Search Results (407)

Cultural Heritage (CH) is becoming increasingly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, aging, and environmental decay, necessitating advanced preventive conservation strategies. This study presents the results of the SPIDER project, focused on Marquis’s Palace in Botrugno, a small but representative case study in Southern Italy of a municipality overwhelmed with the management of valuable CH sites. The approach integrates multi-sensor surveys, subsurface diagnostics, HBIM modeling, and IoT microclimatic monitoring into a lightweight information model designed for operational flexibility. In addition to that,, the possibility of producing new, eco-friendly filaments for Fused Filament Fabrication (FFF) printing from industrial stone dust waste was explored through a preliminary morphological, structural, and chemical–physical investigation of the stone material historically used in construction, with the aim of identifying materials similar to the original using a simplified, low-cost process. The findings highlight that economic and social factors such as limited resources and the “digital divide” hinder effective technology transfer. Consequently, this study investigates whether a ”lightweight” Asset Information Model (AIM) can provide a more sustainable alternative to complex Digital Twins for small municipalities and other public bodies. For this reason, this research proposes a scalable, wide but basic framework of information management tools and methods aimed at enhancing territorial capacity building, fostering technology integration and social inclusion, and valorizing multidisciplinary approaches to address the challenges affecting CH. Full article

This study was developed within the framework of the GOLL (Green Olympic Living Lab and Environment Change) project, promoted by the Municipality of Coimbra, Portugal. The project uses the Mário Mexia Multisport Pavilion (MMMP) and the Olympic Swimming Pools Complex (OSPC) as living lab case studies for sustainability-oriented sports infrastructure management. The study combines a review of best practices in sustainable sports facilities with an applied case study focusing on infrastructure characterisation and the identification of intervention requirements (InRs). The review addresses the environmental, economic, and social dimensions of sustainable sports facilities, including energy and water efficiency, digital technologies, renewable energy integration, waste management, mobility, certification systems, and user inclusion. The adopted methodology integrates a literature review, technical inspections, and the analysis of building systems and resource consumption. The findings highlight the significant potential for improving operational performance, resource efficiency, and overall sustainability by adopting more integrated maintenance and management approaches. However, practical implementation remains dependent on overcoming challenges related to costs, data integration, and stakeholder engagement. The paper also discusses the potential adoption of integrated maintenance approaches, including the potential adoption of tailored digital management solutions and certification schemes, which may support more structured and proactive management. Within the GOLL living lab environment, this contributes to more informed technical, operational, and policy decision-making for the sustainable rehabilitation and management of sports facilities. Full article

The increasing availability of digital documentation in cultural heritage has amplified the need for interoperable systems capable of integrating heterogeneous data and supporting risk-informed conservation strategies. In the field of Disaster Risk Management (DRM), the application of structured methodologies—such as the ICCROM-CCI ABC Method—is often hindered by fragmented data sources, inconsistent terminology, and limited interoperability across institutions. This study presents a semantic workflow for the harmonization, enrichment, and integration of cultural heritage risk assessment data within a CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CIDOC-CRM)-compliant environment. The proposed system is structured as an Extract–Transform–Load (ETL) pipeline that converts heterogeneous assessment records into interoperable semantic knowledge graphs. The workflow combines controlled vocabularies, project-specific thesauri for risk agents and heritage typologies, and formal ontology mapping implemented through the Mapping Memory Manager (3M) and executed with the X3ML engine. The resulting data are deployed within a ResearchSpace environment, enabling semantic querying, cross-dataset exploration, and integration with external knowledge infrastructures. The workflow was applied to a dataset comprising 295 cultural heritage sites in the municipality of Ravenna (Italy). The transformation process generated a CIDOC-CRM-compliant knowledge graph containing 134,611 RDF triples and 18,954 entities, integrating information on cultural assets, risk scenarios, actors, documentary resources, and quantitative risk assessments. Through the adoption of persistent identifiers and semantic mappings, the workflow also supports interoperability with external cultural heritage resources, including ArCo and GeoNames, facilitating the contextualization and enrichment of local risk assessment data. By transforming fragmented assessment records into structured and interoperable knowledge, the proposed workflow contributes to bridging semantic and information gaps in cultural heritage risk management. The study demonstrates the feasibility of integrating risk assessment data within an ontology-based semantic infrastructure and highlights its potential to support data integration, semantic interoperability, knowledge reuse, and future decision-support applications for preventive conservation and territorial risk management. Full article

Digital rural construction is a key component of China’s agricultural and rural transformation, as well as a means to improve rural productivity and strengthen the coordinated development of urban and rural areas in the Yangtze River Delta, which requires the backing of an efficient policy framework. Based on this, the research object is the 145 digital village policies issued by the Yangtze River Delta, and 16 of them are selected for evaluation after content mining. The findings are as follows: (1) Sixteen policies have an average PMC index of 8.42; four policies are excellent, 12 are good, and the quality of policies is generally good. (2) At the administrative level, there is a characteristic that the quality of provincial policies is superior to that of municipal policies. Among regions, the policy quality advantages represented by Zhejiang are obvious, presenting a pattern of “Zhejiang leading, Jiangsu steady, Anhui catching up, and Shanghai waiting for improvement”. (3) Except for the “policy function”, although the absolute scores of some indicators (such as policy field, policy content, policy evaluation) are at a high level, there is still a significant gap compared to the outstanding performance of the policy function (0.98). Moreover, from the perspective of the requirement for comprehensive and coordinated development of policies, the attention and investment in these dimensions are slightly insufficient, resulting in policies not fully exerting their expected comprehensive effectiveness, which is the main reason restricting the overall quality of policies. (4) It is recommended to increase the regulatory and advisory nature of the policy; Expand the scope of policy audiences; Take into account the forward-looking and long-term nature of policy formulation; Refine the execution plan to ensure the implementation of policies; The content of the construction of fiscal taxation, laws and regulations will be increased to provide a scientific basis for the rural transformation; Encourage local exploration and innovation, combine with local conditions, and form replicable and promotable development models. Full article

Public lighting can account for nearly 40% of municipal energy consumption in some European cities and plays a vital role in road safety, mobility, and the quality of public spaces. Despite notable efficiency gains from the widespread adoption of light-emitting diode (LED) technologies, the technical outputs of standards-based and installation-level assessment methods are not usually simple and communicable energy-performance labels for municipal decision-making. This study addresses this issue by introducing an algorithm-based framework for classifying energy performance in public lighting at the road-segment level. This approach translates existing lighting standards and efficiency indicators into a straightforward and understandable energy label, adapting the energy labelling concept, commonly used for buildings and appliances, to public space infrastructure. This framework is implemented through a national digital platform for public lighting classification, which has already attracted formal interest from more than 100 municipalities, indicating strong institutional uptake. The results indicate that road-segment-level energy classification is feasible and scalable as a voluntary tool to enhance municipal accountability and support informed decision-making. This study concludes that algorithmic energy labels for public lighting can support sustainable urban governance transparency, comparability and decision-making capacity, with future research aimed at building capacity for large-scale implementation and incorporating environmental, human health, and ecological impact considerations into the classification system. Full article

Small municipalities often lack the resources and infrastructure necessary to implement advanced digital twin solutions commonly adopted in larger cities or industries. This study addresses the challenge of designing a replicable and interoperable local digital twin architecture specifically suited for low-infrastructure environments. A gap in the current literature and practice is identified: most digital twin implementations are domain-specific, resource-intensive, or proprietary, which limits their applicability in low-infrastructure contexts such as small rural areas. To address this issue, a requirement-driven architecture based on open standards and minimal-footprint, edge-based technologies is proposed. The approach is validated through real-world implementation in Codogno, Italy, with subsequent replication in Varna, Bulgaria, and Lausanne, Switzerland. The findings indicate that the proposed architecture can be deployed with minimal local infrastructure while maintaining interoperability with existing systems and enabling scalability to larger contexts. Interoperability is achieved through standardized data models and APIs, while replicability is ensured by a modular design utilizing open-source components. These contributions offer a practical blueprint for small municipalities to develop local digital twins, thereby supporting digital transformation at the community level. Full article

Promoting the green development of the tourism industry is a crucial pathway for achieving coordinated progress in ecological civilization development and industrial transformation and upgrading. Based on panel data for 16 prefecture-level cities in Anhui Province from 2011 to 2022, this study constructs an “inputs–desirable outputs–undesirable outputs” indicator system, measures city-level tourism eco-efficiency (TEE) using a super-efficiency SBM model incorporating undesirable outputs, decomposes provincial disparities and their sources using the Theil index and its decomposition, and further identifies city-specific heterogeneity in influencing factors by employing a panel variable-coefficient fixed-effects model. The results show that: (1) Anhui’s TEE exhibited an overall fluctuating upward trend during 2011–2022, with provincial efficiency values ranging from 1.465 (2016) to 1.500 (2022), and a more pronounced rebound after 2017; (2) spatially, TEE displays a pattern of “higher in the south, lower in the north, with a central uplift,” with southern Anhui cities such as Huangshan and Xuancheng performing relatively well, while many northern Anhui cities lag behind; (3) Theil decomposition indicates that overall disparities are driven mainly by within-region differences, whereas between-region differences contribute relatively little; and (4) influencing factors are markedly heterogeneous: scale- and affluence-related variables promote TEE in core cities such as Hefei, but tend to inhibit it in cities such as Bozhou, Anqing, Chuzhou, and Wuhu. The mechanisms associated with technology and structural variables are more complex; in particular, the expansion of energy consumption exerts a significantly negative effect on TEE in most cities and constitutes a common constraint on efficiency improvement, while the effects of R&D investment, digitalization, and the share of the tertiary sector vary across cities. Accordingly, policy efforts should prioritize energy-efficiency improvement and low-carbon substitution at the provincial level while implementing differentiated, city-specific pathways at the municipal level to jointly advance the low-carbon transition and high-quality development of the tourism industry. Full article

Peri-urban regions around Southeast Asian megacities connect agriculture, markets, food-service facilities, households, and municipal waste systems, yet comparable data for individual waste streams are often unavailable. This study presents a screening framework for selecting the first organic waste streams and node types to measure in Tangerang Raya, Indonesia, before treatment performance data are available. The framework complements, rather than replaces, city scale circularity monitoring, life cycle assessment, and technology selection tools. Public and institutional data were screened by evidence class and temporal and spatial compatibility. The core Peri-Urban Organic Waste Circularity Readiness Index (PU-OCRI) evaluates five intrinsic criteria: feedstock concentration, source separation readiness, treatment pre-screening compatibility, institutional readiness, and the safety/quality gate. Scores represent collective author judgments linked to a criterion level evidence trail; they have not been independently rated by local stakeholders or empirically calibrated. Korea linked support is assessed separately and cannot affect the index. Available evidence included 3248.1 t of large chili production in Kabupaten Tangerang in 2024, 798,406 t yr⁻¹ of reported potential municipal-waste generation in Kota Tangerang in 2024, and a planning-based estimate that 52.89% of non-residential waste in Kota Tangerang Selatan was biogenic organic material. Under equal weights, market-linked organics scored 76/100 and garden and landscape organics 72; production-side residues and household food waste each scored 56, and mixed residual waste scored 32. In 100,000 weight only simulations, market linked organics ranked first in 65.9% of runs and garden and landscape organics in 31.2%. When each score was allowed to vary by one point and sampled together with the weights, the corresponding first-rank frequencies were 50.7% and 40.7%. These results define a provisional paired audit hypothesis, not evidence of superior circular-economy performance. A required 8–12-week comparison of market/food-service and garden/landscape nodes will apply predefined criteria for mass stability, contamination, safety, treatment feasibility, cost, and operator and stakeholder participation before scores are updated or any treatment or scale-up decision is made. Korea-linked cooperation is limited to digital logging, training, QA/QC, and pilot-operation protocols. Data provenance is explicit: the 798,406 t yr⁻¹ value is the issuing agency’s population × per-capita estimate, whereas 52.89% is an author calculated category sum (kitchen + garden + wood) used only as a screening proxy, not as a direct stream level measurement or the plan’s official aggregate organic fraction. Full article

The rapid transformation of urban centers into smart environments introduces complex challenges at the intersection of technological advancement, environmental stewardship, and social justice. This study evaluates Lisbon’s smart city transition by establishing an integrated framework that links digital equity with Environmental, Social, and Governance principles. Employing a convergent qualitative research design, this paper triangulates a comprehensive regulatory policy analysis with primary empirical data gathered from twenty-five semi-structured interviews with municipal officials, academic experts, and residents of marginalized communities. The findings expose critical systemic disparities in digital infrastructure deployment, device affordability, and platform literacy across socio-economic strata, demonstrating how localized digital divides directly impede the execution of urban ESG objectives. While green financing mechanisms offer robust pathways for sustainable energy and transit infrastructure, their equity outcomes remain constrained without mandatory, transparent information disclosure systems that mitigate agency costs. Cultivating urban resilience requires shifting from tokenistic e-governance to genuine citizen empowerment. This study offers a novel theoretical contribution by operationalizing corporate ESG metrics within public urban governance frameworks, providing an empirical roadmap for municipal policymakers globally to balance digital innovation with structural inclusion and environmental accountability in smart city agendas. Full article

Achieving the coordinated development of the digital economy (DE), the tourism industry (TI) and the ecological environment (EE) is of great significance for regional sustainable development. This paper constructs a comprehensive evaluation index system for the digital economy–tourism industry–ecological environment (DTE) complex system. Indicator weights are determined via the entropy method, and the comprehensive development levels of the three subsystems in the Yangtze River Delta (YRD) region from 2010 to 2023 are systematically assessed. Based on this, the coupling coordination degree model is applied to measure the coordination of the DTE system, and the obstacle degree model is employed to identify the key factors restricting its coupling coordinated development. The results show the following: (1) From 2010 to 2023, the overall level of comprehensive development of the DE and EE in the YRD showed an upward trend, while the TI declined significantly during 2020–2022 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. (2) In terms of temporal evolution, the coupling coordination degree rose from 0.434 to 0.676 between 2010 and 2019, steadily improving from near disorder to primary coordination; although there were fluctuations between 2020 and 2023, it remained stable at a primary coordination level. Spatially, the region exhibited a “higher in the east, lower in the west” pattern. (3) From 2010 to 2019, the primary bottleneck in coordinated development stemmed from the DE subsystem; after 2020, the degree of constraints in the TI rose rapidly, creating a dual-system constraint pattern where the DE and the TI coexist. This study provides theoretical insights and practical recommendations for fostering positive DTE interactions in the YRD and offers valuable experience for other regions. This study has limitations regarding its research scale and indicator system, and it does not account for external influencing factors. Future research could adopt municipal or county-level analyses, apply causal inference methods such as panel Granger causality and system GMM, refine the evaluation index system, integrate internal and external factors, and thoroughly analyze the underlying mechanisms governing interactions within the DTE system. Full article

Rapid urbanization and the aging of large-scale building stocks have created a critical disconnection between strategic urban planning and physical structural realities. This study introduces a multi-dimensional resilience framework to evaluate the structural integrity and socio-economic exposure of Riga’s urban fabric at the parcel level. By integrating high-resolution wear-out data with a normalized Economic Priority Index (EPI), the study analyzes the distribution of 2405 buildings identified in the terminal wear-out phase of the Bathtub Curve reliability model. The results reveal that 92.7% of critically vulnerable buildings fall outside the scope of the city’s RTIAN 2030 strategic intervention framework, including the majority of high-risk structures supporting 13,416 business units and 646,033 residents. Spatial intersection analysis further demonstrates that contemporary modernization initiatives, including digital pilot zones, effectively bypass 98% of these critical structural hotspots. Predictive scenario analysis confirms that without a strategic reorientation toward a proactive, reliability-based monitoring framework, these excluded corridors face an exponential escalation of structural risk. Specifically, this study examines the urban spatial resilience of Riga’s building stock through the integrated PLE-Bathtub Curve framework, evaluates the spatial alignment of RTIAN 2030 with identified vulnerability zones, and assesses how effectively Smart City pilot initiatives target structurally vulnerable clusters defined by the Economic Priority Index (EPI). This research provides a replicable diagnostic framework, calibrated for post-socialist urban contexts, to support municipal authorities in realigning investment priorities with empirical physical vulnerabilities, ensuring long-term metropolitan continuity. Full article

Urban environments increasingly rely on interconnected digital infrastructures like IoT devices, SDN-enabled networks, and cloud platforms to support essential municipal services. Ensuring the resilience of these systems requires advanced, data-driven mechanisms capable of detecting and mitigating cyber disruptions. This study presents Persian Eagle, a hybrid machine learning and deep learning framework designed to enhance the cyber-resilience of urban digital infrastructures by providing high-precision detection of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. DDoS attacks disrupt service availability by flooding targets with massive malicious traffic orchestrated through botnets, and in critical infrastructures, disruptions can be life-threatening. The proposed framework integrates multi-stage data preprocessing, SMOTE-based class balancing, and a four-phase feature-selection pipeline combining filtering, statistical ranking, PCA, and XGBoost. Seven complementary classifiers, including Random Forest, SVM, Gaussian Naive Bayes, XGBoost, MLP, LSTM, and Autoencoder, are bonded through a stacking cooperative with a Gradient Boosting meta-learner. The framework was evaluated on CICDDoS2019 and CICIDS2017 datasets, and achieved near-perfect performance up to 99.9998% accuracy, demonstrating strong generalization across diverse attack scenarios. By offering a scalable, transparent, and data-driven detection mechanism, Persian Eagle maintains urban digital-risk management and supports the continuity and resilience of critical smart-city services. Full article

The coordinated development of urban renewal (UR) and ecological resilience (ER) is essential for regional sustainability and livable city construction. Based on data from 108 cities in the Yangtze River Economic Belt (YREB) during 2012–2023, this study constructs the UR indicator system from the dimensions of urban infrastructure construction, social function development, and cultural and leisure facility construction. ER is evaluated in terms of resistance, adaptability, and recoverability. The spatiotemporal evolution of their coupling coordination degree (CCD) is then examined. In addition, the XGBoost-SHAP model is employed to identify the threshold of digital technological innovation (DTI) on CCD and its interactions with different development conditions. The results show that (1) CCD remained relatively low but improved slowly during the study period. UR lagged behind ER in most cities, indicating that insufficient UR development capacity was the main constraint on coordination between the two systems. (2) CCD exhibited a pronounced core–periphery pattern, with high-value areas mainly concentrated in provincial capitals and centrally administered municipalities within the YREB. (3) DTI was positively associated with CCD and exhibited a nonlinear pattern with a model-derived turning point, while the strength and pattern of this association varied across different development contexts. These findings enrich the understanding of UR-ER coordination and offer policy implications for sustainable urban governance. Full article

The integration of the digital and real economies is a pivotal engine driving the development of new, quality productive forces. Tourism ecological governance is the concrete manifestation of the green dimension of new-quality productive forces in the cultural and tourism sector, as well as being a path for converting ecological value to drive regional sustainable development. The relationship and mechanisms between digital–real integration and tourism ecological governance are critical issues requiring urgent breakthroughs. However, existing research primarily explores the economic factors influencing tourism ecology and has yet to systematically reveal the intrinsic mechanisms through which digital–real integration affects tourism ecological efficiency from the perspective of typical ecological functional zones. Based on data from 78 counties (municipalities, districts) in China’s Taihang Mountains from 2011 to 2023, this study examines the impact of digital–real integration on tourism ecological efficiency and its operational pathways. The findings are as follows: Firstly, from a temporal evolution perspective, tourism ecological efficiency in the Taihang Mountains underwent a phase of dynamic adjustment and gradual improvement between 2011 and 2023, while the level of digital–real integration experienced a phase of general enhancement and phased advancement. From a spatial evolution perspective, neighboring sub-regions within the Taihang Mountains exhibit positive spatial correlations in terms of both digital–real integration and tourism ecological efficiency. From the perspective of spatiotemporal transfer characteristics, changes in tourism ecological efficiency and the level of integration of the digital and real economies in the Taihang Mountains are influenced by neighboring regions. The development processes of tourism ecology and digital–real integration exhibit a relatively stable and gradually improving pattern, driving the agglomeration of regions toward higher levels. Secondly, digital–real integration has a positive impact on improving tourism ecological efficiency by releasing ecological pressure, promoting industrial synergy agglomeration, and driving green innovation development. Heterogeneity analysis reveals that the positive effect of this integration on tourism ecological efficiency is more pronounced in national e-commerce demonstration cities. Digital–real integration has had a positive impact on improving tourism ecological efficiency in the Southern and Western Taihang Mountain regions, while its impact on the Eastern Taihang Mountain region was not statistically significant. This study incorporates digital–real integration with tourism ecological efficiency, as well as environmental, structural, and capacity factors, into a unified analytical framework, providing theoretical references and practical insights for exploring pathways of digital transformation and innovative tourism ecological governance in ecologically sensitive functional zones. Full article

This study addresses the fragmented integration of smart technologies into sustainable tourism management, where digital tools are often implemented without sufficient coordination, interoperability, or clear links to sustainability objectives. Such a situation limits the potential of smart solutions to improve destination governance, visitor experience, and the long-term competitiveness of tourism destinations. The aim of the study is to evaluate how the Smart Region concept can be operationalized at the urban level by analysing the city of České Budějovice (Czech Republic)—the primary regional tourism and administrative hub—as a critical case study. The research first analysed relevant municipal and regional strategic documents, then examined secondary data and publicly available digital services and technological solutions, and finally conducted a structured observation of selected tools relevant to tourism management. The findings show that the city has already introduced several elements of smart tourism management, especially in digital information services, transport management, and sustainable mobility. However, the analysis also reveals important shortcomings in data sharing, cross-sector coordination, and the integration of tourism-oriented digital tools. The study concludes that deeper institutional cooperation and more coherent smart governance are necessary to strengthen sustainability, improve efficiency, and support the long-term competitiveness of the destination. Full article