant regional differences in terms of volatile driving and time spent to accelerate, brake, and jerk the vehicle during daily trips. Correlates of higher volatility are also explored, e.g., battery electric vehicles show low volatility, as expected. This study proposes a novel way to compare regional driving performance by successfully turning GPS driving data into valuable knowledge that can be applied in practice by developing regional driving performance indices. The new indices can also be used to compare regional performance over time and to imply the levels of sustainability of regional transportation systems. This study contributes by proposing a way to extract useful information from large-scale driving data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the function of a software tool for identifying urban agglomerations in low-information settings using free, open data. The framework outlined here is designed to work using polygon data. This paper describes the advantages and disadvantages of using polygon-based geographies in regional analysis, discusses the practical and ethical challenges of distinguishing urban from rural regions, and discusses the relevance of this tool in the analysis of global city regions. It also describes the logical structure of our polygon-based software tool and directs interested readers to the source code. We finally examine the agglomeration results for Sri Lanka and compare them with published urbanization figures. We conclude that there are very large disparities between our model's outputs and the urbanization estimates from the United Nations and that our tools can be used as a less discretionary way to identify actual levels of urbanization. We hope that other analysts will continue to refine the progression toward a less discretionary model of identifying urban regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The need for new forward-looking tools in urban planning is immense: new functional relations and structures are now stretching beyond our capacity to ‘rationally’ capture modern metropolitan spaces (Neumann & Hull, 2009). At the same time, cities struggle to find tools to help manage their long-term transition towards a low-carbon, resource-smart economy. In 2006–2007, the municipalities in the Helsinki metropolitan region organised an international competition for ideas titled “Greater Helsinki Vision 2050.” It drew a good number of entries in the competition stage and later helped bring together the awarded participants with local planning professionals and citizens. This paper explores the process behind the vision-making exercise and evaluates its success in providing new tools for the long-term transition to a low-carbon, resource-smart Helsinki metropolitan region. The theoretical framework used in this paper is ‘incrementalism with perspective’ (Ganser, Siebel & Sieverts, 1993) and its ideas on using long-term visions in the integration and coordination of incremental activities in various institutions. We perceive the backcasting scenario method (Dreborg, 1996) as a tool for implementing this approach and hence interpret the case example’s results through the framework of this method. The Greater Helsinki Vision 2050 competition was an example of a vision-oriented planning process that provided new tools for bringing the ‘unmanageable’ metropolitan region within the scope of the manageable. The backcasting approach was deployed as a tool for emancipating stakeholders to imagine alternative futures for metropolitan spaces. The backcasting scenario method should be considered a viable tool when managing vision-oriented planning processes: longer than usual time horizons help initiate strategic learning among stakeholders. However, in addition to civil servants, citizens and other stakeholders should be widely engaged in order to secure sustainable results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In current capitalist cities, the supremacy of financial capital over industrial capital has redefined the sense of space, which has also adopted the condition of a real estate product. The spatial arrangement of the city is therefore molded by the interest of capital, which uses urban land for the purpose of increasing productive forces. With ambitious strategic projects, public authorities have acted to render their productive and commercial structures more flexible, attract investments, promote tourism, etc., permitting them to be inserted into the networks of the global economy, and enabling competitiveness, all from the perspective of globalizing cities. The present work aims to evaluate the process of spatial and economic restructuring implemented by the public authorities in the Northern Sector of the Metropolitan Region of Belo Horizonte (MRBH), as of 2005, and the appropriation of space by the land and real estate markets in the north and peripheral region of the capital. The metropolitan strategic plan sought to diversify the industrial base of the MRBH by attracting investments and creating high-tech hubs, and it was accompanied by large public infrastructure works and support services. The present study has concluded that the modifying actions undertaken by the public authorities have influenced the valorization of urban land, the appropriation of the space by the land/real estate markets and the elitization of the north and peripheral region of the capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last two decades the large metropolitan regions in Spain have been faced with the challenges of increased competition and delocalisation of activities. Thus, promoting the creative economy has emerged as a key strategy for local governments in these areas. This article evaluates current theoretical debate through the analysis of the Madrid Metropolitan Region, which contains the largest concentration of creative industries in Spain. More specifically, it examines the importance of these industries for the construction of what is hoped to become a global city. To this end, the weight and spatial distribution of the creative sectors is analysed and the main strategies and actors involved are presented. The results suggest that Madrid is still far from building a competitive creative metropolitan region and that governance relations represent a significant obstacle to reaching this goal.