•A selection of seventeen ecosystem services provided by urban soils is proposed.•A decision support system to consider soil quality in urban projects is developed.•The decision support system takes ...into account the heterogeneity of urban soils.•The DSS allows optimizing the ecosystem services provided by urban soils.•Taking into account information on soil quality sustainably improves urban projects.
Urban soils need to be taken into account by city managers to tackle the major urban environmental issues. As other soils in forest or agricultural environments, urban soils provide a wide range of ecosystem services. However, their contribution remains poorly assessed up to now, and as a result there is a strong lack of consideration by urban planning of the services they provide. Indeed, urban soils are mostly seen as a land surface (land area, two-dimensional system) and if they are characterized, it is almost exclusively for their potential contamination and their geotechnical properties. So, policy makers and planning operators rarely consider soils as a living resource, capable to fulfill essential functions. From the conclusions of previous studies, a selection of ecosystem services provided by soil and adapted to the specificity of urban context is proposed. This paper also aims at proposing the concept of the DESTISOL decision support system for urban planning projects upstream of the planning decisions, illustrated by an application example. It is based on an integrative approach linking soil quality indicators (e.g. physico-chemical and biological characteristics, fertility, pollution), soil functions and soil ecosystem services. The method leads to the semi-quantitative assessment of the level of ecosystem services that are either provided by urban soils or required to fit with the urban design.
Urban street canyons formed by high-rise buildings restrict the dispersion of vehicle emissions, which pose severe health risks to the public by aggravating roadside air quality. However, this issue ...is often overlooked in city planning. This paper reviews the mechanisms controlling vehicle emission dispersion in urban street canyons and the strategies for managing roadside air pollution. Studies have shown that air pollution hotspots are not all attributed to heavy traffic and proper urban design can mitigate air pollution. The key factors include traffic conditions, canyon geometry, weather conditions and chemical reactions. Two categories of mitigation strategies are identified, namely traffic interventions and city planning. Popular traffic interventions for street canyons include low emission zones and congestion charges which can moderately improve roadside air quality. In comparison, city planning in terms of building geometry can significantly promote pollutant dispersion in street canyons. General design guidelines, such as lower canyon aspect ratio, alignment between streets and prevailing winds, non-uniform building heights and ground-level building porosity, may be encompassed in new development. Concurrently, in-street barriers are widely applicable to rectify the poor roadside air quality in existing street canyons. They are broadly classified into porous (e.g. trees and hedges) and solid (e.g. kerbside parked cars, noise fences and viaducts) barriers that utilize their aerodynamic advantages to ease roadside air pollution. Post-evaluations are needed to review these strategies by real-world field experiments and more detailed modelling in the practical perspective.
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•Key influences are canyon geometry, traffic and weather conditions, and chemical reactions.•Traffic interventions in street canyons lead to moderate improvement of roadside air quality.•Well-designed canyon geometry significantly enhances dispersion of emissions.•Combining solid and porous in-street barriers is more effective than individual use.•Traffic control and in-street barriers are more implementable than canyon geometry design.
Se efectúa un análisis comparativo de las acciones de participación ciudadana en la redacción del Avance del Plan General de Ordenación Urbana (PGOU) en dos ciudades con similar población: ...Vitoria-Gasteiz y Cartagena. En Vitoria-Gasteiz la redacción del Avance se dilató once años, con procesos de participación salteados temporalmente, mientras que en Cartagena se redactó en menos de un año y la participación se redujo a un periodo de unos pocos meses. La información generada por los ciudadanos en ambos programas fue de gran calidad, concretando demandas y/o propuestas vecinales. Siguiendo una serie de ítems definitorios se analizan comparativamente ambos procesos y se concluye realizando una revisión crítica de los aspectos que deberían corregirse para mejorar tanto los procesos de participación como la incorporación en la figura de planeamiento de la información generada en ellos.
Urban digital twins (UDTs) hold promise for solving complex urban problems. However, the current research landscape is fragmented and lacks clarity. This article aims to (1) promote consensus on UDT ...definition and illustrate their development from domain-specific to intra-city and inter-city models; (2) synthesize current applications to uncover untapped potential; (3) categorize challenges into a triangulated framework and report the latest progress; and (4) discuss standardization and emerging opportunities in technology. This review advocates establishing comprehensive databases, exploring cross-domain interactions, and enhancing human-AI collaboration. Ultimately, it envisions UDTs as central to advancing sustainability and livability in future urban planning.
In the last two decades, a variety of digital technologies have proliferated in cities. Urban planning educators must respond to this given local resources, constraints, and options. This commentary ...reviews curricular innovations being undertaken by planning faculty at five diverse institutions to advance pedagogy beyond analytics. Our contribution is to identify three general approaches to expand teaching on digital technologies: (1) undertake reforms within accredited planning programs, (2) develop new educational offerings, and (3) teach through engaged learning programs. We urge broader curricular innovation in the planning field to ensure the field’s relevance and impact in an increasingly technical future.
Eastern Harbor urban areas, Alexandria-Egypt, are inherited cosmopolitan spatial systems formed across eras. Parameterizing their inheritances is a scientific challenge according to their complex ...configuration and nonmetric meaning and value data. This study developed an approach for calibrating their urban parameter sets as vocabularies and governing grammars based on the space entity. Historical inductive method supports generating a valid spatiotemporal model, facilitating reliable deductive methods for investigating their deep-rooted urban anatomy based on anthropological temporal frames, followed by defining the inherited space-syntax via the resulting ontology-based model. The proposed systematic conceptual approach’s findings would serve informatic-based actions in continuous obsolescence.
To date, health care industry has not fully grasped the potential benefits to be gained from big data analytics. While the constantly growing body of academic research on big data analytics is mostly ...technology oriented, a better understanding of the strategic implications of big data is urgently needed. To address this lack, this study examines the historical development, architectural design and component functionalities of big data analytics. From content analysis of 26 big data implementation cases in healthcare, we were able to identify five big data analytics capabilities: analytical capability for patterns of care, unstructured data analytical capability, decision support capability, predictive capability, and traceability. We also mapped the benefits driven by big data analytics in terms of information technology (IT) infrastructure, operational, organizational, managerial and strategic areas. In addition, we recommend five strategies for healthcare organizations that are considering to adopt big data analytics technologies. Our findings will help healthcare organizations understand the big data analytics capabilities and potential benefits and support them seeking to formulate more effective data-driven analytics strategies.
•A big data analytics architecture for healthcare organizations is built.•We identify five big data analytics capabilities from 26 big data cases.•We present several strategies for being successful with big data analytics in healthcare settings.•We provide a comprehensive understanding of the potential benefits of big data analytics.
•Large-scale and high-resolution approach sensing urban soundscapes without ground measurements with machine learning.•A dataset of street view imagery tagged with multivariate soundscape ...indicators.•Quantifying the relationships between visual features and human soundscape perception.•Validation with sound intensity and corresponding street view imagery using noise meters and cameras.•Comparative analysis including two cities and a scalable approach.
A healthy acoustic environment is an essential component of sustainable cities. Various noise monitoring and simulation techniques have been developed to measure and evaluate urban sounds. However, sensing large areas at a fine resolution remains a great challenge. Based on machine learning, we introduce a new application of street view imagery — estimating large-area high-resolution urban soundscapes, investigating the premise that we can predict and characterize soundscapes without laborious and expensive noise measurements. First, visual features are extracted from street-level imagery using computer vision. Second, fifteen soundscape indicators are identified and a survey is conducted to gauge them solely from images. Finally, a prediction model is constructed to infer the urban soundscape by modeling the non-linear relationship between them. The results are verified with extensive field surveys. Experiments conducted in Singapore and Shenzhen using half a million images affirm that street view imagery enables us to sense large-scale urban soundscapes with low cost but high accuracy and detail, and provides an alternative means to generate soundscape maps. R2 reaches 0.48 by evaluating the predicted results with field data collection. Further novelties in this domain are revealing the contributing visual elements and spatial laws of soundscapes, underscoring the usability of crowdsourced data, and exposing international patterns in perception.
•Parks are key elements of the urban landscape and are believed to promote active lifestyles.•Accessibility to parks by children in Montreal is investigated.•A model of travel behavior uncovers ...variations in the mobility of children in Montreal Island.•As a consequence, differentials in accessibility to parks are detected, by locality, gender, income, and family structure.•Customized accessibility profiles provide a valuable tool for analysis of inequalities in accessibility.
Parks are elemental components of urban landscapes that provide environmental and social function value. In particular, urban parks provide spaces for open-air physical activity. In order to enjoy the opportunities for activities in parks, users must have reasonable access to these resources. A starting point for inquiries about utilization and potential benefits of urban green spaces is an assessment of their geographical accessibility. Of particular interest, in terms of potential users of parks, are children, whose geographical range is limited by their ability to traverse space using nonmotorized modes of transportation, or by their dependence on adults for common forms of motorized mobility. The objective of this paper is to measure accessibility to urban parks from the perspective of children traveling by walking in Montreal, Canada. Implementation of accessibility measures is supported by statistical analysis of trip length using Montreal's 2008 Household Travel Surveys database. Estimates of trip length based on attributes such as age, gender, income class, family structure, as well as geographical location are used to calculate accessibility to urban parks. We evaluate the relationship between the distribution of children population and conditions of accessibility to urban parks to understand the potential for use and possible spatial disparities in the distribution of urban parks. This research contributes to the assessment of the distribution of access to urban parks by children, and can assist planners and policy makers to improve the supply of parks, while accounting for the mobility patterns of children.
This paper examines the asymmetric effects of the United States Economic Policy Uncertainty (USEPU), Geopolitical Threats (GPRT), Geopolitical Acts (GPRA), and the West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude ...oil on Green Bond returns. Our study analyses USEPU, GPRT, GPRA, WTI, and Green Bond monthly data from September 2012 to August 2022. By applying the Nonlinear Autoregressive Distributed Lags (NARDL) model, our empirical evidence shows that in the short run, the return on green bonds is negatively affected by an increase in USEPU and GPRA positively affected by an increase in GPRT and WTI. In the long run, the return on green bonds is negatively affected by an increase in USEPU, GPRA, and GPRT but positively affected by WTI. Considering the climate crisis, looking at these findings in the context of green bonds is essential to entice green investments. Policymakers should use our results for a policy design to mitigate green bond market volatility caused by external uncertainties and risks. Furthermore, we conclude that uncertainties should be considered when investing in green bonds and managing investment portfolios.
•We are the first to investigate the asymmetric effects of USEPU, GPRT, GPRA, and WTI oil on green bond returns.•Employs the NARDL model and nonlinear Ganger causality.•In the short run, the return of green bonds is negatively affected by USEPU and GPRA but positively by GPRT and WTI.•In the long run, the return on green bonds is negatively affected by USEPU, GPRT, and GPRA but positively affected by WTI.
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