Urban Sci., Volume 1, Issue 4 (December 2017) – 10 articles

Coming to terms with the complexity of dense urban areas represents one of the major challenges people, organizations and governments will face in the next few decades. Defining, explaining and modeling socio-cultural factors associated with the development of dense urban regions will be among the most complex problems researchers will face when studying dense urban areas. In this paper, we seek to open the discussion and begin to define the modeling process by conducting a literature review and creating a conceptual framework based on Verba, Binder, Coleman, La Palombara, Pye, & Weiner’s (1971) model of political development. The model emphasizes six key elements of political development, which we use as a point of departure to begin to identify key socio-cultural factors of dense urban areas. Our framework also embarks on identifying a difference between factor relationships in loosely and tightly integrated cities. The interrelationship between variables and the recursive nature of variables are some of the major difficulties we identify when it comes to modeling sociocultural dynamics in dense urban areas. Full article

Event legacy has become a major topic of discussion in recent years. Especially, European Capital of Culture is emerging as a means of facilitating community development in Europe. Based on a case study of the 2008 European Capital of Culture Liverpool, this article aims to conceptualise the relationship between an event and its sustained effects on community development. Methodologically, adopting case study as approach, both primary and secondary were collected and analysed, including four times neighborhood surveys, official evaluation reports and academic publications. The study period is from 2007 to 2015 to monitor changes in an event’s impacts. The results reveal four dimensions of effects, including: cultural access and engagement, volunteering, governance and infrastructure, and sense of place. Overall, the study stresses the importance of integrating the event into a long-term development strategy of the city, through synergies between culture and urban regeneration and community renewal. Full article

Urban land cover is one of the fastest global growing land cover types which permanently alters land surface properties and atmospheric interactions, often initiating an urban heat island effect. Urbanisation comprises a number of land cover changes within metropolitan regions. However, these complexities have been somewhat neglected in temperature analysis studies of the urban heat island effect, whereby over-simplification ignores the heterogeneity of urban surfaces and associated land surface temperature dynamics. Accurate spatial information pertaining to these land cover change—temperature relationships across space is essential for policy integration regarding future sustainable city planning to mitigate urban heat impacts. Through a multi-sensor approach, this research disentangles the complex spatial heterogeneous variations between changes in land cover (Landsat data) and land surface temperature (MODIS data), to understand the urban heat island effect dynamics in greater detail for appropriate policy integration. The application area is the rapidly expanding Perth Metropolitan Region (PMR) in Western Australia (WA). Results indicate that land cover change from forest to urban is associated with the greatest annual daytime and nighttime temperature change of 0.40 °C and 0.88 °C respectively. Conversely, change from grassland to urban minimises temperature change at 0.16 °C and 0.77 °C for annual daytime and nighttime temperature respectively. These findings are important to consider for proposed developments of the city as such detail is not currently considered in the urban growth plans for the PMR. The novel intra-urban research approach presented can be applied to other global metropolitan regions to facilitate future transition towards sustainable cities, whereby urban heat impacts can be better managed through optimised land use planning, moving cities towards alignment with the 2030 sustainable development goals and the City Resilience Framework (CRF). Full article

The United Nations Paris agreement of 2015 highlighted the need for urban planning to prevent and contain urban sprawl so as to reduce trip lengths through an efficient distribution of agglomerations and a well-balanced urban pattern distribution, all while considering travel behavior and accessibility to green areas, services, and facilities on different temporal scales. For the Vienna-Bratislava metropolitan region, our integrated modeling approach uses a combination of multifractal spatial modeling along with a space syntax perspective. Multifractal strategies are intrinsically multiscalar and adhere to five planning principles: hierarchical (polycentric) urban development to manage urban sprawl; sustainable transit-oriented development; locally well-balanced urban pattern and functions distribution to enhance vital urban systems, local centers, and neighborhoods; penetration of green areas into built-up areas; and the preservation of large interconnected networks of green areas to conserve biodiversity. Adding space syntax modeling to a multifractal strategy integrates how space relates to functional patterns based on centrality, thus applying a socio-spatial perspective. In this paper, we used the following workflow for an integrated modeling approach: (1) Space syntax to identify the urban systems’ hierarchy and so determine a spatial strategy regionally; (2) Fractalopolis to create a multifractal development plan for potential urbanization; and (3) Space syntax to design a strategic urban master plan for locating new housing and facilities vis-à-vis socioeconomic factors. Full article

A smarter transport system that caters for social, economic and environmental sustainability is arguably one of the most critical prerequisites for creating pathways to more livable urban futures. This paper aims to provide a state-of-the-art analysis of a selection of mobility initiatives that may dictate the future of urban transportation and make cities smarter. These are mechanisms either recently introduced with encouraging uptake so far and much greater potential to contribute in a shift to a better transport paradigm or still in an embryonic stage of their development and yet to be embraced as powerful mechanisms that could change travel behaviour norms. Autonomous and connected vehicles are set to revolutionise the urban landscape by allowing machines to take over driving that for over a century has been exclusively a human activity, while electrical vehicles are already helping decarbonising the transport sector. Bus rapid transit has been steadily reinventing and rebranding conventional bus services revitalising the use of the humblest form of public transport, while hyperloop is an entirely new, disruptive, and somewhat provocative, travel mode proposition based on the use of sealed tube systems through which pods could travel free of air resistance with speeds exceeding 1000 km/h. Shared use mobility mechanisms like car-sharing, ride-sharing, ride-sourcing and public bicycles can help establishing a culture for using mobility resources on an as-needed basis, while mobility-as-a-service will take this sharing culture a step further, offering tailored mobility and trip planning packages that could entirely replace the need for privately owned modes of transport. Full article

The level of world urbanization has crossed the 50% mark, and nearly all future population growth is projected to occur in cities. Cities are disproportionately wealthy, but are associated with poverty, too. Addressing the dual challenges of urbanization and poverty is key to achieving sustainable development. This paper performs cross-sectional regressions, based on Kuznets, as a starting point for understanding the relationship between urbanization and poverty/inequality indicators. Increases in gross domestic product per capita unambiguously lowered poverty and narrowed rural-urban gaps. By contrast, levels of urbanization were either unrelated to poverty/inequality indicators and measures of rural-urban gaps, or had a nonlinear effect where, initially, increases in urbanization likewise led to improvements in those areas, while at higher levels of urbanization, increases in urbanization exacerbated poverty and rural-urban gaps. Full article

There are many calls for urban planning in Australia to be reformed, although often in contradictory ways. For example, some argue it should be capable of delivering greater certainty to developers while others call for more flexibility in processes of urban development regulation; some would like to roll back its regulatory impact while others argue for a renewal of planning’s commitment to promoting social and spatial justice. The Australian planning system is also held to be hindered by a comparative lack of planning at and for the metropolitan scale. This is connected to the absence of well-developed structures of metropolitan governance in what is a three-tier federal system, with most power over planning concentrated at the State and Territory government scale. The paper explores this putative hindrance by considering three important issues in Australian urban policy debates about the efficacy of contemporary multi-level governance arrangements: spatial scale; identity and legitimacy; and efficiency and effectiveness. It includes some analysis of the case made for a more explicit and rigorous national urban policy and how this might relate to lower level planning regimes. The paper focuses on recent urban policy and planning initiatives in South East Queensland, one of Australia’s fastest growing metropolitan regions, and concludes that while incremental but nonetheless significant improvements in planning policy and practice are possible, these are unlikely to satisfy those calling for more radical changes to improve the Australian planning system. Full article

As a state project to locate the nation within the global knowledge economy, Singapore’s Technology Corridor has acted as a testbed for experimenting with different models of an international scientific community. Its landscape, from garden-style science parks modelled after Silicon Valley to monuments for multidisciplinary research such as One North, reflects the dynamic interaction among various political and ideological aspirations—ideoscapes—driving the built environment. Through both documentary research and semi-structured interviews of scientists and entrepreneurs, we examine how mostly foreign expat and some Singaporean researchers have experienced Singapore’s unique science ‘scape and adapted to a hybrid work and living environment. Testimony of the scientific sojourners of Singapore’s diverse ethnoscape—from China and India to Europe and the United States—reveal the blending of different styles of scientific work and the interconnected flows of intellectual labour. Full article

Cadastres are argued as an essential tool to support land tenure security. Low cadastral coverage in developing countries creates a driver for innovative methods to expedite the mapping processes. As a human construct, the morphology of parcel boundaries is a diverse and complex topic: there are limited generalized rules for identifying, describing, and classifying them. This paper studies both the institutional and spatial aspects of cadastral boundaries, in order to provide more contemporary knowledge about the morphology of cadastral boundaries. This study inspects the relationship between topographic objects and general boundaries in the case context of Port Vila, Vanuatu. Statistical analysis reveals that under a dialectical error tolerance, large percentages of cadastral boundaries coincide with topographic objects. Specifically, in dense urban regions, road edges and building walls coincide with the majority of cadastral boundaries, with proportions of 49% and 35%, respectively. In suburban regions, the fence (25%), instead of buildings, plays an important role in marking a parcel border. The landscape is observed to have significant impact on parcel morphology. Therefore, constructing a map based on automatic or semi-automatic identification and classification of these features could significantly contribute to cadastral mapping in developing countries. Full article

Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, is the eleventh largest megacity city in the world, with a population of 18.2 million people living in an area of 1528 km². This city profile traces the trajectories of its urban development to becoming a megacity and characterizes its emerging challenges due to informal urbanization and climate change impacts. Due to rapid population growth and uncontrolled urbanization, Dhaka currently faces various socio-economic and environmental challenges in aspects such as providing basic urban services; reliable transportation framework; constant water and energy supply; effective sanitation; sustainable waste management and affordable housing. Moreover, the urban setting has further deteriorated as Dhaka is already facing various adverse impacts of climate change. Studies predict that most of the urban sectors, public health and surrounding agriculture and fisheries in Dhaka will be severely impacted by climate change. Dhaka is trying to transform its existing “incremental development” model to an “integrated development” framework in order to effectively mitigate its extreme urban challenges. The future of Dhaka city significantly relies on the successful execution of integrated infrastructure and service planning, development, and management practices, operating under an accountable and good governance system. Full article