Since the mid-1990s Ireland has experienced an extraordinary phase of economic and social development. Housing estates have mushroomed around towns and cities, most notably around the environs of ...Dublin. Seeking to understand the impact of these recent developments, Corcoron, Gray, and Peillon initiated the New Urban Living study, a detailed research project focused on four suburbs of Dublin. Suburban Affiliations represents the culmination of that research, offering an invaluable contribution to the study of suburbanization and to our understanding of the process of social change that has come to Ireland.
Throughout the United States, suburbs have seen an increasing number of immigrant populations as residents in the area. Yet, the suburban social and health services available have not developed to ...serve these immigrant groups, leading to community-based organizations (CBOs) filling in the need for service provision. However, the geographic distribution and resources available to these CBOs to serve these groups is uneven and understanding the constraints these organizations face in delivering services is crucial. Employees in CBOs themselves have crucial insights into immigrants’ needs and concerns, particularly those of immigrant women. This paper examines the understanding of CBO staffers focusing on the Latine population in Chicago and the suburbs, particularly on healthcare access barriers CBOs provide interventions on for Latina women during the COVID-19 pandemic. Qualitative data from a purposeful sample of interviews with CBO staffers during the COVID-19 pandemic supports the findings of financial and legal barriers, particularly access to information, and creative, community-based methods for interventions, specific to the experiences of Latina women.
Urban-rural integration is an ideal urban-rural relationship that balances and coordinates urban and rural development. Suburbs, as transitional zones between urban and rural areas, are usually ...treated as part of urban areas and are insufficiently considered in this integration. However, during rapid urbanization, the suburbs of metropolitan cities attract huge populations and industrial agglomeration. Mixed land use types, population structure, industrial construction, and underdeveloped infrastructure cause the suburbs of big cities to face significant spatial differentiation of socioeconomic development and public services, together with an ecological environmental pressure brought about by drastic land use change. The complexity, gradual change, and dynamics of suburbs render it difficult to map them effectively. In addition, due to different conditions such as the development basis, traffic conditions, spatial location, and resource endowments, the type and degree of integration of villages around metropolises are also differentiated, which determines their future development direction. Against this background, this study first maps the suburban boundaries at the village scale using a logistic-geographically weighted regression (GWR) model, which is a localized parameter estimation method. This study classifies the types of suburban villages in metropolitan areas using three dimensions: socioeconomic, spatial, and ecological integration. Finally, improvement suggestions have been proposed for villages with different types of urban-rural integration. Following findings are summarized: 1) The logistic-GWR model identifies 2626 suburban villages in Wuhan; 2) the integration differentiation identifies 370, 564, 216, and 365 suburban villages that exhibit comprehensive, ecological, socioeconomic, and spatial disintegration, respectively; and 3) solutions for promoting urban-rural integration of suburban villages are provided accordingly.
•This study proposed a method of mapping suburban boundaries at the village scale based on multi-source data and a combined logistic-GWR model.•The verification based on the green space ratio, remote sensing data, and street view photos demonstrated the feasibility of the proposed method.•The suburban villages were classified by evaluating the dominant urban-rural integration type.•Improvement strategies of urban-rural integration for suburban villages were developed based on the evaluation results.
Residential energy use accounts for roughly 20% of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the United States. Using data on 93 million individual households, we estimate these GHGs across the contiguous ...United States and clarify the respective influence of climate, affluence, energy infrastructure, urban form, and building attributes (age, housing type, heating fuel) in driving these emissions. A ranking by state reveals that GHGs (per unit floor space) are lowest in Western US states and highest in Central states. Wealthier Americans have per capita footprints ∼25% higher than those of lower-income residents, primarily due to larger homes. In especially affluent suburbs, these emissions can be 15 times higher than nearby neighborhoods. If the electrical grid is decarbonized, then the residential housing sector can meet the 28% emission reduction target for 2025 under the Paris Agreement. However, grid decarbonization will be insufficient to meet the 80% emissions reduction target for 2050 due to a growing housing stock and continued use of fossil fuels (natural gas, propane, and fuel oil) in homes. Meeting this target will also require deep energy retrofits and transitioning to distributed low-carbon energy sources, as well as reducing per capita floor space and zoning denser settlement patterns.
In this paper, a hybrid genetic algorithm with particle swarm optimization (GA-PSO) is applied for the optimal sizing of an off-grid house with photovoltaic panels, wind turbines, and battery. The ...GA-PSO is one of the most powerful single-objective optimization algorithms. In the other hand, the multi-objective PSO (MOPSO) can solve the optimization problems considering all objectives without transforming them. Minimizing the total present cost including initial cost, operation and maintenance cost, and replacement cost with satisfying the load demand is the main goal of this study. In this optimization problem, the considered reliability factor is a loss of power supply probability, which specifies the subtraction of the load power and generated power. The wind velocity, solar irradiance, and load demand are simulated in 12 months of a year by the HOMER software for a suburbs of Tehran. Then, the optimal size of PV and WT are obtained with both GA-PSO and MOPSO methods, and compared with the HOMER results. At last, the strengths and weaknesses of each method are explained. The results show that the proposed approach with 0.502 of the levelized cost of energy for the PV/WT/BAT system has the best result through the compared methods.
•A photovoltaic/wind turbine/battery system is simulated and optimized in Tehran.•The cost-reliability optimization is carried out by the GAPSO method.•Net present cost of the hybrid system is 300200 $ for 2% loss of power supply.•The levelized cost of energy for hybrid unit is obtained as 0.502.
•Adoption of water-saving irrigation technology influenced metropolis suburbs.•Factors determining farmers’ adoption responses to water scarcity are identified.•Most of adopters used engineering ...water-saving technologies.•Strategies to cope with water scarcity of metropolis suburbs are recommended.
Water scarcity has threatened the food security and been a critical concern in China. Promoting modern agricultural irrigation technologies has been identified as an important measure against water scarcity. The overall goal of this study was to analyze the adoption of water-saving irrigation technology by farmers and to identify the major influencing factors of this decision for metropolis suburbs. Based on a field survey of Beijing of China, the results showed that 53.1% of farmers adopted water-saving irrigation technologies to cope with water scarcity, most of which adopted engineering water-saving technologies. The number of adopted water-saving irrigation technologies followed a strong negative correlation with the share of adopters. Econometric analysis revealed that education, farm size, on-farm demonstration, cooperative, training, groundwater, access to information, water use associations, drought-prone area, neighboring farmers, and policy subsidies significantly improved the adaption to water scarcity. Age, production specialization, and cost posed a negative effect on famers’ adoption of water-saving irrigation technologies. These results and implications provide an understanding of farmers’ sustainable irrigation practices and offer an insight to influencing factors to frame improved strategies and policies that enable to cope with water scarcity of metropolis suburbs.
•We analyzed the land use transition of the rural enterprises in suburban Beijing by a rural enterprise index and explored the spatial-temporal characteristics of implied industrial restructuring ...driven by urban functional sprawl.•Land use transition of the rural enterprises has been observed in both the dominant and recessive land use morphology. Changes on the land use structure, land ownership and intensification of the production factors are main characteristics of this transition.•The rising values of rural enterprise index from the outer suburbs to the peri-urban areas indicate a rural industrial restructuring from the endogenous industrialization to exogenous industrialization. With an increasingly open market of collective construction land, Beijing’s suburban rural areas have been well integrated with the urban industries and functions spilling over from the central city.•The land use transition has released a strong policy demand for the system reform of the rural construction land in China’s metropolitan suburbs.
China’s rural areas has witnessed a rapid and far-reaching transition in the past decades, following which thousands of “hollowed villages” in China’s traditional agricultural areas has mushroomed. While in the metropolitan suburbs, such a transition has led to the functional evolution and industrial restructuring of the rural settlements. Industrial upgrading and land intensive use in the urban areas, coupled with the tightening construction land quotas, has affected the land use morphology of the suburban rural settlements directly and/or indirectly. This paper explores the rural industrial restructuring by evaluating the land use transition of the rural enterprises in suburban Beijing. Based on the spatial land use data and field work, a clear spatial differentiation of the land use morphology has been found in the study area, which involves not only the dominant morphology like land use structure, but also the recessive morphology like the land ownership and intensification of the production factors. Then, a rural enterprise index which combines three main changes on the land use morphology was developed to demonstrate the spatial combination characteristics of the rural enterprises. The results indicate that with an increasingly open market of collective construction land, Beijing’s suburban rural areas have been well integrated with the urban industries and functions spilling over from the central city. This is considered as a process of rural industrial restructuring from endogenous industrialization towards exogenous industrialization. Land use transition of the rural enterprises has released a strong policy demand for the system reform of the rural construction land. The deepening rural land system reform will contribute to the sustainable development of China’s rural industrialization and urbanization.
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