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The global COVID-19 pandemic produced several changes in nearly every aspect of our lives. Ride-sharing platforms such as Uber and Lyft must adapt their strategies and aims to stay afloat. The analysis in this study is based on 216,120 tweets in the U.S. between January 1, 2019, and December 30, 2021, about Uber. It includes four separate analyses: Popularity and Usage Analytics, Sentimental Analytics, Voice Analytics, and Topic Mining Analytics. The result shows that usage and popularity of Uber on Twitter negatively affect Covid and death cases. In contrast, vaccination helps mitigate the shock of Covid. Additionally, ' 'Uber's policy and business model was beneficial in improving its positive image during the pandemic; On the early breakout of Covid in the U.S. Uber had a jump on the positive sentiment, mainly because Uber provided safer service than public transportation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Comprehensive law enforcement' is an important part of the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP's) thinking on urban management. It involves all government departments and units related to law enforcement working together to improve their administrative efficiency. Since 2009, the CCP has absorbed some elements of the Western concept of the 'smart city', including the use of big data analysis and technology in implementing and enforcing the law. At the heart of the Chinese smart city is the 'city brain'. For the CCP regime, the primary purpose of the smart city is to monitor society and improve the efficiency of urban management; making life more convenient for residents is a secondary consideration. In other words, this mechanism is strongly state led in nature, and it is aimed at ensuring the regime's survival by strengthening the CCP's capacity to govern. We found that due to incentives built into the cadre evaluation system, grassroots officials use the information gathered through smart city technology to achieve 'hard' law enforcement targets rather to improve people's lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Grid systems for local governance and administration in China, known as grid management or wanggehua guanli (网格化管理), have been implemented since the mid-2000s. Where existing research focuses on the embeddedness of grid technology in state-society relations, the spatial dynamics of urban grid administration and their significance in China's state structure receive less attention. This analysis adopts the idea of the spatial process for a dynamic approach to grid governance, from its incorporation in China's urban management efficiency drive to its implementation in city districts through local territorialization, to assess the urban grid system as an administrative area and inter-scaled spatial governing strategy. Implementation of the grid system establishes smaller governing areas while networking higherlevel jurisdictions, with the result of overcoming some of the authority fragmentation in the state structure. Grid governance contributes to increasing local state power in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Land Value Capture (LVC) in the Global South has long been a subject of long-standing debate, primarily driven by the need to address uneven urbanization and finance public investments. Despite its significance, current literature focuses on case analyses limited to local implementation contingencies. This paper aims to critically examine LVC as an epistemic object and question its approach within urban studies. Our hypothesis posits that LVC has remained confined to the empirical dimension of case studies, replicated for years, demanding a higher level of theorization that could reveal the colonizing intentions encrusted in the policy learning flows from the Global North. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urban Social Innovation Capacity is determined as a key aspect to explain Social Value creation in European cities suffering increased social problems derived from the urban growth and exacerbated by COVID-19. New Public Value Management paradigm has appeared involving urban managers in new city-centred management models based on Social Innovation networking processes, increasing their capacity to innovate as they face the current social challenges. The main purpose in this study is to assess the Social Value performed within specific systems and to propose instruments to provide local managers with valid and reliable tools for assessing both Social Value and Urban Social Innovation Capacity. The study conducted a mixed-method research technique. A qualitative study to validate the theoretical approach and, with the objective to examine the positive effect of Urban Social Innovation Capacity on Social Value, an empirical work based on PLS well stocked with data collected from a survey aimed at urban social innovation managers in Eurocities. Results showed a direct positive effect of Urban Social Innovation Capacity on Social Value but no effect between Socioeconomic Context and Social Value. The study additionally offers a modern definition for Social Innovation and implications for local managers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper promotes critical realism as a suitable and fruitful philosophical foundation for the development and implementation of urban digital twins. The proliferation of a-theoretical digital twin research and practices, not declaring their philosophical positions, is threatening the scientific soundness of this new paradigm and offers little evidence for reflecting on the knowledge it produces. To address this issue, first, this paper uses focus group discussions to explore digital twin experts' perceptions of digital twin best practices for urban management and uncover the philosophical worldviews underlying these perceptions. A philosophical worldview is a general orientation about the world that is described in terms of ontological and epistemological assumptions and views on human nature. The inferred philosophical worldviews are then compared with critical realism principles, supporting the argument that critical realism provides a suitable philosophical foundation for digital twin practices in urban management envisaged by participating experts, as well as enhancing current forms of digital twin practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although cities are increasingly permeated by information and communication technologies (ICTs), these urban centers still face theoretical and practical obstacles regarding the application of 3D technologies as a tool for urban planning and management. This study aims to ontologically structure an informational model as an urban management tool and assess the perceived challenges for implementing this model in the municipal public management of Curitiba, Brazil. The study was carried out through the collective subject discourse, the interviews' thematic saturation, and Delphi techniques. The results indicate that the technical capacity, technological infrastructure, and financial resources for the development of a city information modeling (CIM) exist, although its activation for such development depends on a more significant political and managerial entrepreneurship in the decision-making in arrangements of multilevel governance, and, consequently, there is a need to develop public policies for staff training to stimulate and promote advanced technological innovations for urban management and planning. Implementing a CIM in large cities seems to face more management and planning problems due to the lack of institutional ontologies than technological, infrastructural, or knowledge limitations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The design processes based on parametric design and generative design allows multiple alternatives to be generated, analysed and corrected. The aim of the developed program was to automate the urban design concept development process for selected land units with a local development plan. This document, ordinances and other sources were the guidelines for the program to be developed. The solution-generating program starts by taking in the data, and then geometrical objects are created that have the right relationships to each other. Finally, results are evaluated on the basis of calculated indices and further generations are created taking into account the best options. This process must be overseen by a human, but with the development of machine learning and artificial intelligence, automation will progress, reducing human effort. The results of the study were collated and compared with other experiments in an in-depth literature review. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic led to unprecedented 'lockdowns' and stay-at-home orders to prevent the spread of infection. Social scientists have analysed mobility during these lockdowns to understand compliance at a population-level, and whether there were systematic barriers to compliance for certain population groups. Much of this analysis has used mobility data from private companies, gathered via smartphones. In this paper, we consider an unexplored source of such data - urban management administrative data - and demonstrate its usefulness for understanding mobility, and what these patterns might reveal about socio-spatial inequality and local economic activity and suggest greater imagination when analysing such data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transportation is a significant issue due to providing people to participate in human activities. Due to an increase in population, the need for transportation has also been increased. Therefore, more traffic is visible on streets that produce more issues related to mobility like noise pollution, air pollution, and accidents. This study pays attention to an impressive transit network design in urban areas. Because of the NP-hard nature of this problem, a shark smell optimisation (SSO) algorithm based on fuzzy logic is employed. A developed system is utilised to produce, optimise, and analyse frequencies and routes of transit in the level of a network. Its target is maximising the direct travellers per unit length, i.e., subject to route length, direct traveller density, and nonlinear rate constraints (a route length ratio to the shortest road interval between the beginning and destination). Since designing an urban transport network issue is in heterogeneous environments is involved, this article provides a new method for lowering the feasible urban travel time, the urban traffic, and the feasible urban travel cost using a well-known SSO algorithm. According to the results, the proposed method has higher efficiency compared to the previous methods. In addition, the results showed that the proposed technique offers fewer transfers and travel time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on ethnographic data from Maputo, Mozambique, this article explores middle-classness as an often-utopic aspiration articulated through particular forms of divides, that assert themselves by continuously deferring the stabilization of a supposedly growing middle-class population. As we argue, however, it is precisely by way of this deferral that new forms of urban citizenship are produced – that are available to the assumed members of the 'middle-class', as well as potentially to other residents enacting middle-classness as an urban ideal. After a brief review of how middle-class areas can be identified, the paper discusses the above argument through a comparison between two of the largest state-sponsored urban planning initiatives to be implemented in Mozambique in recent years. The first is in the Intaka Community on the northern periphery of Maputo, where residents re-configure the material aesthetics of the area in order to separate themselves from a collective that is based on supposed state-sanctioned middle-class values – but to which they do not want to remain attached. The second is in the KaTembe peninsula, where squatters have invaded the building site for the 'New City' and commenced building reed huts and laying foundations for cement-block houses in order to be resettled elsewhere. Strikingly, in both instances, middle-classness seems to be actualized by groups of urbanites that do not desire typical spatially envisioned middle-class status. However, the surprising effect is that this still articulates a particular conceptualization of middle-classness with a dominant utopian ideology for urban living. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Citizen Relationship Management (CRM) based on information and communication technology offers immediate and efficient response to citizens' needs, and when citizens use the CRM services and in turn have positive service experience via the use of the CRM services, their perceived assessment to public service quality and performance can be improved. This study draws on data from the citizen survey of the City and County of San Francisco to test the relationship between citizens use 311 system to contact with the City Hall and citizen satisfaction with the quality of public service encounter. The finding indicates that citizens who use 311 system are more satisfied with the courtesy and professionalism of public officials than citizens who do not. However, the question-response capacity of public officials has opposite result. Citizens who use 311 system are problem-solved orientated and have high expectation of how well their questions are responded and be resolved by public officials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on the theory of administrative burdens, we assess how a variety of rules surrounding access to public hurricane shelters influences residents' likelihood of using this service. We employ three experiments embedded in an online survey, in which we vary the requirements regarding public safety and pets, common at shelters, which could create burdens for residents seeking to access shelters. Our results suggest that residents are more likely to make use of shelters when rules require shelters be staffed by local or state police. However, rules requiring police to check shelter-goers for outstanding warrants or sex-offender registration do not impact the likelihood of going to a shelter. Finally, rules forbidding pets lead to a significant decrease in willingness to evacuate to a shelter. In short, some administrative burdens surrounding access to hurricane shelters may have a significant impact on the degree to which residents seek access to shelters during hazards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study aims to analyse the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT) of managing the Tehran Metropolitan to help comprehend the status quo as well as the challenges to the realisation of liveability indicators. The data were collected from numerous sources including literature review, library resources, public reports, interviews with urban executives and urban management experts, and questionnaires. The study opens a new window through which the main stakeholders and urban managers can understand the internal and external conditions of urban management as well as the challenges to liveability in the city. Seven critical strategies based on SWOT identification are presented with an emphasis on research results. Such strategies can promote the realisation of liveability and inform the future development of the city on a strategic level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urban management in the South of Europe is a very complex issue. The smart city model can offer an innovative response to this complexity, both by improving quality of life and by furthering sustainable development. Implementing an effective smart city model requires its inclusion in urban strategic planning in an integrated and comprehensive manner, sometimes backed by regional, national, and international support policies. Within this framework, the aim of this article is twofold. It intends to clarify the definition of the smart city model as it is applied in the Southern European context, and it aims to contribute to the development of the smart city as an effective model for urban management and to the assessment of its planning in mid-sized cities. This in-depth assessment will bring into focus some critical considerations involved in smart city planning initiatives and will offer useful recommendations for future policymakers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urban housing policies, in the opening decades of the 21st Century are in disarray. The objectives and targets set for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 2015–30 and the United Nations New Urban Agenda call for comprehensive urban housing policies, based on inclusion and participation. This paper argues for housing policies and implementation strategies that go beyond participation and are governed and managed by inclusive cost- and benefit-sharing partnerships of local government authorities and low-income group community members, NGOs and private sector stakeholders. Approaches to the formation and maintenance of democratic and equitable partnerships based on mutualism, interdependence, respect and trust are examined in the paper as a means to the efficient and effective production and management of affordable and sustainable housing and urban development; and as an end mechanism for the generation and strengthening of democratic, equitable urban communities, social change and poverty reduction and the alleviation of its impact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The urban-rural dichotomy and the simple cause-effect relationship do not allow establishing specific criteria for territorial management from a socio-ecological perspective. The gradient approach could be a powerful tool to understand urban socio-ecological dynamics. This research applied a methodological protocol to obtain urban-rural gradients while considering the specific characteristics of a mid-size Andean city. To achieve this goal, a mixed classification process was applied to a Landsat 8 image. Subsequently, a factor analysis (FA) grouped 25 urbanisation variables. Finally, we applied agglomerative hierarchical clustering. FA established four factors that explained (72%) of the urbanisation metrics' variation. From this information, we obtained factor maps and a gradient map. The resulting map differentiated six gradients that contrast with the city's territorial planning based on the urban-rural dichotomy. This study is a starting point to apply the gradient approach in land-use management and urban ecology planning for Andean cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most scholars agree that the character of the urban governance system in Zimbabwe is a reflection of the dominance of one political party, namely, Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF). However, the increasingly prominent role of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) in urban governance has heralded, since the early 2000s, a period marked by change, contestation and confusion. Simultaneously, the destabilising effect of contested urban governance politics on urban management in Zimbabwe has become entrenched. This article focuses on the interface between urban governance politics and urban management in Zimbabwe in the post-2000 era. It analyses how central government, through the local government ministry, local government statutes and appointed officials, structures, and even destabilises, the administration of urban affairs. The article concludes that urban governance is not merely a site of political contestation, as it has also profoundly influenced and altered the functioning of urban administration in Zimbabwe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transportation system and its Urban Transportation Infrastructure (UTI) influence an area´s economic health and quality of life because they provide the background in order the people to perform their everyday activities. Nevertheless, transportation activity generates certain negative externalities like congestion, road accidents, poor air quality that affect the people physically, emotionally and socially. These externalities become severe via the urbanization-metropolisation phenomenon that increase the distances for territorial displacement, generating major mobility demand and car usage. Consequently, an approach to urban planning is required, which would prioritize sustainable mobility. This paper's objective is to help the implementation of Integral Mobility Plans by focusing on the case of Mexico City. This can be achieved through the application of structural analysis method in two steps: first, we facilitate the identification of the interlinks among the essential urban structure's components for sustainable mobility. Second, we evaluate the effectiveness of the public policies-strategies that form part of Mexico City's Integral Mobility Plan and organize them in order of importance. The results show which UTI elements should be considered primarily for sustainable mobility and which public policies-strategies should be prioritized in order to implement the aforementioned plan effectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The demand for the collective involvement of residents in managing and maintaining their urban residential areas is increasing all over the world, particularly in the developing countries. Such collective responsibility for shared urban spaces and building elements among residents was deep-rooted in the traditional urbanism of Cairo. By the early twentieth century, the distribution of responsibilities had changed radically, with the adoption of the Western-inspired maintenance and management paradigms throughout municipalities. With the deterioration of municipal services in Cairo, especially in urban poor areas, and the shortcomings associated with the top-down participatory approaches of nongovernmental organizations and community-based organizations, the search for an alternative approach is now desperately needed. This research investigates the community-driven, spontaneously initiated participatory mechanisms and tools of the urban poor in Cairo for managing and maintaining their housing built environment. For the research method, three residential settlements representing the three prevailing patterns of urban poor housing were selected in order to address three main questions: what are the practices among the urban poor for managing and maintaining their housing built environment in Cairo today?; what are the attitudes of those residents toward their shared responsibility for managing and maintaining their housing built environment?; and why do they have these attitudes? Through this research, it has been found that the local communities managed to develop self-organizing mechanisms and spontaneous tools to efficiently manage and maintain their housing built environment. On the other hand, an analysis of residents' preferences and attitudes suggests that, in general, they neither prefer to keep taking sole responsibility for managing and maintaining their housing built environment, nor wish to leave the entire process in the hands of local authorities. Instead, they would like to share the responsibility with these authorities. The results of this research can be the base for proposing an innovative approach that recognizes instinctive community-initiated mechanisms, but which also has municipal involvement, to create a 'localized' conceptual approach for managing and maintaining deprived urban settlements in Cairo, as well as other potential cities in Egypt, the Arab world, and the developing countries as a whole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper interrogates how street trading is governed in contemporary cities of the South, based on the example of Johannesburg. It excavates policy choices made by municipal officials and politicians, understood through the set of policy instruments (not only policy documents, institutions and tools, but also non-tools) that they have framed and used for almost two decades, beyond public rhetoric that is arguably misleading. The paper provides a critical analyzis of policy instruments for governing street trading, scantly absent from existing literature, it also brings back into the urban studies debate issues of municipal officials’ agency, political objectives and policy choices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The smart city concept lacks a set of coherent criteria for evaluating its effectiveness as an urban management system, its compatibility with human rights principles and its contribution to a democratic, participatory, social urban regime. The author explains why Lean Thinking principles can be applied to evaluate the 'smartness' of cities and serve as guidelines for improvement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although there is an abundance of literature on sustainable development and urban planning in Africa, it remains to be demonstrated whether urban planning in Africa is founded on the ideology of sustainable urban development or has positive or negative effects on sustainable urban development of Africa. This paper reviews a variety of definitions of sustainable urban development and relates them against urban planning processes and practices in Africa. Drawing from published literature, policy documents and international reports, this paper advocates for inclusiveness and spatial integration toward a more desirable form of sustainable urban development in Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Urban rivers have been considered, for different cities, as sources of problems and solutions. The objective of this article is to evaluate local communities’ perception of sociopolitical actions and the natural attributes of the Belém River, located in the city of Curitiba. This study is justified by the theoretical contributions of evaluating urban rivers based on perceptions of the community. The results indicate that the river has been progressively deteriorating to the point where, paradoxically in relation to the constructed view of the sustainable and ecological city, the community considers it useless for domestic purposes, representing a source of discomfort and health hazards. However, the same community still values the river as a public good and demands solutions with society and government shared efforts. Data collection was conducted in 2012 through a stratified random sampling. The margin of error for 586 respondents was 5% at the 95% confidence level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Municipalities interested in communication, education and social development seek to contribute to citizenship by planning, structuring, storing, and providing access to information. Starting with an overview of the global background to discussions on digital cities and the relation between digital cities and public policies, this article seeks to analyze and describe municipal information planning based on a project carried out, between 2009 and 2014, in the municipality of Vinhedo, São Paulo, Brazil. The study stresses the importance of adopting a project design methodology and implementing projects collectively at a municipal level to increase the efficiency of municipal management and implementing the strategic digital city concept, thereby increasing public space and governability and, consequently, citizens’ quality of life. The results show that municipal information planning projects constitute public policy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper intends to investigate the process through which the Tehran–Karaj urban region has come into being, tracing its development from a small-town status 200 years ago, to its current status as an urban agglomeration of about 13 million inhabitants. Having introduced the genesis and structure of this urban region, a short review of the main challenges raised by it will reveal the nature and character of interconnectivity between its different components. It will then be argued that unlike some leading examples such as the Randstad, this interconnectivity has never been taken seriously by policy-makers, and suffers from an inefficient sectoral governance system, although it calls for the introduction of an integrated management system in the region. Finally, it will be concluded that despite the urgency of establishing an Integrated Management and Monitoring Administration, there is a growing will to fragmentation which neglects any regional planning strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Combined with urban poverty, the escalation in the rapid growth of squatter and informal settlements in Pacific towns and cities has been a defining feature of Pacific urbanisation in the new millennium. Squatter and informal settlements now cater for up to approximately 40–50% of the urban populations now residing in the larger Pacific towns and cities, especially in Melanesia. People are being increasingly attracted to urban areas in the likelihood of finding a better life for themselves and their families. The reality for most, however, is immersion in a life of urban poverty, entrenchment in a squatter or informal settlement, or a return to the rural village or outer island. Set against a background of mediocre national economic performance and poor governance, squatter and informal settlements will become the dominant form of housing and land development in Pacific towns and cities in the next 15 years. In a Pacific Region context, this paper examines the growth of squatter and informal settlements by exploring the range of drivers that entice people to move and make their homes in squatter and informal settlements. The paper concludes with discussion on the policy implications of finding new approaches for Pacific urban management. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article shows that although a large literature has been produced on the concept of urban governance, its meaning remains ambiguous. The aim of the article is not to ‘prove’ that there is confusion in the concept or to rectify that confusion, but rather to consolidate, categorise, and synthesise the many meanings of urban governance. The article argues that when the concept of ‘urban governance’ is regarded as a cluster of meanings, particularly as decentralisation, entrepreneurialism, and democratisation (DED) and repositioned in a broad political-economic and socio-cultural framework, its full tenor can be grasped for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the context of globalization, regionalization, and urbanization, business improvement districts (BIDs) emerge on the urban landscape as a public-private mechanism of place management across networks. This article raises the question: In a public-private partnership model that is globalizing, how does the local context shape BID performance management across networks? In search of an answer, this paper uses the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's urban entrepreneurial governance framework to examine a sociospatial reconfiguration of space in which BIDs are often nestled and within which they manage network structures for service delivery while implementing urban revitalization policy. The article explores the BID model as a microcosmic example of how performance management may emerge through meta-sector network management geared toward creating a globally competitive locale. In so doing, the article draws on qualitative research data from the Newark Downtown District in New Jersey and the Central City Improvement District in Cape Town, (Western Cape, South Africa). Findings from the cross-national triangulated descriptive case study suggest that Newark Downtown District's collaborative network management for capital improvements generates performance-based budgeting, and in Cape Town, collaborative network management facilitates opportunity for transformative social development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Municipalities in Saudi Arabia are working hard to make use of rapid advances in information technology (IT), especially geographic information systems (GIS), to improve their performance and increase their effectiveness. Most initiatives in IT applications, including GIS, are limited to individual departments rather than supporting comprehensive institutional operations. This has resulted in fragmented applications with isolated databases. It is obvious that the municipalities lack an overall framework to guide them through building reliable IT solutions that care for enterprise or corporate requirements. Because the Saudi municipalities share many commonalities, especially among their business functions and organizational structures, it is believed that a general framework is necessary to help them to develop their IT solutions in general and GIS applications in particular, because the majority of municipal decisions are spatially oriented. This article attempts to provide a framework for enterprise GIS for Saudi municipalities. It starts by reviewing the important issues associated with enterprise GIS to establish the basis for building a framework that is suitable for the Saudi context. The proposed GIS framework emphasizes the enterprise requirements for municipal institutions and considers GIS as a major IT requirement that can be supported by other related technologies. The suggested framework includes three main factors: business functions, tasks and data requirements. The integration of these factors provides the basis on which the municipalities can advance their aim of automating their functions. Discussion of these factors within Saudi context is presented with reference to the Municipality of Jeddah where data were based upon interviews with key municipal officials in 2004. The main finding of this research article is the identification of municipal functions and tasks that pave the way for determining applications required for the corporate IT solution. Furthermore, this article identifies data issues related to municipal data - sources, sharing and management - and calls for establishing a unified municipal data model. Finally, this article suggests that similarities among Saudi municipalities lead us to believe that IT applications can grow reasonably well by partnership among municipalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores major trends and patterns of change embedded in the overall process of economic, social and political transformation that profoundly influence the spatial adaptation and repositioning of post-socialist cities. It reflects on important issues such as the efforts to create competitive, socially inclusive and well-governed cities in the post-socialist world. The research draws much-needed attention to an important set of urban policy issues with wide implications for the success of the transition process in the region. It explores the links between the transition to democracy, markets and decentralized governance, and highlights the most salient characteristics of these multilayered processes on the spatial transformation in post-socialist cities. The main argument is that the impact of these processes of urban change has created a mosaic of diverse urban experiences. Despite this diversity, the spatial transformation has several principal dimensions: (1) new spaces of production/consumption reflecting globalization and economic restructuring within the hierarchy of cities; (2) social differentiation in residential spaces associated with growing inequality and the emergence of new forms of urban poverty; and (3) conflicts and selective urban development associated with new models of governance and institutional transformation. The exploration of these 'transitions' through the urban lens emphasizes the importance of strategic urban management to address the unique challenges of post-socialist cities and their dynamic realities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the process of water resources planning and management in the city of Saint Petersburg, Russia. The country's economic transition resulted to pressures on the urban environment and yet researchers did not give attention on the impact of such transition on environmental conditions. Despite continuous development in living, water remained non-potable in major cities while boiling of tap water is still a standard practice even in some of Russia's largest and richest cities. According to an opinion poll, water pollution was deemed as the most important environmental threat to public health. Municipalities were pointed as the major source of pollution followed by industry and agriculture.

Recent years have seen the emergence of two policy objectives and associated development trends in UK city centres relating to urban vitality and to the urban renaissance policy agenda. These involve a shift towards more city centre residential development and, associated with the 24-Hour City agenda, a shift towards the development of evening/night-time economies (ENTEs). Mixed land uses are seen as an essential component of this vitality. But conflicts often arise from different land uses in close proximity, which, in turn, suggests a need for the sensitive management of urban areas in general and the ENTE in particular. Focusing on the management of activities in space and time in the ENTE of UK cities, this article explores how planning and liquor licensing controls, the two main sets of contextual controls for the ENTE, provide both the context for more active forms of management and policing and frame an opportunity space for behaviour and conduct. The article's overarching argument is that the management of the ETNE should be considered in terms of a fine-grained understanding of space and time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the face of a continuing 'fiscal crisis of the state' this article addresses how land taxation might be reformed to better fund the demands on urban management. Our premise is that land tax initiatives offer governments a means for increasing the funds available for urban management without significantly compromising the assumed political boundaries of public fiscal restraint. The specific focus in the article is on the bridge provided by land taxation in the form of 'betterment' or the interchangeable notion of 'value capture'. The article recommends a new form of betterment tax that would operate alongside existing or future charges for infrastructure levied by local government. Importantly, the tax would be applied to value increments across the city, and not just in fringe areas which have been the traditional targets of betterment levies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Building Research & Information is the property of Routledge 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 Building Research & Information is the property of Routledge 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 urban transportation infrastructure (UTI) is an essential asset for any city and it affects citizens, governments, economic growth and urban functioning. The UTI is more valuable than ever due to the urbanization process that concentrates more people in the urban centers, generating a greater mobility demand and urban sprawl that encourages the automobile usage with its associated consequences like congestion, roads accidents, noise etc. Hence, a new UTI management approach is required in order to enhance the sustainable mobility paradigm. The objective of this paper is to construct a set of indicators related to the sustainable transportation modes that could help the decision-making of urban planning via a Geographic Information System. As a case study, the indicators are determined for a Census Tract within Iztapalapa County, the results revealed opportunities for improvement through lines of action that belong to an integral mobility plan rather than partial implemented countermeasures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]