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Monitoring, understanding and predicting city user behaviour (hottest places, trajectories, flows, etc.) is one the major topics in the context of Smart City management. People flow surveillance provides valuable information about city conditions, useful not only for monitoring and controlling the environmental conditions, but also to optimize the deliverying of city services (security, clean, transport,..). In this context, it is mandatory to develop methods and tools for assessing people behaviour in the city. This paper presents a methodology to instrument the city via the placement of Wi-Fi Access Points, AP, and to use them as sensors to capture and understand city user behaviour with a significant precision rate (the understanding of city user behaviour is concretized with the computing of heat-maps, origin destination matrices and predicting user density). The first issue is the positioning of Wi-Fi AP in the city, thus a comparative analyses have been conducted with respect to the real data (i.e., cab traces) of the city of San Francisco. Several different positioning methodologies of APs have been proposed and compared, to minimize the cost of AP installation with the aim of producing the best origin destination matrices. In a second phase, the methodology was adopted to select suitable AP in the city of Florence (Italy), with the aim of observing city users behaviour. The obtained instrumented Firenze Wi-Fi network collected data for 6 months. The data has been analysed with data mining techniques to infer similarity patterns in AP area and related time series. The resulting model has been validated and used for predicting the number of AP accesses that is also related to number of city users. The research work described in this paper has been conducted in the scope of the EC funded Horizon 2020 project Resolute ( http://www.resolute-eu.org ), for early warning and city resilience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The paper deals with a survey on major advances in the field of bio-imaging presented at the WWMR2010 Conference, held in Florence (Italy) from 4th to 9th July 2010. The selected contributions have been organized into the following headings: Hyperpolarization, Acquisition Methods and Molecular Imaging applications. Overall, the Conference has witnessed an outstanding progress in either methods and applications that further stresses the key-role of MRI in many fields of biomedicine. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Using an ethnographic case study, this paper looks at some of the repercussions of urban sprawl on local food sources in Florence, Italy. The Roselli-Magherini family has been farming their ever-shrinking plot of land on the outskirts of an ever-growing city of Florence since the 17th century. In recent times this family has seen their land partitioned and expropriated due to the creation of roads, parking lots and the development of a multiplex cinema, literally in their backyard. The Roselli-Magherini family has had to downsize from wholesaling their produce (seasonal vegetables) to selling at the San Ambrogio neighbourhood market. No longer able to raise pigs and cows due to city by-laws and unable to afford the employees who helped tend their crops, this family is stilling trying to maintain their traditional way of life. This Florentine family is not alone in their fight to keep farming in peripheral urban areas: the Isolotto area where they live is full of fragmented market garden plots tended by struggling farmers who have watched the city grow around them. The expansion of cities and the rise in land prices has seriously jeopardized local food sources in many Italian cities. This case study brings into discussion the struggle to maintain green spaces in and around cities; access to locally grown foods; contrasts and conflicts between rural and urban life; the viability of small-scale farming near cities. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]