Search Results (649)

In recent years, the city of Naples has seen increasing attention focused on the mural dedicated to Diego Armando Maradona, located in the Spanish Quarter. Originally a spontaneous expression of street art and initially perceived by the local community as a simple artwork, the mural has gradually transformed into a powerful symbol of identity, becoming a true cultural icon of the city. This process has generated effects that transcend the artistic value of the artwork, contributing to the enhancement of the entire surrounding urban context and altering the social and economic dynamics of the quarter. By considering the Maradona Mural as the epicentre of a range of territorial and socio-economic effects, this paper aims to explore the issue of measuring the influence exerted by its presence on the market values of residential properties located in the Spanish Quarter of Naples. From this perspective, street art can be interpreted as a positive externality capable not only of fostering processes of urban regeneration and the redevelopment of formerly marginalised or degraded areas but also of influencing the dynamics of the local real estate market. Property values reflect not only the intrinsic characteristics of the properties but also the environmental and territorial attributes that contribute to the formation of market prices. From this perspective, properties can be considered as beneficiaries of externalities, whose economic value can be estimated through variations in house prices attributable to changes in environmental and territorial conditions. Full article

As an expression of cultural identity, food is rooted in social transformation and, in the area of the Pearl River Delta, the cuisines of Macau and Hong Kong have been shaped by global interactions. Despite a geographical adjacency, both Special Administrative Regions (SARs) display unique foodways. While typical Macanese cuisine integrates not only Portuguese and Chinese but also African and Indian fusions, the Cantonese gastronomy of Hong Kong is heavily based on street food culture and the hybridity of cha chaan teng dishes. This encyclopedia entry looks at local food traditions from colonial culinary practice to globalized consumption. It illustrates a continuous adaptiveness in the wake of socioeconomic change, as well as the resilience needed for preserving heritage. Full article

The regular practice of physical exercise is often associated with promoting benefits for practitioners. In recent decades, street running has become popular worldwide, with most participants being recreational runners who engage in the activity primarily to promote health, well-being, leisure, and quality of life, although some also participate with competitive goals. Among the psychological aspects related to exercise, studies have shown that some individuals may become susceptible to “exercise dependence,” a condition in which exercise takes a central role in a person’s life. As a result, individuals may exhibit characteristics such as excessive training, injuries; weight control issues, withdrawal symptoms when unable to exercise and even problems in social relationships when exercise is exclusively prioritized. Background/Objectives: The aim of this study was to investigate and analyze levels of susceptibility to running dependence and its relationship with exercise volume and mood states (tension, depression, anger, vigor, fatigue, and mental confusion). Methods: This was a quantitative cross-sectional study involving 761 regular Brazilian runners (59.8% male and 40.2% female) who consented to participate and answered the Sociodemographic Questionnaire, the Escala de Dependência de Corrida (EDC), a Brazilian Portuguese adaptation of the Negative Addiction Scale (NAS), and the Brunel Mood Scale (BRUMS). The analysis plan was conducted through descriptive statistics (mean, standard deviation, median, 1st and 3rd quartiles, interquartile range, and 95% confidence intervals) and inferential statistics (Spearman’s Correlation and Kruskal–Wallis Test). In all tests, the significance level adopted was p < 0.05. Results: The sample was divided into three groups of susceptibility to exercise dependence: low (37.6%), moderate (36.4%), and high (26%). Scores indicative of greater susceptibility to exercise dependence showed positive correlations with running practice volume (years of experience, weekly training frequency, weekly training duration, and weekly mileage), as well as with vigor. Although a statistically significant correlation was also observed for tension, its magnitude was trivial (rs = 0.080). Comparisons using the Kruskal–Wallis test showed that higher susceptibility levels were associated with greater running volumes and higher raw vigor scores, whereas no significant group differences were observed for the remaining mood states. Conclusions: Higher susceptibility to exercise dependence was associated with greater running volume and higher raw vigor scores. No consistent associations were observed with negative mood states, except for a trivial correlation with tension. These findings suggest that greater susceptibility to exercise dependence among runners was primarily associated with higher raw vigor scores rather than with broader alterations in mood states. Full article

Adolescent mental health problems have become increasingly prominent, and everyday urban spaces may provide important support for stress relief. Focusing on adolescents aged 12–18 in Xi’an, China, this study examines three frequently used urban spaces: streets, residential communities, and parks. Based on questionnaire data, a multi-group structural equation model was estimated to test the relationships among built environment satisfaction (BES), perceived restorativeness (PR), and restorative outcomes (ROs), as well as their spatial differences. The results show that parks performed best in PR and ROs, followed by residential communities, whereas streets showed the weakest restorative performance. Across all three space types, BES significantly improved PR, and PR further promoted ROs. Parks showed both a significant direct effect and a significant indirect effect through PR, whereas communities and streets mainly relied on the mediating pathway through PR. Taken together, these findings suggest that restorative experiences cannot be explained by space-use intensity alone and are also associated with BES, PR, and space type. The study provides empirical evidence for optimizing everyday urban spaces to support adolescent mental health and socially sustainable urban development. Full article

Rapid urbanization, automobile dependence, and declining public-space quality have increased interest in how street-level environments influence pedestrian activity and urban vitality. Although prior research has focused on macro-scale urban form and individual walking behavior, fewer studies have examined population-level pedestrian activity and micro-scale streetscape characteristics, particularly in socioeconomically segregated Latin American cities. This study explores the relationship between pedestrian activity and street-level built environment characteristics in middle-income neighborhoods of Santiago. The analysis included 514 street segments across seven neighborhoods using a modified Pedestrian Environment Data Scan (PEDS) audit instrument assessing destinations, street functionality, safety, aesthetics, and urban design qualities. Pedestrian activity was measured through repeated pedestrian counts conducted during two observation periods in 2025. Street segments were categorized into low, medium, and high activity levels, and multinomial logistic regression models were applied. Results showed that several micro-scale streetscape characteristics were significantly associated with pedestrian activity. Tree presence, sidewalk width, landmark visibility, and street-name visibility were consistently linked to higher pedestrian activity across both periods. Building height, enclosure, benches, segment monitoring, and on-street parking were also significant in at least one model. These findings highlight the importance of micro-scale urban design in promoting walkable and socially vibrant urban environments. Overall, greener, more legible, and pedestrian-oriented streets were consistently associated with higher levels of pedestrian activity. Full article

Historic districts are conserved through visible fabric, while locality is also sustained by everyday sounds, language, and social activity. This study examines the spatial patterning of perceived multisensory homogenization across five historic districts in Yunnan, China. We combine street-view imagery for all sites, synchronous field recordings at 340 sampling points on Ximen Street, pairwise human judgments, multimodal model scoring, and explainable machine learning. For the other four districts, auditory variables represent image-derived proxies for potential soundscape conditions, rather than measured acoustics. The results reveal a mismatch between visual preservation and auditory locality: streets that retain historic façades may still be perceived as losing distinctive soundmarks and everyday acoustic identity. In the fitted models, standardized signage, generic decoration, and consumption-oriented frontages are associated with higher visual homogenization predictions, whereas dialect-related cues, resident activity, and diverse everyday sound events are associated with stronger auditory locality. The findings support heritage governance that considers not only material appearance but also the social and acoustic conditions through which place distinctiveness is maintained. Full article

Participatory citizenship plays a critical role in strengthening climate change resilience, particularly in the context of natural disasters such as floods and other hydrological extremes. Citizen-generated data shared through social media platforms offer valuable real-time insights that can complement traditional environmental monitoring systems. This study proposes a machine learning-based framework to analyze multilingual news data and global X (formerly known as Twitter) data that can complement street level sensor data for improved detection and understanding of extreme hydrological events: floods and landslides. The approach identifies and filters tweets related to hazards such as floods and contextualizes them with information extracted from news reports to enhance event characterization. In addition, sentiment and emotion analysis are applied to assess public reactions and perceived event intensity. By integrating physical event signals with societal responses, the method provides a broader perspective on disaster impacts and the effectiveness of emergency responses. The results highlight the potential of combining social media analytics and machine learning to support hydrological monitoring, enhance situational awareness, and contribute to more responsive disaster management strategies in the face of increasing climate-related risks. Full article

Current approaches to urban greenery often led to a certain uniformity of vegetation. The desire of residents to be able to grow plants according to their own preferences and to co-create the appearance of the surroundings of their houses therefore leads to the emergence of spontaneous initiatives. One of these phenomena is the narrow strips at the interface between the foundations of houses and the sidewalks of streets in continuous urban development, which are used for growing plants and are referred to as “Jardin de la Rue”. The assessment of street vegetation with “Jardin de la Rue” elements took place in the urban district of Saint-Genès, which is part of the city of Bordeaux in the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region in France. The description of the street vegetation with the “Jardin de la Rue” represents an important first step towards understanding the causes of their creation and the subsequent ecological and social interactions. The creation of these small green spaces is the result of the initiative of residents, and these areas are not part of the planned urban green space. Field surveys in selected streets took place in August–September in 2023, 2024 and 2025. Based on the analysis of the species composition, a total of 107 plant taxa were recorded in the streets. The most frequently recorded ornamental taxa include Lonicera japonica Thunb., Alcea rosea L. and Passiflora caerulea L. The most popular group of cultivated plants consists mainly of lianas, e.g., Akebia quinata (Thunb. ex Houtt.) Decne., Ipomoea purpurea (L.) Roth, Lonicera japonica Thunb., Parthenocissus tricuspidata (Siebold & Zucc.) Planch., Passiflora amethystina J.C.Mikan, Solanum laxum Spreng., Trachelospermum asiaticum (Siebold & Zucc.) Nakai, Trachelospermum jasminoides (Lindl.) Lem. and Wisteria sinensis (Sims) Sweet. The most frequently represented taxa belong mainly to the weed group, e.g., Amaranthus deflexus L., Taraxacum sect. Taraxacum F.H.Wigg., Paspalum dilatatum Poir. The vegetation of the “Jardin de la Rue” elements is a manifestation of the cultural function of plants. The free choice of cultivated taxa allows residents to express their preferences and relationship to the place. Respect for these spontaneous green spaces and their vegetation composition by the city administration is a manifestation of mutual cooperation and at the same time a means of strengthening the ties of residents to their place of residence. These elements may deserve greater consideration within contemporary approaches to construction, architecture and urban planning. Full article

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to conduct a qualitative study of perceptions of active commuting to school (ACS) amongst middle school girls. Methods: Twelve adolescent girls (M = 13.1 ± 0.7 years old) who participated in the Safe TRavel Environment Evaluation of Texas Schools (STREETS) natural experiment were recruited to participate in semi-structured interviews. The semi-structured interview guide was grounded in Social Cognitive Theory, the Theory of Planned Behavior, and the existing literature. All interviews were transcribed by WebEx and thematic analysis was conducted via NVivo 12. Results: Participants had generally neutral to positive views of ACS. Main themes included social support of peers and the convenience of active commuting. Commonly reported barriers were distance to school, safety, and concerns about lack of sleep because of an early commuting time. Areas for future intervention included reducing perceived barriers of distance, time management, and safety, increasing girls’ motivation to actively commute, and improving skills and self-efficacy related to ACS through education, social support, guided practice, and incentives. Conclusions: This study provides evidence for schools and communities to include support programs for those who want to actively commute and suggestions for school policy changes to encourage active commuting to school (ACS). When developing ACS infrastructure or programs for middle school girls, concomitant programs that address strategies to address student perceptions and psychosocial barriers should be included. Full article

Community social services play a crucial role as the main gateway to welfare systems. However, increasing demand, organizational complexity, and limited adaptive capacity have generated growing difficulties in ensuring timely and equitable access to support. This study examines the organizational barriers affecting access to community social services and explores the role of triage as an organizational innovation. A qualitative case study was conducted at the Community Social Services Centre of Benalmádena City Council (Spain). Data were collected through focus groups, Customer Journey Mapping exercises, and Design Thinking workshops involving social workers, administrative staff, managers, and external experts, and were analysed using thematic analysis. The findings indicate that access barriers arise from a systemic configuration of organizational dysfunctions rather than from resource scarcity alone. Six interconnected themes were identified: fragmented access pathways, the absence of prioritization mechanisms, demand duplication and appointment absenteeism, organizational bottlenecks related to professional role distribution, fragmented information systems, and the emergence of triage as an organizational innovation. These factors generate cumulative effects that reduce organizational responsiveness and hinder access to services. The study concludes that triage should be understood as part of a broader process of organizational redesign aimed at improving demand management, prioritization, and coordination, highlighting the need for systemic organizational transformation to enhance access to social services. Full article

Public spaces in Iraqi cities carry social memory, daily trade, and civic trust; therefore, post-conflict reconstruction must be evaluated through social performance as well as physical repair. This study develops a user-satisfaction framework for sustainable and resilient public space reconstruction in post-conflict Iraq. A convergent mixed-methods design was used, combining literature and site analysis with Likert-scale surveys of residents and experts in two public-commercial case studies: Eskan Bazaar and Najafi Street. The resident survey included 901 valid respondent records (Eskan Bazaar, n = 451; Najafi Street, n = 450), and the expert survey included 89 respondent records (Eskan Bazaar, n = 48; Najafi Street, n = 41). The analysis used weighted means, standard deviations, medians, percentage agreement, site comparison, and reliability testing. Cronbach’s Alpha showed acceptable to excellent internal consistency for the local surveys (0.79 and 0.91) and excellent internal consistency for the expert surveys (0.93 for both sites). Results show that Najafi Street scored higher than Eskan Bazaar across all local factors, especially cultural preservation (3.15 versus 2.71) and accessibility (2.57 versus 2.30), while accessibility remained the weakest local dimension in both cases. Expert results similarly favored Najafi Street, particularly for cultural preservation (3.28 versus 2.83) and accessibility (3.26 versus 2.94). The findings were translated into a five-pillar framework covering community engagement, cultural preservation, environmental stewardship, economic revitalization, and adaptive resilience. The framework is preliminarily validated through construct reliability, cross-case application, expert-local triangulation, and monitoring indicators, while future post-occupancy testing is recommended. Full article

Walking is essential for daily physical activity, yet most existing studies focus on pedestrian counts while neglecting varied on-street activities, largely owing to data shortages. Targeting this gap, the research defines walking activity quality as the occurrence likelihood of walking-related activities and explores built environment influences. It adopts deep-learning video recognition to capture fine-grained pedestrian behaviours and quantifies walkability via activity quality. Structural equation modelling (SEM) is applied to decode causal links between urban design quality, pedestrian volume and activity quality. According to the results, urban design qualities exhibit a more pronounced influence on activity quality compared to pedestrian volume. Among a broad array of 20 physical features examined, interface density, the quantity of street furniture, walkway width, and shading rate all demonstrated significant positive effects on stationary activities. Interestingly, higher interface density and shorter crossing distances facilitated the occurrence of social activities, whereas the proportion of ground-floor windows had a notable negative impact on social activities. The findings of this study can directly inform the development of sustainable and liveable streets. Full article

This article analyses pneumatic (inflatable) objects as used in the work of four contemporary European artists from diverse disciplinary backgrounds: choreographers Adrienne Hart and Gabriella Engdahl, and visual artists Michael Shaw and Bambí Benkö. Deployed across deconsecrated churches, swimming pools, theatres, galleries and streets, these works demonstrate a broad spectrum of engagement with inflatables, ranging from formalist to existential, social and political-activist purposes—all implicating choreography in an expanded sense. Informed by theories from the visual arts, dance studies and sociology, as well as interviews with the artists themselves, the analysis adopts a multi-methodological approach attuned to this diversity. Overarching concerns about spectatorship, site and materiality centre on how inflatables’ precarious properties—porous seams requiring continual reinflation—engender playful instability and encourage interaction with audiences. Proposing ‘whimsy’ as a critical lens, the essay reimagines contemporary inflatables as cultural-choreographic objects that question disciplinary boundaries. The artists’ practices both extend a 1960s legacy of pneumatic experiments and redirect their utopian-critical impulses toward twenty-first-century issues. Full article

Responding to residents’ differentiated health-promoting needs has become important for improving the adaptability of street renewal in old urban neighborhoods. Based on 1404 valid questionnaires from residents in old urban neighborhoods of Jinan, China, this study develops an analytical framework linking group classification, environmental responses, and renewal strategies from the perspective of health literacy–activity behavior mismatch. Health literacy and activity behavior indices were constructed, and K-means clustering was used to identify mismatch groups. Estimated marginal means, average marginal effects, and multiple-response analysis were then employed to compare group-specific response trajectories and improvement preferences across four street environmental dimensions: slow-mobility space, service function, natural aesthetics, and activity facilities. Further interpretation of the obtained analytical results demonstrates that the investigated resident samples are partitioned into four typical subgroups: behavior-driven, high-literacy/high-behavior, literacy-driven, and low-literacy/low-behavior groups. Slow-mobility space was mainly associated with participation willingness and mismatch adjustment; natural aesthetics was primarily related to environmental cognition and perceived attractiveness; activity facilities were more relevant to mismatch changes among low-literacy/low-behavior residents; and service function mainly provided everyday convenience support. Improvement preferences were generally concentrated on basic environmental conditions, especially traffic safety, natural environment, and public activity spaces. These findings provide empirical evidence for group-based health-promoting street renewal and highlight its relevance to socially inclusive and sustainable urban regeneration. Full article

Urban Green Spaces (UGSs) monitoring usually focuses on the extraction of vegetation in the physical layer, while neglecting their functional attributes. This renders the monitoring results unable to objectively reflect the rationality of UGS planning. To address these issues, this study proposes a multi-level classification method integrating multi-source remote sensing and geospatial big data to bridge the semantic gap between the physical layer and the functional layer. In this method, a strategy of prior knowledge injection and semantic reconstruction was developed through the fine-tuning of a BERT model with cross-mapping rules. This strategy aims to classify the urban area into 24 functional categories, generating the social-functional basemap in a functional layer, based on Point of Interest (POI), OpenStreetMap (OSM), and Global Urban Boundary (GUB). Meanwhile, a novel deep learning architecture, namely the Multi-Shape and Spectral Aware Network (MSSANet), was designed for precise vegetation classification of UGSs in the physical layer. Finally, a “function-first, vegetation-second” coupling paradigm containing three functional attribute layers, referring to the Code for Classification of UGS in China (CJJ/T 85-2017), was established. This paradigm integrates the social-functional basemap with physical vegetation patches to build a multi-level UGS classification framework, i.e., the 5 major UGS categories, 11 intermediate UGS categories, and 24 fine-grained UGS sub-categories. Experiments conducted in Jinan and Qingdao, China, demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method for refined multi-level UGS mapping. Full article