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Cesarean delivery rates are rapidly increasing in Southeastern Europe (to more than 60%), North Africa (with a rate as high as 72% in Egypt), and in urban areas in Southern Africa (a rate of over 50% in Lagos, Nigeria). Data on the background to these increases are scarce, but likely to include poor birthing facilities in general hospitals, convenience for the doctor, private medicine, fear of litigation, socioeconomic status, shortage of midwives and nurses, and disappearance of vaginal instrumental deliveries. Options to reverse cesarean delivery trends are discussed. In this context there is a need to be better informed about how women are being counseled regarding vaginal or cesarean delivery. The long-term consequences in subsequent pregnancies for mothers and children may well be largely ignored, while these risks are highest in LMICs where higher birth numbers are desired. FIGO has begun discussions with obstetric and gynecologic societies, healthcare bodies, and governments in several countries discussed in this article, to find ways to lower the cesarean delivery rate. The requests came from the countries themselves, which may prove beneficial in helping advance progress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Paper‐based composite packages, which have been widely used for beverage in modern daily life, are featured of nutrition preservation and convenience. However, it is also causing environmental problems in urban areas because of the low recycling rate. The introduction of extended producer responsibility (EPR) is helpful to improving the recycling rate of beverage paper‐based composite packaging by extending the producer's environmental‐protecting responsibility for the product from its production to its end‐of‐life treatment. To find out the optimal strategy of applying the EPR system for beverage paper‐based composite packaging, this paper is conducted based on the basic framework of the EPR system, combined with the specific requirements of the EPR System Implementation Plan promulgated by China and the Implementation Plan of the EPR System for Beverage Paper‐Based Composite Packaging. An evaluation index system for beverage paper‐based composite packaging manufacturers is constructed to perform the EPR system, including three management‐level indicators, 10 standard‐level indicators and 42 programme‐level indicators. A comprehensive evaluation method is introduced to help the producers to fulfill the extended producer responsibility. Results suggest that beverage paper‐based composite packaging producers should first fulfill the responsibility in information disclosure, ecological design and use of recycled materials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Africa's population is expected to triple by 2050, owing to rapid urbanisation and overall demographic trends. The combined pressures of urbanisation and climate change impact the ecosystem and the services it provides. As a result, additional dangers such as increased flooding, and environmental disruption have risen. Therefore, devising adaptive solutions to mitigate flood risk impacts while also building community resilience is needed. Evidence suggests that Nature‐based Solutions (NbS) can potentially alleviate floods and mitigate climate change impacts while also delivering other societal benefits. Despite rising NbS popularity following its recognition in the last decade, studies on its recognition in Africa remain limited. For this reason, this paper reviewed NbS studies conducted in East Africa (EA) to evaluate opportunities and barriers surrounding NbS adoption in EA. Academic literature published from January 2012 to May 2022 was reviewed using a comprehensive search of the SCOPUS database. Results show 14 papers have been published during the period, with the majority being post‐2020. In addition, the majority of the articles focused on cities and peri‐urban settlements, while public awareness, clear guidelines on performance monitoring, stakeholder inclusion, and diverse demonstration projects were highlighted as potential success factors for the adoption of NbS in EA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Flash floods can carry substantial sediment, posing significant sedimentation hazards in hilly cities. The sedimentation hazard map can reproduce the sediment thickness and extent of an extreme events scenario, playing an important role in sediment risk management. However, current research primarily focuses on modeling the inundation area and depth of floods, while studying sedimentation hazard caused by flash floods in urban areas remains insufficient. This paper aims to address this gap by utilizing a numerical model that simulates hyperconcentrated flow in hilly urban areas using the two‐dimensional hydro‐sediment‐morphological model to compile the cumulative sedimentation hazard map. The model, built upon the open‐source TELEMAC‐MASCARET framework, incorporates Zhang Hongwu's formula to simulate sediment‐carrying capacity, particularly suitable for hyper‐sediment concentration near the riverbed. This paper uses the data of extreme flash flood events in the Wuding River basin in 2017 to simulate and compile the cumulative sedimentation hazard map. The hazard map delineates the sedimentation hazard extent and level attributable to overbank floodplain sedimentation. Notably, the sediment thickness is highest in areas near the levees on both sides of the Dali River. Moreover, the map illustrates the extent of channel erosion resulting from hyperconcentrated floods, which could jeopardize bank stability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of this research was to investigate the performance of an electrochemical process for enhancing dewaterability and stabilize wastewater sludge from paper mill industry (PMS) and municipal wastewater (MWS) treatment plants. The treatment was conducted using 13.2 kg of sulfuric acid (H2SO4) per ton of dry sludge (TDS) and 200 kg of NaCl/tds as electrolytes, at a current intensity of 8A for 60 min. The process was efficient for increasing the dryness of PMS with an average value of 25.3 ± 1.2% (w/w). By comparison, the electrochemical treatment using MWS allowed increasing the dryness to 33.4 ± 1.4% (w/w). Simultaneously, the process was found to be effective in removing pathogen indicators (abatement > 4 to 5 log units of total and fecal coliforms) using either PMS or MWS. At the same time, it preserved the fertilizing properties of sludge by maintaining the concentration of Ptot, N-TKN and COD in dewatered sludge. The substitution of sodium chloride (used as electrolyte) by sodium sulfate (Na2SO4) combined with hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) allowed reducing the formation of organo-chlorinated compounds: more than 50% of chloroform was reduced, 86% of toluene was reduced and 59% of phenolic compounds was reduced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I develop an urban social geography of neurodiversity that attends to the plurality of neurodiversity and of neurodiverse experiences of the city. Geographers have remained relatively silent on issues of neurodiversity in the city and, as such, the perspectives and experiences of neurodiverse individuals remain vastly unreported. The city is a crucial spatial context of everyday life for those who are neurodiverse as it can present challenges due to its complex, unpredictable and fluid nature. Drawing on recent calls for the development of a relational geography of disability, this paper explores the intricate geographies of neurodiversity in the city, revealing ways urban spaces become spaces of belonging or exclusion for those who are neurodiverse. Urban spaces are experienced in diverse and complex ways, linked to a multitude of neurological differences and their intersections. The paper reveals social, spatial and temporal practices and processes through which urban spaces acquire meaning for those who are neurodiverse. The research offers important insights for urban planning and policy, particularly in terms of thinking complexly about neurodiversity and associated questions of inclusion and exclusion in the city. The paper concludes with a discussion of some future research directions for an urban geography of neurodiversity. In this paper I develop an urban social geography of neurodiversity that attends to the plurality of neurodiversity and of neurodiverse experiences of the city. Drawing on recent calls for the development of a relational geography of disability, this paper explores the intricate geographies of neurodiversity in the city, revealing ways urban spaces become spaces of belonging or exclusion for those who are neurodiverse. The paper reveals social, spatial, and temporal practices and processes through which urban spaces acquire meaning for those who are neurodiverse. The research offers important insights for urban planning and policy, particularly in terms of thinking complexly about neurodiversity and questions of inclusion and exclusion in the city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The increasing fortification of borders produces new urban forms of irregular migration. This paper invokes the concept of "borderzone departure cities" as urban constellations created where global migration routes meet blocked borders in cities which become jumping‐off points from which migrants try to depart. The paper examines Athens and Calais as borderzone departure cities located at both sides of the EU Schengen area. By focussing on the Athenian City Plaza squat and the makeshift Calais Jungle camp as emblematic yet relational spaces of departure, the paper moves beyond the squat/camp divide to better understand how irregular migrants struggle against hostile bordering apparatuses through urban practices of meanwhile inhabitation and mobile commoning. The paper illustrates how these spaces were variously assembled, run, and experienced to form the conditions for movement and stay, each holding different potentials for creating solidarity infrastructures and negotiating forms of migrant citizenship to support the uncertain urban realities of those stuck on the move. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Disasters is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The circular economy has been promoted as a solution to plastic pollution, but cities and communities bear the brunt of plastic pollution. The Circularity Assessment Protocol (CAP) is a systems method of collaborative and open data collection for communities to use for decision‐ and policy‐making. The CAP has been utilized in 51 cities in 14 countries and is illustrated here in Metro Manila. Results include identifying manufacturing and parent companies to bring to the table; documenting most (77%) products are in single‐use multi‐layer film packaging; a small, but growing formal refill and reuse system; 10% of to‐go food containers composed of paper‐based alternatives, and a snap‐shot leakage concentration of plastics to the environment that is 1.8%–2.7% of current waste generation. Community narratives emerged from a collaborative workshop and are threaded throughout opportunities identified by the CAP process to inform circularity, future actions, and policy, as a scalable way to create systems change for plastic pollution from the ground up. Plain Language Summary: The Circularity Assessment Protocol, or CAP, is a collaborative framework for communities to collect data on circular materials management, like plastic packaging or food waste. This framework is illustrated for plastic packaging with a local non‐governmental partner in Manila, Philippines. From this framework, local community members help to define opportunities to reduce plastic pollution. Key Points: A Circularity Assessment Protocol framework for cities was developed and applied to Metro ManilaA local trained community partner collected data working with researchers; community members identified opportunities to optimize circularityThis localized framework provides community‐level opportunities to change, and over multiple cities can create a larger systems change [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, Gaussian Process Regression (GPR)‐based models which use the Bayesian approach to regression analysis problem such as load forecasting (LF) are proposed. The GPR is a non‐parametric kernel‐based learning method having the ability to provide correct predictions with uncertainty in measurements. The proposed model provides an hourly and monthly load forecast for an Australian city and four Indian cities in the Maharashtra state. Twelve GPR models are trained with historical datasets including hourly load and environmental data. To evaluate the trained model, the actual and predicted load demand curve is plotted and mean average percentage error (MAPE) is calculated corresponding to different kernel functions of the GPR model. To the best of the author's knowledge, the prediction of load demand using GPR for Indian cities of Maharashtra state has been made for the first time. The calculated MAPE in LF is 0.15% for Australia and 0.002%, 0.209%, 0.077%, and 0.140% for Indian cities viz. Nasik, Bhusawal, Kolhapur, and Aurangabad, respectively. The test results illustrate that minimum MAPE in load prediction is obtained using the proposed model that is GPR with 'Exponential' kernel functions. Furthermore, the comparative analysis with the existing approaches confirms the dominance of the proposed model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urban expansion is a major threat to diversity, especially in rapidly developing tropical countries where urban areas are growing at great pace and protection is limited.We conducted a systematic review of published research on the ecology of lentic habitats in tropical urban areas. The review focused on understanding: (1) how much is currently known about the biodiversity of these habitats; (2) whether this knowledge is biased towards certain taxonomic groups and/or geographic areas; (3) what is known about the factors influencing their diversity; and (4) which ecosystem services urban lentic habitats provide. The review aimed to establish whether existing knowledge is sufficient to help guide conservation and provide evidence to policy makers of the importance of conserving tropical urban wetlands.We found 64 papers that addressed questions about the diversity and/or distribution of lentic ecosystems within tropical urban areas. Papers came from 15 countries, although almost half (45%) were from India; relatively few countries from Southeast Asia, tropical Africa, or South America were represented in the literature.Publication patterns revealed a growing interest in urban wetlands, but several biases and gaps were evident from the review. Firstly, papers generally focused on larger natural or semi‐natural wetlands, with other types and sizes of lentic habitat under‐represented in published work. Secondly, most papers focused on a single site, with a limited number of multi‐site, city‐wide, or landscape‐scale diversity assessments. Thirdly, studies tended to focus on understanding the influence of water quality on diversity, with work assessing the influence of physical habitat or factors related to dispersal and connectivity very limited. Finally, work assessing the ecosystem services provided by wetlands in tropical urban areas remains narrow in focus, with few quantitative assessments of the relationship between ecological characteristics and ecosystem functions and services.We suggest a number of research focal points and approaches to help address these biases. Research is needed to improve understanding of the distribution patterns tropical freshwater species in urban areas and of the relationships between species diversity and a wider set of environmental and spatial conditions. Overall, there is a need for diversity assessments of tropical urban wetlands of all types and sizes, especially new and novel habitats, and scope for much greater adoption of ecosystem service concepts and evaluation tools to help emphasise the importance of these habitats. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mega‐events like the Olympics and the football World Cups remain popular around the globe, regardless of their record of damaging host cities and societies. In parallel, research on mega‐events continues to grow across a range of disciplines, including geography. Much of this literature remains fixed at global levels of analysis. In this light, mega‐events suffer from a double problem: their planning and articulation too often cause harm to cities and societies and, simultaneously, research on mega‐events focuses too much on the macro. This paper endeavours to address both problems by proposing to make sense of mega‐events by thinking through the minor. This concern valorises micro scales and marginalised people, those who most often lose during mega‐event hosting. The paper argues that geographers are uniquely positioned to conduct nuanced mega‐event research across a globally diverse range of political‐economic contexts, and calls for more geographers to contribute to this project in a move towards a critical geography of mega‐events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

George Floyd's murder by a white policeman has sparked the largest urban uprising in US cities since the 1960s. By contextualising this wave of uprisings in the broader context of similar uprisings in twenty‐first‐century US cities, this paper shows that such an uprising has long been in the making with the violence, murders and revolts that have marked US cities since the turn of the century. My argument in this paper is against the pathological framing of these uprisings that evokes the alleged irrational anger of those who participate in the uprisings and the bad behaviour of a few police officers. Such a framing directs attention away from the structural violence that is at the source of these uprisings, and perpetuates racialised images of those who participate in the uprisings as irrational and impulsive. These uprisings, I argue, are not the actions of irrationally angry individuals mindlessly following the crowds; they cannot be reduced to gratuitous looting and burning, and they are not triggered by some police officers behaving badly. The sources of this urban rage lie in systematic, mostly unchecked, violence. The rage that erupts in these uprisings is a political emotion guided by cognition and judgements about right and wrong, just and unjust, rather than a pathological reaction spurred by uncontrollable impulses. It is a deliberate response to white contempt and the violence associated with it. This article is an attempt to reflect on the political aspects of rage as an emotion. By exploring recent urban uprisings, I argue that the pathological framing of rage that erupts in such events is misleading, as it diverts attention away from the structural violence that produces them. The rage that erupts in urban uprisings is a political emotion and a deliberate response to violence, rather than a pathological reaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a renewed interest in policy initiatives that aim to ruralize and regionalize immigration in Canada. These efforts are visible through temporary foreign worker programs linked to Provincial Nominee Programs, as well as the increase in the number of refugee resettlement programs in smaller communities. Against this backdrop, cities in Canada are experiencing a housing crisis. There is a tacit assumption that immigrants in smaller and more rural settings will fare better with respect to housing. This paper examines the assumptions underpinning efforts to ruralize and regionalize immigration—namely that immigrants to smaller centres will find more affordable and available housing. By presenting two case studies of small towns that have successfully leveraged immigration to meet their labour market needs, this paper demonstrates that housing remains a critical issue for newcomers, even outside of large urban centres. Further, the paper argues that discussions about housing need to be linked to broader policy conversations about immigration and labour, especially in contexts where transnational corporations leverage immigration and temporary labour programs to secure their workforce, without parallel investments in infrastructure and housing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 resulted in a massive exodus of Ukrainians to Europe but also the emigration of Russian citizens. While attention has primarily been on the flow of Russian migrants to neighbouring countries, intercontinental migrations to regions like South America have been overlooked. This paper sheds light on the growing trend of Russians settling in Brazil. Drawing on a comprehensive dataset of migration statistics and qualitative data from empirical fieldwork conducted between 2019 and 2023 in three Brazilian cities, our analysis reveals that new Russian migrants to Brazil are primarily young, highly skilled and resourceful individuals. Unlike in other regions, family migration with young children is common among recent Russian migrants to Brazil. We show that strategic births ‐ using the birth of children to gain  residency and citizenship ‐has become the primary migration channel, forming a new migration system characterised by intensive circulation and turnover between Russia and Brazil. Moreover, while Russian emigration is driven by political reasons, the incorporation of migrants into Brazilian cities is influenced by the relatively privileged economic and legal status of these families. The paper contributes to a deeper understanding of complex migration patterns in the “Global South” by illuminating a geographically unconventional flow. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Smart city construction is an essential practice in the effort to promote the digital transformation of society as a whole. Taking China's 'National Smart City' pilot project as a quasi‐natural experiment, this paper studies the income distribution effect of smart city construction by building a differences‐in‐differences model and using the data of China's prefecture‐level cities from 2008 to 2018. The results show that implementing China's 'National Smart City' pilot project has significantly reduced regional income inequality. However, this effect has heterogeneity. In regions with a higher level of economic development, human capital accumulation and R&D investment, the impact of smart city construction on reducing income inequality is stronger. In areas with a higher level of human capital accumulation, smart city construction can reduce income inequality. However, this effect is insignificant in areas with a lower level of human capital accumulation. Mechanisms tests show that smart city construction can reduce regional income inequality by creating more jobs, narrowing the digital divide and improving public service delivery. As stated above, this paper implies that accelerating the construction of smart cities and improving the digital and intelligence levels of the wider society is of great significance to reducing income inequality and building a more reasonable income distribution structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Chinese government has been using water efficiency targets to manage commercial, institutional, and industrial water use across the country. This paper argues that water efficiency targets may influence provincial administrators’ preferences in tightening water regulation in cities with higher water use while disproportionately overregulating water use in productive cities to satisfy their efficiency goals. I develop a city‐level production model with water regulation preferences and show that the unintended distortion of water regulation in response to water efficiency targets leads to efficiency loss of resource allocation and further reshapes regional output across cities, especially for productive cities. Using a sample of city‐level water data from 2006 to 2016 in China, this paper empirically investigates the impact of the Three Red Lines (TRL) policy on provincial administrators’ preferences in water use regulation. The results indicate that the elasticity of water regulation in response to the policy is approximately −0.64 to −0.8 and has resulted in tighter water regulations for cities with higher economic outputs. Quantitatively, eliminating water distortions would reshape water use across cities and increase the aggregate output of an entire province by up to 0.069%. The results imply that possible consequences of the political consideration of provincial administrators in satisfying water efficiency targets include inefficiency and inequality in water allocation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT This paper examines the transnational and translocal experiences of the Rohingya in India, a stateless, refugee community forcibly displaced from Myanmar, onward migrants from Bangladesh, who currently occupy a legally precarious space in India. Drawing on approximately 90 interviews conducted with refugees, community leaders and NGOs across three Indian cities, along with informal group discussions and field notes, this paper makes two arguments that shed light on the complex, multi‐factorial ways in which networks are rebuilt in displacement as well as the emerging characteristics of Rohingya onward migration in Asia. First, that early generations of Rohingya in India leveraged translocal network building spaces and encounters to rebuild their networks with others in the community and create translocal networks of care and support with local civil society actors, cementing the notion of a ‘Rohingya refugee community’ in India. Second, that the gradual internationalisation of the Rohingya crisis as well as the transnationalisation of the Rohingya diaspora in the last decade through multiple waves of displacement, onward migration and resettlement schemes has prompted a shift towards multi‐sited transnationalism, particularly reflected in the emergence of multi‐sited transnational families, digital transnational spaces among younger refugees and extended diasporic networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws together elements of the academic literature on policy mobilities on the one hand, and on the 'digital turn' on the other. It argues that COVID‐19 accelerated the digitalization of everyday life asking we think through how those already existing informational infrastructures supporting the mobility of policies are continuing to evolve, as are the methods available for researching them. This has potential consequences for how cities practice policy comparison exchange, and learning and how these processes are studied. This paper sets out a three‐pronged schema to take seriously the intersection of policy mobilities and the digital. They are policy mobilities through the digital, policy mobilities produced by the digital and policy mobilities of the digital. It concludes by outlining fruitful areas for a future research agenda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper makes a case for viewing vacancy as "precarious property" (Blomley 2020; Antipode 52[1]:36–57), i.e. less a material object defined by absence of use than the property relation (understood as a bundle of social, economic, legal, and political relationships) put under strain by the visibility of non‐use. Focusing on Dublin's temporary urbanism moment (2008–2017), the paper has two aims. Firstly, it gives a critical account of this recent urban history of experimentation, documenting how the possibilities of the period following the crash were (fore)closed through governmental interventions. Secondly, the empirical case is used to make a wider conceptual argument about the conjunctural role that vacancy plays in urbanisation and urban politics, developing three main arguments: that vacancy is a vulnerable axis within the ownership model of property; that claims to vacancy are articulated in conjunctural and contextual ways; and that vacancy epitomises the dual nature of precarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The outbreak of pandemic at the beginning of 2020 has been urban exclusive and brought the existing inequalities across class and different types of settlements into the forefront. A prolonged period of lockdown, promotion of social distancing, and quarantine of infected individuals, which had been recommended as preventive measures raises a question on the feasibility of these measures in Indian cities considering the challenges related to adequate housing and exclusive access to basic amenities. Against this background, this paper tries to understand the level of pandemic preparedness of urban households across different socio-economic groups, city-size, and settlement types and its changes in the last two decades based on an analysis of unit level data from the National Sample Survey (NSS). The paper has attempted to construct a 'Pandemic Preparedness Index' (PPI) to measure a household's ability to maintain isolation and social distancing. Results indicate that urban households have become more prepared for such pandemics over this period. However, the poor and slum households, particularly located in metropolitan cities still face multiple deprivations related to housing and basic amenities, which make them more vulnerable to such pandemics. This paper calls for urban household's pandemic and disaster preparedness with an increased policy focus on poor and slum households in metropolitan cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The construction of sub‐daily pressure series is described for the cities of London (GB) and Paris (FR). The series extend back 1692 and 1748, respectively, and as such they represent two of the longest sub‐daily series of barometric pressure available. These series are updated from the previously documented London and Paris daily series and offer more homogeneous series, and in the case of the London series a more temporally complete sequence of data. A pairwise homogenization procedure has been applied to the two series alongside the long series of pressure that exists for De Bilt (NL). The De Bilt series has been available for some time in the International Surface Pressure Dataset (ISPD), but further quality control and homogeneity‐checking procedures have been applied to the data in this paper and therefore the three series are released together in this dataset. The series are of immediate interest for understanding changes to storm activity across the English Channel and North Atlantic region over an extended timeframe but may also be assimilated into reanalysis datasets such as the 20th‐century reanalysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Well‐being is rarely considered in studies of residential segregation. This paper explores the spatial distribution of well‐being and its relationship to various forms of residential segregation. External well‐being indices are obtained for Swedish individuals through register data. The mean well‐being of 13 scales of bespoke neighbourhoods is classified into 12 clusters. Similar to previous findings, a strongly polarised pattern of neighbourhood well‐being is found. Neighbourhood well‐being is found to strongly correlate with more traditional measures of segregation. Areas in cities found in more traditional segregation studies have lower well‐being. Half of the working population lives in areas that have homogenised levels of well‐being; 14% live in a well‐being‐deprived neighbourhood. Low‐scoring areas are deprived in most well‐being dimensions, while middle and high‐scoring neighbourhoods vary in the domains they excel in. The paper is one of the first to connect segregation studies to explore the causes of the spatial sorting of well‐being. Moreover, it is one of the few that explores well‐being on scales below the regional level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on Angoulême, a town in Bordeaux and the Atlantic coast in France. The town was the center of the French paper industry during the 17th century. Festival de la Bande Dessinée or the Festival of Cartoons is being held in the town during January. The highlight of the celebration is the Centre National de la Bande Dessinée ed de I'Image.

The successful movement of individuals is fundamental to life. Facilitating these movements by promoting ecological connectivity has become a central theme in ecology and conservation. Urban areas contain more than half of the world's human population, and their potential to support biodiversity and to connect their citizens to nature is increasingly recognized. Promoting ecological connectivity within these areas is essential to reaching this potential. However, our current understanding of ecological connectivity within urban areas appears limited., We reviewed the published scientific literature to assess the state-of-the-art of ecological connectivity research in urban areas, summarized trends in study attributes and highlighted knowledge gaps., We found 174 papers that investigated ecological connectivity within urban areas. These papers addressed either structural (48) or functional connectivity (111), and some addressed both (15), but contained substantial geographic and taxonomic biases. These papers rarely defined the aspect of connectivity they were investigating and objective descriptions of the local urban context were uncommon. Formulated hypotheses or a priori predictions were typically unstated and many papers used suboptimal study designs and methods., We suggest future studies explicitly consider and quantify the landscape within their analyses and make greater use of available and rapidly developing tools and methods for measuring functional connectivity (e.g. biotelemetry or landscape genetics). We also highlight the need for studies to clearly define how the terms ' urban' and ' connectivity' have been applied., Knowledge gaps in ecological connectivity in urban areas remain, partly because the field is still in its infancy and partly because we must better capitalize on the state-of-the-art technological and analytical techniques that are increasingly available. Well-designed studies that employed high-resolution data and powerful analytical techniques highlight our abilities to quantify ecological connectivity in urban areas. These studies are exemplary, setting the standards for future research to facilitate data-driven and evidence-based biodiversity-friendly infrastructure planning in urban areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urbanization in India has been on a rise, as can also be seen in emerging economies like Brazil, China, and Indonesia. India in 2011 was 31.2% urban with 377 million living in urban areas, which increased to 34% in 2017. The urban population is set to increase to 590 million by 2030 placing pressure on Indian infrastructure, which will necessitate the construction of 700 to 900 million square meters of commercial, residential, gardens, parks, and open spaces, in order to meet the demands of urban population. In the present study, gardens and parks in the city of Pune (Maharashtra State, India) and their revenue and expenditure heads (for year 2018–19) have been administered. The paper aims to study how public sector owned gardens and parks can be better utilized for advertising, co‐working spaces, physical fitness centers and be converted into revenue generating assets for the city, which are currently acting as liabilities. Explorative research methodology has been utilized and the study is based on secondary data collected majorly from the local Municipal Corporation office. Important findings of the paper suggest – as to how under‐utilized public gardens and parks can be converted into multifaced, revenue generating areas without hindering the core objective of open places and thereby helping the city level corporation in smoothly fulfilling its roles and responsibilities. The paper would thus play a positive role in aiding the local government to look at innovative sources of financing and thus, reduce its financial dependability on higher levels of government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Papers in Regional Science is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Papers in Regional Science is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper reviews literature and identifies trends in the study of slum redevelopment and rehabilitation policies in India since the country's Independence. In doing so, it brings into conversation literature from various disciplines centered around slum redevelopment and rehabilitation policies of Indian cities. The paper begins by laying out the history of slum redevelopment and rehabilitation policies in India and then contextualizing the policies by examining how they came about and how they correspond to specific moments of the Indian political‐economy, especially the "liberalization" of the market in the 1990s. In the second section, the paper highlights trends in contemporary research on slum redevelopment and rehabilitation policies with a focus on studies on dispossession. The final section identifies a critical omission of the socio‐spatial realities of caste in contemporary studies of slum redevelopment and provides suggestions for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During research conducted in the summer of 2020, I observed the advanced marginality of the refugees in Ankara, Turkey. While some authors have examined this precarity, and some others have examined how refugees have begun to live in a spatially distinct section of certain cities, the combination of these two phenomena demands further investigation. If the underpinning truly is spatial as claimed by Lefebvre (The production of space. Oxford and Cambridge: Blackwell, 1991), then the precarious subject and the precarious space co‐produce each other. What this paper intends to do is to combine space and precarity using the observations of Wacquant (Urban poverty and the underclass: a reader. Oxford and Cambridge: Blackwell, 1996, Urban Studies, 2016, 53, 1077) in his various analyses on the ghetto in France and the United States. In Wacquant's work, we can begin to see a spatial conception of precarity, and we can further extend this to the point that as space is a production and its subjects are also a co‐constitution of that space. Nevertheless, Sampson (Ethnic & Racial Studies, 2014, 37, 1732) points out a certain state centrism in Wacquant's analysis. Building upon this, as well as the work of Roy (International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2011, 35, 223 and Territories of poverty: rethinking north and south. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015), we can offer the refugee neighbourhood in Ankara as an example of "bottom‐up" agency, alternative to Wacquant's original state‐centric analysis. In the course of this paper, this possibility of a "bottom‐up" refugee solidarity and related refugee space will be analysed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how extreme weather events affect the mobility of low‐income urban residents in Ghana. Bringing together scholarship on extreme weather and mobilities, it explores the differential impact of flooding on their everyday lives as they navigate the cities of Accra and Tamale. A range of qualitative methods were drawn on, including semi‐structured interviews, focus group discussions, and follow‐along‐participant observations in selected communities of both cities. Three key themes emerged: disrupted road and transport infrastructure, everyday mobility challenges, and coping/adaptive strategies. In flooding conditions, residents experienced difficulties leaving/returning home, engaging in income‐generating activities, and accessing transport services and other key urban infrastructure. Conceptually, the paper reveals how disruption to urban residents' daily movements and activities (re)produces new forms of mobilities and immobilities, which have three relational elements: postponed, improvised and assisted. Throughout the analysis, we show how these mobilities/immobilities vary by age and gender: all urban residents, (though women in particular), experience postponed mobility; young people especially engage in improvised mobility; and children and the elderly are in greatest need of assisted mobility. The paper thus contributes to scholarship on extreme weather events and mobility by providing a more spatially nuanced understanding of the multi‐faceted domains in which flooding, socio‐economic conditions and adaptive strategies intersect to influence urban mobility in resource poor settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers travel information on the town of Wells and the caves of Mendip Hills in Somerset, England. The cathedral town is considered to be an important link in the Saxon kingdom of Wessex. Among its attractions are the Cheddar Showcaves & Gorge, the Wells Cathedral and the Wookey Hole Caves & Paper Mill. Information on hotels and restaurants are also provided.

This paper examines the determinants of private tutoring in five major Middle East and North Africa (MENA) countries: Egypt, Algeria, Lebanon, Morocco, and Tunisia. The paper uses data extracted from the SAHWA Youth Survey (2016) and runs a probit model. The main findings indicate that age, receiving financial support, having educated parents and living in urban areas increase the demand for private tutoring. Conversely, the results show that being a male student or a child of an employed mother will decrease the need for a private tutor. The empirical findings propose potential policy implications for MENA countries facing the exacerbation of gaps in the education system while emphasizing the challenges hindering public schools from delivering quality education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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A low‐cost and accurate positioning solution is significant for the massive deployment of fully autonomous driving vehicles (ADV). Conventional mechanical LiDAR has proven its performance, but its high cost hinders the massive production of autonomous vehicles. This paper proposes a low‐cost LiDAR/inertial‐based localization solution for autonomous systems with prior maps in urban areas. Instead of relying on the costly mechanical LiDAR, this paper proposes to utilize the solid‐state LiDAR (SSL) with the prior map to estimate the position of the vehicle by matching the real‐time point clouds from the SSL and the prior map using the normal distribution transformation (NDT) algorithm. However, the field of view (FOV) of the SSL is signifcantly smaller than the conventional mechanical LiDAR, which can easily lead to failure during the NDT map matching. To fill this gap, this paper proposes to exploit the complementariness of the inertial measurement unit (IMU) and the SSL, where the IMU pre‐integration provides a coarse but high‐frequency initial guess to the map matching. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method in this paper, the authors collect the dataset in two typical urban scenarios through a pedestrian hand‐hold and a vehicle driving condition. The results reveal that the SSL‐only‐based localization is significantly challenged in dynamic scenarios. With the help of the IMU, the robustness of the proposed method is significantly improved, achieving an accuracy of within 0.5 m. To show the sensitivity of the SSL‐based map matching against the initial guess of the state, this paper also presents the convergence results of the map matching under different levels of accuracy in terms of the initial guess. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Recent scholarship on smart cities and platform urbanism has explored the very wide range of data harvested from urban environments by digital devices of many kinds, analysing how not only efficiencies but also profits are sought through the extraction, circulation, transformation, commodification, integration, and re‐use of data. Much of that data is generated by smartphone applications. This paper looks at the design of a group of eight smartphone apps by a range of different actors in Milton Keynes, a small UK city with a large number of smart city initiatives. The apps are understood as a co‐constitutive interface between data circulations and embodied users. The paper focuses specifically on the data that the apps generated and shared and on how the app designers anticipated that the data would create different kinds of value for embodied app users. While some data circulations were understood as ways of generating financial value, the paper argues that a number of other forms of value were assumed in the app design. The paper identifies two of these, which it terms normative values and interactive values. It examines how the data mobilised by the smart city apps enacts particular versions of these values, and how those values co‐constitute specific kinds of bodies, agencies, and geographies in digitally mediated cities. This paper looks at the design of a group of eight smartphone apps by a range of different actors in a small UK city with a large number of smart city initiatives. The apps are understood as a co‐constitutive interface between data circulations and embodied users. The paper focuses specifically on the data that the apps generated and shared, on how the app designers anticipated that the data would create different kinds of value for embodied app users, and on how those values co‐constituted specific forms of embodiment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper brings into dialogue recent critical scholarship on smart cities and geographies of the future by examining how city dwellers encounter normative visions of the future supplied by government actors under smart urbanisation. I focus specifically on the prosaic but significant ways in which people (re)interpret and (re)produce urban futures in and through their everyday affective and material engagements with digital technologies. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and semi‐structured interviews, I discuss the extent to which state‐promulgated imaginings of digital urban futures projected by electronic payment infrastructures are negotiated by urban inhabitants in Singapore, at both the levels of the individual and the collective. Although there is a tendency in Urban Studies to read the smart city as depoliticising, the findings in this paper suggest that urban dwellers' lived encounters with digital urban futures are characterised and bound up with politics. Furthermore, this paper casts attention on forms of negotiation that emerge not from grassroots movements and/or democratic activism that have so far attracted social and cultural geographers working on the future, but everyday lived practice around the digital. Such a fine‐grained, practice‐based approach productively foregrounds emancipatory potential for reworking and reimagining normative digital urban futures. Equally importantly, it takes seriously the diverse and uneven future‐making capacities of urban inhabitants in the digitally mediated city, contributing to ongoing projects that seek to develop a globally oriented alternative smart urban agenda for cities and urban spaces in the 21st century. This paper brings into dialogue recent critical scholarship on smart cities and geographies of the future by examining how city dwellers encounter normative visions of the future supplied by government actors under smart urbanisation. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and semi‐structured interviews, it discusses the extent to which state‐promulgated imaginings of digital urban futures projected by electronic payment infrastructures are negotiated by urban inhabitants in Singapore, at both the levels of the individual and the collective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the impact of the arrival of Airbnb on local consumption amenities in Madrid. We exploit the exogenous variation created by the timing and uneven distribution of Airbnb listings in the city to determine the impact on food and beverage establishments. Using an instrumental variable strategy, we find positive local effects on both the number of restaurants and their employees: an increase of 14 Airbnb rooms in a given census tract leads to almost one more restaurant, and the same increase in a given neighborhood generates 11 new tourist‐related employees. The results are robust to the specification and sample composition. This paper contributes to the literature on the economic impact of the platform economy on urban areas by providing evidence of market expansion externalities from short‐term rentals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past 30 years, Sudan has experienced several severe floods which have caused loss of life and significant damage to property. The frequency and intensity of floods in Sudan are predicted to increase as a result of climate change. The main objective of this research was to assist policymakers in establishing a mechanism for public participation in Sudan to enable communities to be engaged in improving flood risk management. This paper focuses on Tuti Island, which is located near the confluence of the Blue and White Niles in Khartoum which is severely affected by flooding. The research was based on surveys and interviews with both officials and the public to examine the degree of public participation in mitigating flood risks. The research concluded that Sudan has no policy or official way of engaging the public in disaster risk reduction; however, the traditional method of social mobilization called Nafeer (building together) can play a significant role in increasing communities' flood resilience. Establishing a clear framework for public participation, such as Nafeer, for the various stages of the flood management cycle that coordinates with decision‐makers can help increase the resilience of urban areas in low‐income countries like Sudan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The potential of the low carbon city pilot (LCCP) to foster enterprise green technology innovation (EGTI) is contingent upon enhancing the quality of urban development, improving the ecological environment, and ultimately achieving the objective of "double carbon" reduction. Due to this, this article uses data from Chinese A‐share listed businesses in Shanghai and Shenzhen from 2009 to 2021 to investigate the effect of LCCP on EGTI. It is found that LCCP significantly contributes to EGTI, and a number of robustness tests later, this finding remains valid. The mechanism analysis confirms that LCCP promotes EGTI by weakening economic policy uncertainty and increasing firms' R&D investment. Through the heterogeneity analysis, this paper explores that optimizing corporate staff structure, increasing media attention, and increasing government subsidies are effective paths to promote EGTI development with LCCP. The moderating effect confirms that executives' environmental cognition plays a positive moderating role between LCCP and EGTI. This paper enriches the related research on the evaluation of the effect of low‐carbon pilots and provides important policy insights for promoting the development of corporate green transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Since the Reform and Opening up, China's rapid but regionally uneven economic growth has continuously attracted a large number of migrant workers from rural areas to cities, from the central and western regions to the eastern regions. At the same time, the migration structure of migrant workers has gradually changed from individual migration to family migration. Under the linked lives principle in life course framework, this paper makes an in‐depth analysis of the relationship between family structure and the long‐term settlement intention of migrant workers based on a nationwide survey in 2020 by using the binomial logistic models. This paper found that, migrant workers who migrate in couple or with their whole family (spouse and children) have higher intention to live in local areas for longer time than migrant workers who migrate individually. More importantly, this paper argues that that spouses and children have more positive influence on migrant workers' local residence intention in medium and long‐distance cross city or inter‐provincial migration than in short distance within city migration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conservation planners often rely on heuristic indices when challenged with prioritizing potential projects under a constrained budget. This paper presents a comparative analysis of several prioritization indices (PIs) of culvert fish passage barriers, which can contribute to declines in anadromous fish populations. A federal injunction requires Washington state to restore 90% of habitat blocked by state‐owned culverts by 2030, prompting the development of numerous PIs, by various entities (i.e., counties, cities) within the injunction area. Our comparative analysis of PIs within the injunction Case Area investigates their ability to distinguish between barriers, their transferability in terms of scoring metrics, how scoring weights differ, and the preferences implied thereby. We document the use of six distinct PI methods by 10 entities and find that some PIs used many shared metrics, whereas others used a high percentage of unique metrics that would be difficult to replicate outside the entity's jurisdiction. Although habitat potential, habitat quantity, and connectivity were considered across all PIs, we found a high level of variation in terms of the metric weights. Our methods can be employed in other geographies or for other restoration PI planning efforts, and our results may facilitate the development and refinement of future PIs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most of the world's refugees live in Global South countries, where they struggle to find quality education and opportunities for decent livelihoods. This paper explores the underexamined yet highly relevant interlinkage between sustainable livelihoods and adult learning among urban refugees residing in three major cities in India. It speaks to the tight intersection of education, livelihoods and aspirations of five refugee communities: Afghan, Rohingya, Somali, Chin and Tibetan. Building on interviews, focus groups and participatory drawing sessions involving 66 refugee and staff respondents, the study highlights the refugees' extremely limited learning opportunities, which result in low skills and being forced to take discriminatory and undignified work in the informal sector. By integrating the capabilities approach with sustainable livelihoods, the paper argues for more diverse educational opportunities and a broader understanding of refugee livelihoods that goes beyond pure economics to encompass consideration of freedom and human dignity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how Chinese transnational investments, as (re)framed in the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), contribute to changes in urbanisation processes in Southeast Asia. On the ground, the BRI becomes contextualised and intersects with local and national development trajectories. The growing presence of Chinese actors in the region intensifies urban dynamics, especially in secondary cities and emerging urban sites, where the BRI is used as a lever for local internationalisation strategies. The heterogeneous nature of the links between the BRI and various large urban projects is demonstrated on the basis of case studies involving changing consortia of private and public Chinese and Southeast Asian actors. A regional approach allows us to identify connections and shared processes across Southeast Asian countries. It provides a historically grounded understanding of how the BRI incorporates long‐term interactions with China and more recent partnerships in Southeast Asian countries. The paper paves the way for a research agenda that contests the image of China as a monolithic actor implementing the BRI uniformly and consistently. Further analyses are needed to examine systems and networks of actors as well as the local urban politics that affect the BRI on the ground. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Color is a central component of human experience, yet when we narrow our focus to the practice of city planning and architecture, color only plays a marginal role in the initial phases of the design process. This paper reviews various approaches to using color on buildings: for example, the evolution of regional styles due to the availability of pigments and materials, the use of color as a form of decorative drapery, and the emphasis of a building's pure form without any additional color. Central to the paper is the analysis of the dichotomy between the reality of the process of actually experiencing a city and its buildings on the one hand and the design process on the other—a dichotomy between reception and production, thus, a contradiction between an "atmospheric world" of human perception and cognition and a professional world of imaginative design, in which the spatial atmosphere created by color, material, and light often emerges only as a by‐product at the end of a conceptual and diagrammatic planning process. The paper proposes a different way of going about the architectural design process that encompasses holistic thinking in color, material, and light right from the start. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Stimulating counterurbanization has long been understood as a potential approach to revitalising rural areas. While well‐established in many countries, in China, it is taking a particular time‐limited form and characteristic dominated by issues of domicile and property rights. Rather than being characterised by long‐term life choices, counterurbanization in China is predominantly a shorter‐term leisure and tourism activity in which urbanites 'curate', for a limited period, a gentrified country lifestyle in accessible near‐urban villages. These lifestyles are in some ways akin to second‐home tourism. However, rather than purchase property as an investment, this new movement rents and renovates property as a consumption good with which to welcome other urbanites to visit, to consume and affirm these newly gentrified spaces and leisure opportunities. Based on a case study of Cenbu Village near Shanghai, this paper argues that current approaches to counterurbanization in China have limited impact on the revitalisation of local communities. Rather, newcomers from the cities largely superimpose their needs on the village in a way both ephemeral and removed from local people and village life. This comes about less as a mark of distain on the part of the incomers, and more as a result of their exclusion from key village institutions such as collective ownership, rights of domicile and ability to contribute to local governance. The paper concludes by arguing that mechanisms should be developed to enhance the long‐term confidence of newcomers, to encourage them to engage with community governance as a means of shaping the community and contributing more effectively to endogenous village revitalisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]