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香川県高松市は瀬戸内海沿岸の四国の中核都市であり、1588年から1867年まで280年間、城下町として栄えた。1945年7月4日、空襲によって市街地は壊滅的な被害を受けた。このような状況に対処するために、市民と行政が協力して戦災復興の土地区画整理事業を行った。その結果、近代的な都市に生まれ変わった。また、昭和と平成の市町村合併を通じて人口と面積が大幅に増えた。しかし、現在、郊外への人口流出、市街地の人口減少、中山間地域の過疎化、少子高齢化の進行などの多くの課題に直面している。このような多くの難しい問題を前にして、高松市は「コンパクトで持続可能なまちづくり」を実現するためにコンパクトシティ計画を策定した。本論文では、社会学の視点に基づき、高松市の地域社会構造の変化とコンパクトシティ計画の特徴を考察してみる。, Takamatsu City in Kagawa Prefecture faces the Seto Inland Sea and is a core city in Shikoku, which prospered as a castle town for 280 years, from 1588 to 1867. On 4 July, 1945, downtown Takamatsu City suffered catastrophic damage from air raids. To manage such a situation, the inhabitants and city administration carried out land readjustment for restoration of the war-damaged area. As a result, Takamatsu City was reborn as a modern city. Subsequently, through a municipal merger with Showa and Heisei, the population and area expanded remarkably. However, present-day Takamatsu City faces many challenges, such as population outflow to the suburbs, declining population in the downtown, depopulation in semi-mountainous areas, decreasing birthrate, and an aging population. To overcome such difficulties, Takamatsu City has formulated a compact city plan to realise ‘sustainable city development through compactness’. This paper analyses and discusses the changes in community social structure in Takamatsu City and the ‘Takamatsu Compact City Plan’ from sociological perspective.

In most dense urban environments in emerging markets, retail deliveries are very fragmented to thousands of nanostores. It is not uncommon for a delivery route to include more than 60 stops. Unloading bays are often blocked by regular traffic. Due to the complex urban environment, it is difficult to estimate the benefits of making unloading bays available. In this study, we conduct a field experiment in an urban field lab of one square kilometer in the downtown of Querétaro, Mexico. During the treatment period of one week, we obtain help from the local traffic police to keep the unloading bays available for unloading only. Using advanced GPS devices and extensive manual field observations, we are able to capture the change in driver behavior and the direct efficiency increases. We find a high efficiency gain, not only in travel time (39%) but also – remarkably – in the total time parked (17%). Corrected for other effects, we estimate a gain of about 44% in total time per delivery. Apart from the insights on unloading benefits, we also provide insights into the method of field experimentation in such a complex environment.

Argumentation Maps support participants in geographically referenced debates as they occur, for example, as part of urban planning processes. In a quasi-naturalistic case study, 11 student participants discussed planning issues on the University of Toronto downtown campus. The analysis of this case study focuses on general usability aspects of an Argumentation Map prototype, such as cost of entry, efficiency, interactivity, and connectivity. By applying usability analysis methods from the field of human-computer interaction, we evaluate the learnability, memorability, and user satisfaction with this tool’s functionality. Our findings indicate that the participants were generally satisfied, but we include specific suggestions for improving the functionality of Argumentation Maps, e.g., with respect to map navigation, display of discussion contributions, and online status of participants. On a more general level, this case study contributes to the methods spectrum of research into participatory spatial decision support systems as an example of user testing in a realistic decision-making context.

This research is one of the few studies to investigate the mutual impact between residential segregation and the commuting outcomes of minority groups in the context of a developing country. Based on previous empirical studies that acknowledged the interactions between the built environment and travel behavior, we develop a Structural Equation Model to illustrate the multi-directional relationships between residential segregation, the built environment and commute outcomes. With survey data collected from migrant workers in 12 Chinese cities, we apply this model to estimate these complex mutual relationships. Our major findings include: 1) Both residential segregation and the built environment have significant causal impact on migrants' commute distance and duration. Distance from home to downtown has the strongest causal effect on commute outcomes, while residential segregation in urban villages ranks the second. 2) Residential sorting is observed. Commuting distance and duration significantly affects migrants' choice of built environment features. 3) However, commuting outcomes are not a major (or statistically significant) driver of migrant workers’ residential segregation in urban villages. In other words, their choice to reside in urban villages is inelastic to the commuting outcomes of these villages. Other factors such as housing affordability may be more influential. Therefore, demolishing urban villages under “urban renewal” policies will force migrants to relocate to more remote areas with worse job accessibility. These findings have important implications for recently proposed urban renewal policies that are bringing large-scale changes in China. They also offer important insights for other developing countries that are experiencing rapid urbanization. Finally, the framework of this study can be generalized and applied to other countries to examine similar urban issues.

The growing amount of electronic waste (e-waste) poses considerable risks to the environment and human health, especially when treated inadequately. However, it is difficult to assess the significance of these issues without quantitative understanding of spatiotemporal patterns of e-waste generation. This paper proposes a new model to estimate in-use stock of electric household appliances (HAs) and e-waste generation at the level of 1 km × 1 km grids by coupling geographic information system (GIS) and material flow analysis (MFA). We took Xiamen, a rapidly urbanized city in China, as a case and the results showed that demands for HAs increased from 1980, peaked in 2016, and then declined. In-use HAs exhibited a logistic growth and significantly increased in both spatial extent and intensity. E-waste generation kept rising until 2019, and its spatial center expanded outward from downtown to suburban areas. Our study highlights that a dynamic and spatial model is useful for designing effective policies for e-waste management by providing spatiotemporal details of e-waste types and generation magnitudes and explicitly recognizing generation hotspots in cities.

Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) can eliminate the burden of finding a parking spot upon arrival to the destination. AVs can park at a strategic location or cruise until summoned by their users. In this study, we investigate AV users’ parking decision considering their cost and time constraints. Each users’ decision has impacts on congestion which can change feasible options of other users. Hence, we use an agent-based simulation model to study AV parking policies. Results show that travelers consider sending their vehicles to park at home if they have to pay to use a parking facility. Also, our analysis for downtown Toronto shows that AVs would travel on average 12 min and a maximum of 47 min to park in cheaper parking lots. We also find that assigning the same parking price across all the parking facilities would exacerbate the congestion by motiving more AVs to cruise instead of choosing the closest parking lot. However, we show that a toll for zero-occupant AVs leads to a tradeoff between parking cost and distance that would decrease the VKT by 3.5% in downtown Toronto.

The event of landscape formation of public center areas depends on time and place. The development of urban planning, the increase in the level of the population, the increase in the demand for public centers, as well as the expansion of the city, the emergence of new public areas, the preservation of the environment, and the ecological attitude to the environment require. In turn, this will help to find a solution to a number of problems related to green areas in urban planning.

We visualize the rates of stay-home for residents by region using the difference between day-time and night-time populations to detect residential areas, and then observing the numbers of people leaving residential areas. There are issues with measuring stay-home rates by observing numbers of people visiting downtown areas, such as central urban shopping centers and major train stations. The first is that we cannot eliminate the possibility that people will avoid areas being observed and go to other areas. The second is that for people visiting downtown areas, we cannot know where they reside. These issues can be resolved if we quantify the degree of stay-home using the number of people leaving residential areas. There are significant differences in stay-home levels by region throughout Japan. By this visualization, residents of each region can see whether their level of stay-home is adequate or not, and this can provide incentive toward compliance suited to the residents of the region.

Video accounts for a large proportion of traffic on the Internet. Understanding its geographical viewing patterns is extremely valuable for the design of Internet ecosystems for content delivery, recommendation and ads. While previous works have addressed this problem at coarse-grain scales (e.g., national), the urban-scale geographical patterns of video access have never been revealed. To this end, this article aims to investigate the problem that whether there exists distinct viewing patterns among the neighborhoods of a large-scale city. To achieve this, we need to address several challenges including unknown of patterns profiles, complicate urban neighborhoods, and comprehensive viewing features. The contributions of this article include two aspects. First, we design a framework to automatically identify geographical video viewing patterns in urban neighborhoods. Second, by using a dataset of two months real video requests in Shanghai collected from one major ISP of China, we make a rigorous analysis of video viewing patterns in Shanghai. Our study reveals the following important observations. First, there exists four prevalent and distinct patterns of video access behavior in urban neighborhoods, which are corresponding to four different geographical contexts: downtown residential, office, suburb residential and hybrid regions. Second, there exists significant features that distinguish different patterns, e.g., the probabilities of viewing TV plays at midnight, and viewing cartoons at weekends can distinguish the two viewing patterns corresponding to downtown and suburb regions.

This paper addresses the question, “Will post-pandemic travel behaviour, when the virus has gone, be different to pre-pandemic travel?”. It adopts an online survey where respondents were asked to report changes in travel during the various stages of the pandemic and expectations of future travel after the virus has gone. The paper focusses on commuting including total commuting, work from home (WFH), employment, travel mode volume and share and timing of morning commute trips using reported behaviour during pandemic shutdowns; and expectations of commuting when the virus has gone. The paper provides evidence that travel behaviour post-pandemic might be different to pre-pandemic travel. It suggests that after the pandemic, public transport ridership, which declined steeply during the pandemic, will return but not to pre-pandemic levels. A post-pandemic reduction effect of around 20% in transit commuting is expected. This effect is supported using secondary evidence from a number of international cities. Results imply a mode shift from public transport use to car driving; this will be particularly large for CBD/downtown areas and is likely to result in peak period traffic congestion after the virus has gone. Work from home increased substantially during the pandemic; this will reduce after the pandemic as enforced WFH is replaced by voluntary WFH. Nevertheless, a sustained future ongoing increase in WFH above pre-pandemic levels is suggested, acting to reduce peak commuting by 6% and commuting to Melbourne CBD by 20%. However, reductions in commuting due to WFH do not offset mode shift from public transport to car driving resulting in a net increase in car use after the pandemic. Infection fear is a new top concern of public transport users since the pandemic. This fear has transitioned from ‘fresh infection fear’; the initial concerns when the pandemic started to ‘residual infection fear’; a long-term effect when the virus has gone. Implications of the findings for research and practice are discussed.

Small cities tend to have modest immigrant settlement services and cultural amenities, engendering a distinct sense of place among immigrants and impacting their wellbeing differently from large cities. To study the impacts of place characteristics on settlement needs, this photovoice research examines the sense of place among immigrant women through their attribution of meanings to places of comfort and discomfort as they settled in a small city in Canada. Thirty-two immigrant women of different immigration admission statuses, i.e., economic, family, and refugee classes, ranging in age from 19 to 48, took photographs of places that they considered to be either comfortable or uncomfortable. Most participants were from Asia, Africa, and South America, and they had lived in Canada for less than 10 years. Findings indicated that these women appreciated the warmth and support extended to them by settlement services provider organizations, libraries, and faith-based organizations, attesting to the relational nature of the place. Nevertheless, immigrant women dreaded harsh winter conditions and felt unsafe in downtown areas. A close read of these women’s photo stories revealed that their apprehensions about punitive winter conditions are closely linked to their role as primary household caregivers who take their children to public places. Their sense of vulnerability towards downtown areas demonstrates female subordination and their distaste for public spaces. Immigrant women sought comfort in locales that this paper terms “restorative space,” showing their creative use of private and public spaces for relaxation. This study contributes to our understanding of the gendered and interwoven nature of the self, social, and physical spaces. The findings from this study call for settlement policies that attend to distinct characteristics of local places to better serve the settlement needs of immigrants.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) deem large indoor gatherings without social distancing the “highest risk” activity for COVID-19 contagion. On June 20, 2020, President Donald J. Trump held his first mass campaign rally following the US coronavirus outbreak at the indoor Bank of Oklahoma arena. In the weeks following the event, numerous high-profile national news outlets reported that the Trump rally was “more than likely” the cause of a coronavirus surge in Tulsa County based on time series data. This study is the first to rigorously explore the impacts of this event on social distancing and COVID-19 spread. First, using data from SafeGraph Inc, we show that while non-resident visits to census block groups hosting the Trump event grew by approximately 25 percent, there was no decline in net stay-at-home behavior in Tulsa County, reflecting important offsetting behavioral effects. Then, using data on COVID-19 cases from the CDC and a synthetic control design, we find little evidence that COVID-19 grew more rapidly in Tulsa County, its border counties, or in the state of Oklahoma than each’s estimated counterfactual during the five-week post-treatment period we observe. Difference-in-differences estimates further provide no evidence that COVID-19 rates grew faster in counties that drew relatively larger shares of residents to the event. We conclude that offsetting risk-related behavioral responses to the rally—including voluntary closures of restaurants and bars in downtown Tulsa, increases in stay-at-home behavior, displacement of usual activities of weekend inflows, and smaller-than-expected crowd attendance—may be important mechanisms. Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11166-021-09359-4.

Introduction: Amman’s growth expansion was shaped by its topography (valleys and hills), which generated a special character and patterns of the urban form. The city was built on seven hills, which are connected by steep stairs that serve as pathways to the downtown core. The rapid urbanization caused by uncontrolled population growth, as well as random and unplanned formations that were far from following any kind of aesthetic, resulted in the expansion of the center towards the surrounding seven hills. The continuous intersection of these hills caused their boundaries to blur and melt. As a result of the intense transformation, which is causing the hills’ appearance to become more uniform, their continuing overlap may completely destroy the unique character and imageability of downtown Amman. Methods: This research made use of topographical context analysis and the Geographical Information System (GIS) as well as its 3D modeling function to identify the optimal visibility and viewing angle when looking from the valley towards the hills and between the hills. Results and discussion: We identified the main vistas, i.e., highly significant views, which could subsequently be adopted as the locations for proposing landmark scenarios via 3D model GIS analysis. The projection process helped determine the significant views from the valley towards the hills and between the hills. Overall, three scenarios were proposed for the landmarks, out of which, the best one was chosen. It corresponds to the topographical analysis and the community needs, depends upon the local context and urban fabric, and is optimal for decision-making.

Research on territorial stigmatization has gained considerable traction in the past decade as urban inequalities accelerate under neoliberal urbanization. While the production of territorial stigmatization is complex and multifaceted, central to this process is the perception and representation of places by outsiders, particularly the media. Through an analysis of crime news articles and crime statistics in Toronto, this paper identifies media coverage as one pathway by which certain neighbourhoods can become known for criminal activity, a key discourse associated with place-based stigma. A systematic search of news articles from major newspapers between 2015 and 2019 was conducted, focusing on terms related to three types of violent crime; robbery, homicide, and assault. Analysis reveals a spatial significance to the coverage of the crimes, with the majority of identified neighbourhoods located in the peripheral North York area and Downtown Toronto. Rates of coverage in the media were then statistically examined in relation to actual crime rates, revealing that several neighbourhoods receive disproportionate coverage as sites of crime by the media, particularly in the district of North York. These findings point to a suburbanization of media-driven perceptions of crime in Toronto, and to the possibility of territorial destigmatization for gentrifying neighbourhoods. Overall, this work highlights the necessity of critiquing not only defamatory discourses in the media, but also the extent to which the media covers criminal activities, because level of coverage is itself likely to be an important determinant of territorial stigmatization.

El San Francisco es un pequeño río que cruza longitudinalmente gran parte del centro de la ciudad de Puebla. Antes de ser entubado en 1963 y quedar escondido bajo un bulevar, este río se había caracterizado como parte importante del ambiente urbano y uno de los principales espacios de la ciudad. En este sentido, buscando establecer un diálogo con la historia ambiental urbana, este artículo analiza las diferentes formas de interacción entabladas entre la ciudad y su río durante fines del siglo XIX y las seis primeras décadas del XX, momento caracterizado por el afán modernizador urbano que culminó con en el entubamiento de la corriente. Utilizando diferentes tipos de fuentes, las cuales incluyen estudios hidráulicos, comunicados, proyecciones cartográficas y notas periodísticas, el presente texto ofrece una interpretación de cómo el San Francisco pasó a ser concebido como un mero elemento antitético a la ciudad e identifica los factores culturales, políticos, técnicos y ambientales que ayudaron a promover el proyecto de entubamiento del río como una solución modernizadora.

The usage of social media was significantly expanded in 2020, what made it necessary to analyze the geographical experience of networking and displacement in the pandemic. By increasing the use of digital technologies in our daily lives, due to the impossibility of fully enjoying the city, we have profoundly modified our physical, bodily and cultural relations with the city. The overlaps between the networks formed in the pandemic, with impact on the territory, and the virtual networks form hybrid spaces. Based on data from a doctoral research from the Postgraduate Program in Geography at the Federal University of Espirito Santo, Brazil, this study investigated the experience of mapping the networks of five women with community activities in the Centro district (downtown), in Vitoria, Espirito Santo, symbolically and materially building another city. The premise is a knowledge process under construction, not necessarily linear or explicitly academic about the relationship between extensive and intensive mapping. The article addresses the relationship between body and city, mapping, displacement records and analysis of these hybrid spaces. In the conclusion, we rescued the extensive and intensive map relationship, the route built in the article and reflections on other possible paths for mapping.

As of 2018, technological innovation in the music industry at large had impacted firms in nearly every sector. Yet, music publishers have been traditionally unconcerned with technological advancement. Several competitive forces have made this position sustainable, but the broader industry’s pace of change was bound to reach the music publishing sector. The laissez-faire attitude of prominent market players in the publishing space has led to a market that was ripe for value innovation, and Downtown Music Publishing has already capitalized in this space, differentiating themselves from their competitors. This case highlights the choices the CEO and co-founder of Downtown Music Publishing and the rest of the senior management team must make about a new product. Should they keep it internal, or should it be spun off?

Objectives: This study aims to highlight the difficulties caused by the motorized transport system in the downtown of Baniyas city, Syria, and analyse the applicability of a non-motorized transport system based on a deep understanding of the nature of the society and the needs of the users. Methods: this study used the observation of the author and data obtained from official reports to identify the challenges in the downtown area caused by the current traffic system, a new non-motorized transport system was designed and proposed to the users through an online questionnaire using Qualtrics online survey tool. After the pilot sample testing the questionnaire was distributed to the targeted group of 326 participants with (11 invalid responses, 17 unqualified respondents and 298 valid responses). The data from their responses was exported to SPSS statistical analysis software then the qualitative data was analysed using SPSS and MS Excel. Findings: The most profound of the results is the significance of the relationship between the social reasons as a factor to prevent people from cycling and the variables of age and gender. The participants’ level of being affected by social reasons varied depending on their age and gender. And when giving people the opportunity to cycle in better conditions after implementing the proposal, it was also found that the participants were positive towards the idea of riding the bicycle regardless of their gender, but according to their age, people reacted differently, the younger people had a positive opinion, but the relatively older people were neutral towards it. Novelty: It is being the first study to target the downtown of Baniyas city, and designs an approach to improve it in addition to design the non-motorized transport system questionnaire which was an original work of this study. Keywords: Nonmotorized transport; Chi square test; Bicycling; Pedestrianization; New transportation system questionnaire

The Main Street Program is a popular smaller-scale economic development strategy used to revitalize historic town centers across the rural United States. In this article, a difference-in-differences design using longitudinal business establishment data is implemented to estimate the program’s causal impact on job and establishment growth in downtown retail districts. Using a pooled sample of four Midwest states, the author found no significant effect of Main Street Program adoption on downtown jobs or establishments. However, for each individual state, a substantial degree of structural heterogeneity across states exists. Iowa emerges as a state where the Main Street Program appears to yield its hypothesized economic benefits to the downtown business districts of participating communities. These findings suggest that Main Street Program participation effects are not generalizable across states and that implementation and local context matter.

Local government funding of sports stadiums is frequently justified as stimulating economic activity despite consensus contrary findings in the academic literature. Though some studies have identified positive neighborhood effects from stadiums on nearby residential property, scant research exists regarding impacts on highly-localized commercial activity that is hypothesized to spur further local economic development. This analysis exploits the recent relocation of a professional baseball team from downtown Atlanta to a pre-existing Georgia Business Improvement District (Community Improvement District or CID) in suburban Cobb County to estimate the impact of the stadium development on commercial property values. The existence of multiple CIDs in the metro-Atlanta area provides the opportunity to estimate a counterfactual comparison absent the stadium to draw causal inference regarding the stadium’s impact on economic activity using the synthetic control method. Estimates do not identify increased commercial property values in the district following the stadium opening, which is consistent with past studies that find little to no positive impact on economic activity. The results indicate that previous findings of positive impacts on residential property may not be applicable to commercial property.

The Pacific Northwest faces the looming threat of a massive 9.0 earthquake coming from the Cascadia Subduction Zone of the Juan de Fuca plate off the coast of Northern California, Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia. City officials, emergency managers, and researchers are preparing for this event by examining not only the earthquake itself, but also the cascading hazards that will follow it, such as fire and tsunami. Additionally, they must measure the effects of these hazards not just on the infrastructure systems they affect (e.g., water, power, transportation, communication, emergency services, etc.) but also how each system is affected by the failure of one or more of the others, or its “dependency.” The following paper discusses the effects of two cascading hazards—earthquake and fire—and the vulnerability of three infrastructure systems—building stock, water, and transportation—with a special focus on the needs of firefighters and other emergency services in the 12 h following a major seismic event. It then frames these methodologies in the context of a fine-grain case study of Seattle downtown and identifies three critical zones where mitigation measures would provide the most benefit. The discussion includes challenges in approaching such studies—the largest being available data, the uncertainties in making these evaluations, and general best practices for increased resilience in urban communities similar to the case study.

In the COVID-19 era, movement restrictions are crucial to slow virus transmission and have been implemented in most parts of the world, including Japan. To find new insights on human mobility and movement restrictions encouraged (but not forced) by the emergency declaration in Japan, we analyzed mobility data at 35 major stations and downtown areas in Japan—each defined as an area overlaid by several 125-meter grids—from September 1, 2019 to March 19, 2021. Data on the total number of unique individuals per hour passing through each area were obtained from Yahoo Japan Corporation (i.e., more than 13,500 data points for each area). We examined the temporal trend in the ratio of the rolling seven-day daily average of the total population to a baseline on January 16, 2020, by ten-year age groups in five time frames. We demonstrated that the degree and trend of mobility decline after the declaration of a state of emergency varies across age groups and even at the subregional level. We demonstrated that monitoring dynamic geographic and temporal mobility information stratified by detailed population characteristics can help guide not only exit strategies from an ongoing emergency declaration, but also initial response strategies before the next possible resurgence. Combining such detailed data with data on vaccination coverage and COVID-19 incidence (including the status of the health care delivery system) can help governments and local authorities develop community-specific mobility restriction policies. This could include strengthening incentives to stay home and raising awareness of cognitive errors that weaken people's resolve to refrain from nonessential movement. Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11524-021-00566-7.

In downtown areas of large cities, it is very challenging for drivers to find available parking spots, even when they are provided with information on parking availability and location information. To overcome this challenge, this paper develops a dynamic vehicle routing system to search for the optimal routes for connected vehicles to find parking spots successfully and to minimize total trip time, including driving time and walking time. The system predicts the probability of each parking lot having available parking spots based on the existing available number of spots and the vehicle arrival and departure rates collected by connected vehicles. This probability is integrated in the search for vehicle routes to minimize total travel and walking times. Numerical experiments indicate that the proposed system can reduce the cruising time spent searching for available parking spots, and the total trip time can be reduced by up to 24%. In addition, the system can decrease the number of re-routing decisions, which reduces the stress of drivers on the road. A sensitivity analysis of the parking probability is also conducted. Some future work based on the proposed system is proposed in the conclusion to this paper.

This paper investigates the effects of the built environment and weather on the demands for transportation network companies (TNC) in Toronto. The research is based on a historical dataset of Uber trips from September 2016 to September 2018 in Toronto. A wide range of built environments, sociodemographic, and weather data are generated at the dissemination area-level and fused with the monthly aggregated Uber dataset. To provide insight into the underlying factors that affect TNC demand, a series of aggregate demand models are estimated using log-transformed constant elasticity demand functions, with consideration of the seasonal lag effect. To capture the weather effect, an autoregressive moving average model is estimated for the downtown core of Toronto. The model results show that the influence of lagged ridership and seasonal lag effect have a positive correlation with TNC demand. The trip generation and attraction models reveal that TNC trips increase where when the commuting trip duration is longer than 60 min. It is found that the number of apartments in a dissemination area is positively correlated with TNC trip generation, while the number of single-detached houses has a negative correlation. The time-series model indicates that temperature and total daily precipitations are positively correlated with TNC demand. Due to the lack of comprehensive data sources on the Uber and Lyft ridership, the policymakers often struggle to make evidence-based policy recommendations to regulate such disruptive technologies. The series of models presented in this study will help us better understand the potential users of transportation network companies (TNC) and the effects of land use, built environment and weather on transportation network company trips.

In this paper, we focus on the cost-sharing problem for ride-sharing: determining how to allocate the total ride cost between the driver and the passengers. In particular, we focus on the scenario where drivers are also commuters with the goal of cost recovery. We identify the properties that a desirable cost-sharing mechanism should have and develop a general framework that can be used to create specific cost-sharing mechanisms. We propose specific mechanisms and analyze their relative advantages and disadvantages so that service providers can select a mechanism according to their different needs. In addition, we incorporate the value of time by allowing passengers to have inconvenience costs due to extra travel time caused by detours for picking up the passengers, and provide discount methods to compensate for these costs. We evaluate our approach using real traffic data from the downtown Los Angeles area. Our results show that each proposed mechanism has its unique advantages and that the discount methods can successfully reduce the number of no-passenger vehicles for a large ride-sharing system.

Purpose According to conventional research and political conceptions, illicit drug scenes are often characterised by cultures of crime, violence and deceit and customarily met by repressive law enforcement. However, a growing body of research demonstrates the very diverse nature of drug subcultures. This paper aims to explore this diversity and thereby investigates the psychosocial and socio-spatial features people selling and/or using drugs in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver (DTES) attribute to the local drug scene. Design/methodology/approach Qualitative in-depth interviews were conducted with 23 persons with drug selling and/or using experiences in the DTES. Interviews were analysed and interpreted according to grounded theory. Findings Participants represent the social fabric of the DTES drug scene as comprising complexly interwoven facets and structures including frequent, brutal violence on the one hand and sincere, heart-rending compassion, care and even love on the other. Originality/value Police and social and health services can cooperate constructively with the overriding aim of individual and social harm reduction. Thereby, the existing social network and prosocial orientations of a drug scene can be used in effective approaches such as participatory policy strategies and peer-driven interventions.

Este trabalho incide sobre o estudo do sismo de 28 de fevereiro de 1969. Procedeu-se ao levantamento de toda a informação existente sobre o fenómeno com o intuito de averiguar o seu impacte no território português. Para tal, analisou-se um largo conjunto de edifícios afetados nos distritos de Lisboa, Setúbal e Faro com vista a estabelecer padrões de danos observados de acordo com as descrições diversas, quer noticiadas nos principais jornais da época quer através de outras fontes, nomeadamente elementos soltos consultados nas Câmaras Municipais (Serviços de Proteção Civil), fotografias obtidas em hemerotecas e dados do SIPA. Estes edifícios foram classificados segundo a sua época de construção e tipologia construtiva para, posteriormente, através da Escala Macrossísmica Europeia (EMS-98), associar um índice de vulnerabilidade e um grau de dano. Esta atribuição permitiu determinar as intensidades para os distritos em estudo, seguida da sua comparação com as intensidades obtidas na época e identificar as tipologias construtivas que apresentam mais fragilidades na ocorrência de um sismo de intensidade semelhante, designadamente as construções antigas das zonas baixas de Lisboa, Setúbal, cidades do Barlavento algarvio e nas suas zonas rurais. Foram identificadas 16 vítimas mortais em Portugal Continental, sendo 3 de consequência direta do sismo.

The iconic Charleston Pineapple Fountain, installed in 1990 at Waterfront Park in downtown Charleston, stands as a symbol of the history and hospitality of the Palmetto State.From the beautiful bea...

Since the emergence of ride-hailing services has changed travel behaviors, a greater understanding of the ride-hailing mode enables us to explore choices and assists in the drafting of more effective policies. This paper aims to investigate the degree of perceived need for motorcycle-based ride-hailing services among university students because young and well-educated people dominate this service. By involving 632 respondents and considering 12 trip characteristics, the Rasch model was used as an instrument to measure the students’ perceived needs and inherent resistance to motorcycle-based ride-hailing services. The model results revealed that the students perceived the highest need for motorcycle-based ride-hailing services for their first- and last-mile trips when they needed to travel out of town by public transport. A need for this service was also perceived by the students for trips at peak periods, trips within tight schedules, trips to downtown areas, trips to campus, and food delivery. In contrast, the study found a weakly perceived need for motorcycle-based ride-hailing for shopping goods and documents delivery, trips for shopping, social, and momentary activities, and short-distance trips. The empirical findings also showed that the variable of gender, monthly income, motorcycle ownership, frequency of use, and time spent as motorcycle-based ride-hailing users contributed to differences of perceived need. The research findings can help the government in deciding effective policies for ride-hailing, especially those related to riding safety and increasing urban transit demand.

Understanding the surrounding scenes is one of the fundamental tasks in intelligent transportation systems (ITS), especially in unpredictable driving scenes or in developing regions/cities without digital maps. Street view is the most common scene during driving. Since streets are often full of shops with signboards, scene text recognition over the shop sign images in street views is of great significance and utility to urban scene understanding in ITS. To advance research in this field, (1) we build ShopSign , which is a large-scale scene text dataset of Chinese shop signs in street views. It contains 25,770 natural scene images, and 267,049 text instances. The images in ShopSign were captured in different scenes, from downtown to developing regions, and across 8 provinces and 20 cities in China, using more than 50 different mobile phones. It is very sparse and imbalanced in nature. (2) we carry out a comprehensive empirical study on the performance of state-of-the-art DL based scene text reading algorithms on ShopSign and three other Chinese scene text datasets, which has not been addressed in the literature before. Through comparative analysis, we demonstrate that language has a critical influence on scene text detection. Moreover, by comparing the accuracy of four scene text recognition algorithms, we show that there is a very large room for further improvements in street view text recognition to fit real-world ITS applications.

This article presents a tool for reaching consensus in the participatory planning of the conversion and renovation of an urban space. It is based on the main assumption of combining descriptive and normative approaches in the actions of experts. It is an innovative way to strengthen the possibility of expert assessment in the decision-making process concerning desired spatial transformations. The authors hereof resorted to their own long-term experience when elaborating a tool that can easily support the selection of the optimal solution for maximizing benefits and minimizing outlay. The issues presented herein refer to the Central European context, which is characterized by a low level of social trust and by contentiousness in making joint decisions. The tool presented herein can contribute to participatory planning practice by enabling an expert to select solutions that meet the highest efficiency criteria on more objective grounds. It can be used to identify the convergent expectations of various social groups, thus facilitating conflict mitigation and arrival at a consensus. As a result, it can underlie the process of building social trust.

Una comunidad empoderada de su patrimonio es aquella que se ha hecho responsable del mismo y aboga por su conservación y preservación. Es por ello que ICOMOS, en la Declaración de Florencia (2014), invita a la creación de estrategias que permitan a la comunidad empoderarse de su patrimonio. Mérida es una ciudad privilegiada ya que sus características geográficas, históricas y sociales la hacen una candidata perfecta para desarrollar una sinergia de turismo cultura como lo propone ICOMOS (1999). La creación de una ruta cultural (de corte artístico – tipología residencial) denominada Mérida Edilicia Moderna – la vivienda unifamiliar, basada en la metodología de López (2006), usando como recurso las viviendas de corte moderno, permitirá a los usuarios hacer un recorrido diferente por el casco central de la ciudad, conocer al hombre merideño de mediados del siglo XX y cómo la ciudad de Mérida deja de ser la ciudad tradicional del damero americano, para convertirse en una ciudad que entra en la modernidad mundial.

The Recreational Business District (RBD) is a more active and attractive place in a city. The development of RBDs has become a popular transforming direction in downtown renewal progress by creatin...

Based on the trend of global aging, people are paying more and more attention to the health of the elderly and the improvement of green open spaces. However, few studies have focused on strategies to improve green spaces in response to this trend. Especially, with the outbreak of COVID-19, an urgent need to develop a sustainable system strategy to improve the health of the elderly in residential communities in old districts has emerged. Traditional improvement strategies based on current situation evaluation often focus on the most prominent practical problems. Therefore, the objective of this study was to provide theoretical research and practical improvement strategies for green open spaces in old downtown residential communities to improve the health and well-being of the elderly. In response to this problem, this research proposes an alternative method based on causality (FDM-DANP-mV model), by extracting 23 green open space elements that affect the health of the elderly and dividing them into three dimensions, to form a preliminary evaluation framework. On this basis, the more effective and feasible standard elements are screened out, and the influence relationship behind the elements is clarified. Then, the sustainable development strategy is systematically discussed in three practical cases. This allows for the analysis of the present situation to not only identify the current significant problems but also to capture the source of the influence behind the real problems based on the clarification of the dominant influence relationship. The actual value of this study is to provide a key design decision basis for the improvement of the green open spaces in old downtown residential communities, aiming at avoiding waste to the greatest extent under the premise of limited resources and gradually promoting the improvement of the urban built environment to promote the health and well-being of the elderly.

With the rapid growth of mobile networks and smart devices, a large number of people prefer to visiting video services via mobile devices. This generates massive data traffic, and thus increases the load of cellular networks. To deal with it, we need to investigate the usage patterns in the video consumption. In this article, we take a data-driven analysis of mobile video services by classifying them into three major types: traditional video portals, user-generated video services and personalized livestreaming. We collect a large dataset of 25,937,758 logs from 455 thousand users, and we find that 1) for the same kind of video services, users exhibit high loyalty; 2) in consecutive days, the traffic peaks have differences among different service types; 3) more video traffic is generated from personalized livestreaming services, and it keeps increasing after midnight at weekdays in the downtown; 4) traffic consumption of user-generated service exhibits great differences under different functional regions; 5) individual users are prone to click within the same service type but possible different time gaps during the consecutive views. Lastly, we utilize these findings to discuss the potential applications in the improvements of cellular networks and video services.

The Brazilian urban centers, in general, emit a saturated landscape of vehicles with visual, noise, thermal, and atmospheric pollution causing stress and discomfort. Thinking about sustainable mobility is the principle of planning for such space’s reformulation, to make them truly pleasant and efficient public spaces. Observing the need of users in the city traffic of Anapolis-GO, this research has essay investigative character based on bibliographical research, census and case study. Done through an analysis of the flow and the aggravating conditions of urban mobility in that region, to enable efficient use of space and consistent with demand from users. The research presents viable alternatives, changing the conformation, the organization of the transit and essentially the cultural meaning of this space, basing on preference to sustainable modes, or even physical restructuring of components that complicating the access to any person.

We present an urban science framework to characterize phone users’ exposure to different street context types based on network science, geographical information systems (GIS), daily individual trajectories, and street imagery. We consider street context as the inferred usage of the street, based on its buildings and construction, categorized in nine possible labels. The labels define whether the street is residential, commercial or downtown, throughway or not, and other special categories. We apply the analysis to the City of Boston, considering daily trajectories synthetically generated with a model based on call detail records (CDR) and images from Google Street View. Images are categorized both manually and using artificial intelligence (AI). We focus on the city’s four main racial/ethnic demographic groups (White, Black, Hispanic and Asian), aiming to characterize the differences in what these groups of people see during their daily activities. Based on daily trajectories, we reconstruct most common paths over the street network. We use street demand (number of times a street is included in a trajectory) to detect each group’s most relevant streets and regions. Based on their street demand, we measure the street context distribution for each group. The inclusion of images allows us to quantitatively measure the prevalence of each context and points to qualitative differences on where that context takes place. Other AI methodologies can further exploit these differences. This approach presents the building blocks to further studies that relate mobile devices’ dynamic records with the differences in urban exposure by demographic groups. The addition of AI-based image analysis to street demand can power up the capabilities of urban planning methodologies, compare multiple cities under a unified framework, and reduce the crudeness of GIS-only mobility analysis. Shortening the gap between big data-driven analysis and traditional human classification analysis can help build smarter and more equal cities while reducing the efforts necessary to study a city’s characteristics.

This paper investigates time-series correlations between macroscopic travel speed and parking garage occupancy in downtown area, using the real-time parking occupancy data via SFPark.org and travel...

O artigo apresenta narrativas memorialísticas sobre vivências da infância, nos caminhos percorridos entre a casa e as instituições escolares do centro urbano de Florianópolis (SC), na primeira metade do século XX: os Grupos Escolares Lauro Müller, Dias Velho, Silveira de Souza e Arquidiocesano de São José. As memórias sobre as “artes de fazer” da infância, capturadas por meio de quinze entrevistas, gravadas em áudio e imagem, são compreendidas na perspectiva de Michel de Certeau, especialmente no que se refere aos conceitos de “espaços praticados” e de “táticas”. Dentre as conclusões, ressalta que as memórias relampejam de um intenso processo de interação entre entrevistador e entrevistado e que a infância de outrora, nas memórias, é um agente social que faz uso de táticas dentro de uma margem própria à ordem social de cada tempo e contexto histórico.

Most of the buildings damaged by the mainshock of the 2016 Kumamoto earthquake were concentrated in downtown Mashiki in Kumamoto Prefecture, Japan. We obtained 1D subsurface velocity structures at 535 grid points covering this area based on 57 identified velocity models, used the linear and equivalent linear analyses to obtain site-specific ground motions, and generated detailed distribution maps of the peak ground acceleration and velocity in Mashiki. We determined the construction period of every individual building in the target area corresponding to updates to the Japanese building codes. Finally, we estimated the damage probability by the nonlinear response model of wooden structures with different ages. The distribution map of the estimated damage probabilities was similar to the map of the damage ratios from a field survey, and moderate damage was estimated in the northwest where no damage survey was conducted. We found that both the detailed site amplification and the construction period of wooden houses are important factors for evaluating the seismic risk of wooden structures.

In 2015, the billionaire Douw Steyn launched a mixed-use megaproject 27 km north of downtown Johannesburg. Plans for Steyn City include 10,000 high-end residential units along with private hospitals, schools, a golf course, an equestrian centre and 2000 acres of parkland behind a 3-m-high perimeter wall. The launch attracted some critique in the media for the exclusive environment that the development sought to create, an ambition that seemed particularly incongruous given its close proximity to the poor settlement of Diepsloot. In response, the developers argued that the project had created more than 11,000 jobs and that wealthy people should invest close to places that need work and livelihood opportunities. This paper is based on interviews with workers who live in Diepsloot and travel each day into Steyn City to work for subcontractors building infrastructure, housing and social facilities. The empirical material shows that although these workers acknowledge the opportunity of employment, they are aware these jobs are uncertain, mostly low-skilled and insufficient to cover the basic costs of everyday life in Diepsloot.

Dance critic and editor Wendy Perron has published a new volume titled The Grand Union: Accidental Anarchists of Downtown Dance, 1970–1976. The improvisational dance group Grand Union brought toget...

Location-based games have been around since 2000. In these games, players are required to move and interact with objects in the physical world. Players need to reach a set of targets by moving outdoors. The targets are real objects (amenities) like statues, restaurants, bridges and contain the name, location and a representative image. The main challenge is finding content and creating games where there is playing interest. In this paper, we study the usefulness of OpenStreetMap (OSM) for content-creation. We study the availability of amenities in different regions and whether they contain sufficient metadata for generating targets. We found that even if the data within OSM itself lacks images; many amenities refer to external links like Wikipedia pages and individual websites, from which we can extract the desired content about 21% of the time. This approach outperforms previously studied methods including Web crawling, geotagged photo datasets, and photo-sharing services such as Flickr. However, OSM data is greatly underrepresented in Asian countries and good results are limited to urban and downtown areas.

Dwell time is defined as the time that delivery workers spend performing out-of-vehicle activities while their vehicle is parked. Restricting vehicle dwell time is widely used to manage commercial vehicle parking behavior. However, there is insufficient data to help assess the effectiveness of these restrictions. This makes it difficult for policymakers to account for the complexity of commercial vehicle parking behavior. The current study aims to identify factors correlated with dwell time for commercial vehicles. This is accomplished by using generalized linear models with data collected from five buildings that are known to include commercial vehicle activities in the downtown area of Seattle, Washington, USA. Our models showed that dwell times for buildings with concierge services tended to be shorter. Deliveries of documents also tended to have shorter dwell times than oversized supplies deliveries. Passenger vehicle deliveries had shorter dwell times than deliveries made with vehicles with roll-up doors or swing doors (e.g., vans and trucks). When there were deliveries made to multiple locations within a building, the dwell times were significantly longer than dwell times made to one location in a building. The findings from the presented models demonstrate the potential for improving future parking policies for commercial vehicles by considering data collected from different building types, delivered goods, and vehicle types.