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As a rising star on the international stage, city diplomacy has been examined by practitioners and pioneer scholars. Therefore, structured insights from practice, history, and academic works have boosted theory development. Similarly, new diplomatic history can explore new paths based on contemporary perspectives on city diplomacy. Based on a practitioner's perspective, this essay brings academically contextualized observations together for the construction of a conceptual framework for the historical study of city diplomacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inventory of the urban heritage: case of the medieval cities of the North of Algeria and cities restructured in the XIXth century. The cities of North Africa became, since more thousands years, Muslim cities; certain old cities were abandoned; others were established by dynasties stemming from Muslim conquests. In Algeria, at the beginning of the 19th century, during the French colonization, those who stayed were occupied and transformed for the greater part in their initial structure by applying a new morphological mode superimposed on the existing city (Medina). The degradation of these laminated old centers became more marked with the departure of Europeans who started the phenomenon of the exodus of the medina’s inhabitants towards the residences of the freed (released) colonial center, which induced the densification, the insalubrity and the degradation of the physical framework of the laminated part. These historic entities had not aroused any private interest considering the maladjustment of the current laws. The current drama is that these laminated centers risk not to exist anymore. This article will present a methodology adopted for the elaboration of an inventory of the historic cities which existed since the Muslim conquest in the 7th century until the advent of colonization in the 19th century. The inventory will establish knowledge on this category of the good which we qualify as urban heritage; it will become a tool of knowledge in first phase and gratitude of the patrimonial dimension of the historic cities unclassified in the second phase. Also, he will allow to identify those who disappeared and are underestimated and who can be revealed thanks to investigations

The cities of North Africa became, since more thousands years, Muslim cities; certain old cities were abandoned; others were established by dynasties stemming from Muslim conquests. In Algeria, at the beginning of the 19th century, during the French colonization, those who stayed were occupied and transformed for the greater part in their initial structure by applying a new morphological mode superimposed on the existing city (Medina). The degradation of these laminated old centers became more marked with the departure of Europeans who started the phenomenon of the exodus of the medina's inhabitants towards the residences of the freed (released) colonial center, which induced the densification, the insalubrity and the degradation of the physical framework of the laminated part. These historic entities had not aroused any private interest considering the maladjustment of the current laws. The current drama is that these laminated centers risk not to exist anymore. This article will present a methodology adopted for the elaboration of an inventory of the historic cities which existed since the Muslim conquest in the 7th century until the advent of colonization in the 19th century. The inventory will establish knowledge on this category of the good which we qualify as urban heritage; it will become a tool of knowledge in first phase and gratitude of the patrimonial dimension of the historic cities unclassified in the second phase. Also, he will allow to identify those who disappeared and are underestimated and who can be revealed thanks to investigations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article interprets the abbé d'Aubignac's 1715 Conjectures académiques, ou, Dissertation sur l'Iliade-the first text to posit the non-existence of Homer-in light of the Parisian literary underground of the mid-seventeenth century. It shows that the city's nascent street culture influenced regimes of authorship and, ultimately, classical scholarship on Homer. In general, it argues for a history of scholarship in dialogue with the architecture of the cities where it took place.

This article describes the emergence of health concerns relating to the epidemics that occurred during the twentieth century in La Pampa, a province in Argentina. Epidemics such as smallpox drove such policies, which frequently originated in Buenos Aires, the country's capital. The spread of many epidemics was due to shortages: water, sewage and adequate refuse disposal, an insufficient number of health care workers, the presence of disease transmission vectors such as mosquitos, and, ultimately, poverty. The historical experience described in this text highlights the importance of analyzing the impact of SARS-CoV-2 beyond the big cities.

Tikal, a major city of the ancient Maya world, has been the focus of archaeological research for over a century, yet the interactions between the Maya and the surrounding Neotropical forests remain largely enigmatic. This study aimed to help fill that void by using a powerful new technology, environmental DNA analysis, that enabled us to characterize the site core vegetation growing in association with the artificial reservoirs that provided the city water supply. Because the area has no permanent water sources, such as lakes or rivers, these reservoirs were key to the survival of the city, especially during the population expansion of the Classic period (250-850 CE). In the absence of specific evidence, the nature of the vegetation surrounding the reservoirs has been the subject of scientific hypotheses and artistic renderings for decades. To address these hypotheses we captured homologous sequences of vascular plant DNA extracted from reservoir sediments by using a targeted enrichment approach involving 120-bp genetic probes. Our samples encompassed the time before, during and after the occupation of Tikal (1000 BCE-900 CE). Results indicate that the banks of the ancient reservoirs were primarily fringed with native tropical forest vegetation rather than domesticated species during the Maya occupation.

Roman metal use and related extraction activities resulted in heavy metal pollution and contamination, in particular of Pb near ancient mines and harbors, as well as producing a global atmospheric impact. New evidence from ancient Gerasa (Jerash), Jordan, suggests that small-scale but intense Roman, Byzantine and Umayyad period urban, artisanal, and everyday site activities contributed to substantial heavy metal contamination of the city and its hinterland wadi, even though no metal mining took place and hardly any lead water pipes were used. Distribution of heavy metal contaminants, especially Pb, observed in the urban soils and sediments within this ancient city and its hinterland wadi resulted from aeolian, fluvial, cultural and post-depositional processes. These represent the contamination pathways of an ancient city-hinterland setting and reflect long-term anthropogenic legacies at local and regional scales beginning in the Roman period. Thus, urban use and re-use of heavy metal sources should be factored into understanding historical global-scale contaminant distributions., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Population and economic growth in Asia has led to increased urbanisation. Urbanisation has many detrimental impacts on ecosystems, especially when expansion is unplanned. Singapore is a city-state that has grown rapidly since independence, both in population and land area. However, Singapore aims to develop as a 'City in Nature', and urban greenery is integral to the landscape. While clearing some areas of forest for urban sprawl, Singapore has also reclaimed land from the sea to expand its coastline. Reclaimed land is usually designated for future urban development, but must first be left for many years to stabilise. During the period of stabilisation, pioneer plant species establish, growing into novel forest communities. The rate of this spontaneous vegetation development has not been quantified. This study tracks the temporal trends of normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), as a proxy of vegetation maturity, on reclaimed land sensed using LANDSAT images. Google Earth Engine was used to mosaic cloud-free annual LANDSAT images of Singapore from 1988 to 2015. Singapore's median NDVI increased by 0.15 from 0.47 to 0.62 over the study period, while its land area grew by 71 km2. Five reclaimed sites with spontaneous vegetation development showed variable vegetation covers, ranging from 6% to 43% vegetated cover in 2015. On average, spontaneous vegetation takes 16.9 years to develop to a maturity of 0.7 NDVI, but this development is not linear and follows a quadratic trajectory. Patches of spontaneous vegetation on isolated reclaimed lands are unlikely to remain forever since they are in areas slated for future development. In the years that these patches exist, they have potential to increase urban greenery, support biodiversity, and provide a host of ecosystem services. With this knowledge on spontaneous vegetation development trajectories, urban planners can harness the resource when planning future developments., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Many infectious diseases are thought to have emerged in humans after the Neolithic revolution. Although it is broadly accepted that this also applies to measles, the exact date of emergence for this disease is controversial. We sequenced the genome of a 1912 measles virus and used selection-aware molecular clock modeling to determine the divergence date of measles virus and rinderpest virus. This divergence date represents the earliest possible date for the establishment of measles in human populations. Our analyses show that the measles virus potentially arose as early as the sixth century BCE, possibly coinciding with the rise of large cities., (Copyright © 2020 The Authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. No claim to original U.S. Government Works.)

Despite the recent flurry of interest in various aspects of ancient urbanism, we still know little about how much traffic flowed in and out of ancient cities, in part because of problems with using commodities as proxies for trade. This article investigates another approach, which is to estimate these flows from the built environment, concentrating on transport infrastructure such as city gates. To do this, I begin by discussing a new model for how we would expect this kind of infrastructure to expand with population, before investigating the relationship between the populations of sites and the total numbers and widths of city gates, focusing on the Greek and Roman world. The results suggest that there is indeed a systematic relationship between the estimated populations of cities and transport infrastructure, which is entirely consistent with broader theoretical and empirical expectations. This gives us a new way of exploring the connectivity and integration of ancient cities, contributing to a growing body of general theory about how settlements operate across space and time., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Masonry city walls were common defense facilities in the cities of the Eurasian before the industrial revolution. However, they were not widespread in China until the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644). Limited in research methods, previous studies failed to make convincing arguments on this phenomenon. We collected, organized and analyzed relevant historical documents to reconstruct the spatio-temporal process of the construction of masonry walls from 1st to 17th century in China. We conducted a time series analysis primarily based on factors such as wars, garrisons, economy, and natural disasters. Analysis of the correlation among the construction of masonry walls and these factors provides insights into this process. From the 1st to 14th century, only 125 masonry city walls were built in China and the annual average number was below 0.1. While in the Ming Dynasty, a total of 1,493 masonry walls were built, with an annual average of 5.41. The construction activities in 1368-1456 spread throughout the country, but mainly appeared in the high-grade administrative cities and garrisons, as a result of the planned implementation of the central government. The construction activities in 1457-1644 had corresponding cluster areas during different periods, mainly at county-level. We found that the wall construction was stimulated by external factors such as wars and disasters. We believe that the mass construction of masonry walls in the Ming Dynasty is a phenomenon of cultural diffusion. The central government plan, the complex interactions between local governments and community, and the stimulation of external factors worked together to contribute to the diffusion of masonry city walls in the Ming Dynasty., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Objective: This study explores the differences in frequency and type of trauma found in two Medieval cemeteries in Denmark, as well as the cultural and community implications of those differences., Materials: We examined 235 skeletons from the cemetery at Tjærby (rural) and 170 skeletons from the cemetery at Randers (urban) for trauma from the Medieval period in Denmark, 1050 to 1536 CE., Methods: Trauma was assessed through macroscopic examination and odds ratio and relative risk assessments were run to assess the difference in trauma., Results: There was no significant difference in the presence of trauma between the rural and urban cemeteries or between males and females. There were some significant differences in relative risk for trauma between the two cemeteries., Conclusions: The division and variation in trauma between the two cemeteries is most likely related to differences in economy and occupation., Significance: There are relatively few studies that examine the difference in inherent risk of trauma between rural and urban Medieval communities, especially in Denmark. This research also adds to the growing body of literature in paleopathology that uses epidemiology to explore the parallels between patterns of trauma and community lifeways., Limitations: The cemeteries are approximately 5 km distance from each other so similarities in the sample could be a result of location., Suggestions for Further Research: A wider sample of Medieval cemeteries in Denmark needs be added to this analysis to provide a more complete picture of trauma patterns during this time period., (Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

For decades, people have viewed narcotics as a devil impeding the modernisation of China, but they have recently been faced with the challenge of declaring that narcotics are harmless in some instances. A deeper understanding of this issue requires historical approaches which show that the demonisation of narcotics has mainly been a political pursuit. In re-examining the drug problem and its correlation to political and socio-economic issues, data statistics based on substantial archives in modern China play a crucial role. Discovered in 2007 in Longquan, a city in southeast China, Judicial Records of Longquan remains the largest judicial record in modern China by far. Data analysis reveals government efforts regarding drug control were not in line with the peak periods of drug-related cases in Longquan. Drawing on previously unexamined documents, it can be shown that anti-drug mobilisation and hygienic conditions have been overstated to legitimise the authority of governments in modern China. However, the knowledge of local residents regarding medicine and health was indirectly promoted in this agenda. Compared with the negative image of drugs constructed under the biopower of government, the role of narcotics was a positive vehicle for accelerating health mobilization during the Republic of China.

During the 1960s, cities across the United States erupted with rioting. Subsequent inquiries into its sources revealed long-simmering discontent with systemic deprivation and exploitation in the country's most racially segregated and resource-scarce neighborhoods. Urban medical centers were not exempt from this anger. They were standing symbols of maldistribution, cordoned off to those without sufficient economic means of access. In this article, I examine the travails of the world-famous and prestigious Cleveland Clinic after the 1966 riot in the Hough neighborhood on the East Side of Cleveland, Ohio. After years of unbridled expansion, fueled by federal urban renewal efforts, the riots caught the Clinic's leadership off guard, forcing it to rethink the long-standing insularity between itself and its neighbors. The riots were central to the Clinic's programmatic reorientation, but the concessions only went so far, especially as the political foment from the riots dissipated in the years afterward. The Cleveland experience is part of a larger-and still ongoing-debate on social obligations of medical centers, "town-gown" relations between research institutions and their neighbors, and the role of protest in catalyzing community health reform.

The 1899/1900 arrival of bubonic plague in Argentina had thrown the model status of Buenos Aires as a hygienic city into crisis. Where the idea of foreign threats and imported epidemics had dominated the thinking of Argentina's sanitarians at that time, plague renewed concerns about hidden threats within the fabric of the capital's dense environment; concerns that led to new sanitary measures and unprecedented rat-campaigns supported by the large-scale application of sulphur dioxide. The article tells the story of early twentieth-century urban sanitation in Buenos Aires through the lens of a new industrial disinfection apparatus. The Aparato Marot, also known as Sulfurozador was acquired and integrated in the capital's sanitary administration by the epidemiologist José Penna in 1906 to materialise two key lessons learned from plague. First, the machine was supposed to translate the successful disinfection practices of global maritime sanitation into urban epidemic control in Argentina. Second, the machine's design enabled public health authorities to reinvigorate a traditional hygienic concern for the entirety of the city's terrain. While the Sulfurozador offered effective destruction of rats, it promised also a comprehensive - and utopian - disinfection of the whole city, freeing it from all imaginable pathogens, insects as well as rodents. In 1910, the successful introduction of the Sulfurozador encouraged Argentina's medico-political elite to introduce a new principle of 'general prophylaxis'. This article places the apparatus as a technological modernisation of traditional sanitary practices in the bacteriological age, which preserved the urban environment - 'el terreno' - as a principal site of intervention. Thus, the Sulfurozador allowed the 'higienistas' to sustain a long-standing utopian vision of all-encompassing social, bodily and political hygiene into the twentieth century.

Scaling has been proposed as a powerful tool to analyze the properties of complex systems and in particular for cities where it describes how various properties change with population. The empirical study of scaling on a wide range of urban datasets displays apparent nonlinear behaviors whose statistical validity and meaning were recently the focus of many debates. We discuss here another aspect, which is the implication of such scaling forms on individual cities and how they can be used for predicting the behavior of a city when its population changes. We illustrate this discussion in the case of delay due to traffic congestion with a dataset of 101 US cities in the years 1982-2014. We show that the scaling form obtained by agglomerating all of the available data for different cities and for different years does display a nonlinear behavior, but which appears to be unrelated to the dynamics of individual cities when their population grows. In other words, the congestion-induced delay in a given city does not depend on its population only, but also on its previous history. This strong path dependency prohibits the existence of a simple scaling form valid for all cities and shows that we cannot always agglomerate the data for many different systems. More generally, these results also challenge the use of transversal data for understanding longitudinal series for cities., Competing Interests: The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Mapping and quantifying urban landscape dynamics and the underlying driving factors are crucial for devising appropriate policies, especially in cities of developing countries where the change is rapid. This study analyzed three decades (1984-2014) of land use land cover change of Addis Ababa using Landsat imagery and examined the underlying factors and their temporal dynamics through expert interview using Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). Classification results revealed that urban area increased by 50%, while agricultural land and forest decreased by 34 and 16%, respectively. The driving factors operated differently during the pre and post-1991 period. The year 1991 was chosen because it marked government change in the country resulting in policy change. Policy had the highest influence during the pre-1991 period. Land use change in this period was associated with the housing sector as policies and institutional setups were permissive to this sector. Population growth and in-migration were also important factors. Economic factors played significant role in the post-1991 period. The fact that urban land has a market value, the growth of private investment, and the speculated property market were among the economic factors. Policy reforms since 2003 were also influential to the change. Others such as accessibility, demography, and neighborhood factors were a response to economic factors. All the above-mentioned factors had vital role in shaping the urban pattern of the city. These findings can help planners and policymakers to better understand the dynamic relationship of urban land use and the driving factors to better manage the city.

This commentary constructs a social history of Hillbrow, an inner-city suburb in Johannesburg, South Africa, based on a review of relevant published historical, anthropological and sociological texts. We highlight the significant continuities in the social structure of the suburb, despite the radical transformations that have occurred over the last 120 years.Originally envisaged as a healthy residential area, distinct from the industrial activity of early Johannesburg, Hillbrow was a prime location for health infrastructure to serve the city. By the late 1960s, the suburb had been transformed by the rapid construction of high rise office and apartment buildings, providing temporary low cost accommodation for young people, migrants and immigrants. In the 1980s, Hillbrow defied the apartheid state policy of racial separation of residential areas, and earned the reputation of a liberated zone of tolerance and inclusion. By the 1990s, affected by inner-city decay and the collapse of services for many apartment buildings, the suburb became associated with crime, sex work, and ungovernability. More recently, the revitalisation of the Hillbrow Health Precinct has created a more optimistic narrative of the suburb as a site for research and interventions that has the potential to have a positive impact on the health of its residents.The concentration of innovative public health interventions in Hillbrow today, particularly in the high quality health services and multidisciplinary research of the Hillbrow Health Precinct, creates the possibility for renewal of this troubled inner-city suburb.

This study sheds light on the agricultural economy that underpinned the emergence of the first urban centres in northern Mesopotamia. Using δ 13 C and δ 15 N values of crop remains from the sites of Tell Sabi Abyad, Tell Zeidan, Hamoukar, Tell Brak and Tell Leilan (6500-2000 cal bc), we reveal that labour-intensive practices such as manuring/middening and water management formed an integral part of the agricultural strategy from the seventh millennium bc. Increased agricultural production to support growing urban populations was achieved by cultivation of larger areas of land, entailing lower manure/midden inputs per unit area-extensification. Our findings paint a nuanced picture of the role of agricultural production in new forms of political centralization. The shift towards lower-input farming most plausibly developed gradually at a household level, but the increased importance of land-based wealth constituted a key potential source of political power, providing the possibility for greater bureaucratic control and contributing to the wider societal changes that accompanied urbanization.

Epidemics can spread across large regions becoming pandemics by flowing along transportation and social networks. Two network attributes, transitivity (when a node is connected to two other nodes that are also directly connected between them) and centrality (the number and intensity of connections with the other nodes in the network), are widely associated with the dynamics of transmission of pathogens. Here we investigate how network centrality and transitivity influence vulnerability to diseases of human populations by examining one of the most devastating pandemic in human history, the fourteenth century plague pandemic called Black Death. We found that, after controlling for the city spatial location and the disease arrival time, cities with higher values of both centrality and transitivity were more severely affected by the plague. A simulation study indicates that this association was due to central cities with high transitivity undergo more exogenous re-infections. Our study provides an easy method to identify hotspots in epidemic networks. Focusing our effort in those vulnerable nodes may save time and resources by improving our ability of controlling deadly epidemics.

An intriguing paradox emerges in the history of disposal of the dead in Europe: the countries (Italy, Germany, England, and Scotland) where, in the last quarter of the 19th century, cremation was introduced first, were the last ones to see the diffusion of cremation as a mass phenomenon. The contrary was true where-for instance, in Switzerland and in Denmark-the start of cremation was initially delayed. Here the growth was very fast. To explain this puzzling enigma, I propose to abandon the usual nation-level approach and take cities as appropriate units of analysis. So, a database on presence or absence of crematoria and on trends in "annual cremation by death ratios" in the European cities with more than 5,000 inhabitants before 1939 was completed for an analysis of patterns of the early emergence of cremation and change of cremation rate at a local level.

Medieval European urbanization presents a line of continuity between earlier cities and modern European urban systems. Yet, many of the spatial, political and economic features of medieval European cities were particular to the Middle Ages, and subsequently changed over the Early Modern Period and Industrial Revolution. There is a long tradition of demographic studies estimating the population sizes of medieval European cities, and comparative analyses of these data have shed much light on the long-term evolution of urban systems. However, the next step-to systematically relate the population size of these cities to their spatial and socioeconomic characteristics-has seldom been taken. This raises a series of interesting questions, as both modern and ancient cities have been observed to obey area-population relationships predicted by settlement scaling theory. To address these questions, we analyze a new dataset for the settled area and population of 173 European cities from the early fourteenth century to determine the relationship between population and settled area. To interpret this data, we develop two related models that lead to differing predictions regarding the quantitative form of the population-area relationship, depending on the level of social mixing present in these cities. Our empirical estimates of model parameters show a strong densification of cities with city population size, consistent with patterns in contemporary cities. Although social life in medieval Europe was orchestrated by hierarchical institutions (e.g., guilds, church, municipal organizations), our results show no statistically significant influence of these institutions on agglomeration effects. The similarities between the empirical patterns of settlement relating area to population observed here support the hypothesis that cities throughout history share common principles of organization that self-consistently relate their socioeconomic networks to structured urban spaces., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

This essay takes seventeenth-century Stockholm as its point of departure in discussing the many spaces to which early modern medicine belonged, in particular the court, the cityscape, the site of the pharmacy, and the city’s Collegium Medicum. It shows how scholarly medicine and pharmacy arose along with the city itself. They were a part of the city and of its many interlaced local, European, and global flows and relationships. Thus the essay offers new perspectives on medicine as part of, and a driving force behind, Stockholm’s transition from a medieval town to the capital of an early modern state, as well as the city’s integration into the early modern system of global trade. It also shows how a switch of perspective may relocate pharmacy to the center of the seventeenth-century medical world. By focusing on the city, rather than on specific professional groups, the essay seeks to problematize the alleged special importance of physicians for early modern medicine and the view that physicians held a superior status in relation to other medical practitioners, as well as to artisans/craftsmen.

Despite a well-established literature investigating race-related predictors of riot incidence, the racial aftermath of riots remains unexamined. In this study, I use the 1960s U.S. race riots to investigate trends in black residential segregation levels following large-scale riot activity in seven major U.S. cities. I use a novel approach--namely, synthetic control matching--to select a group of cities against which segregation trends can be compared. I find that levels of black segregation rose in 1970 for four of the seven cities, but these increases disappeared in 1980 and 1990 except in Detroit. These results mask differential trends at lower geographic levels: suburban neighborhoods in affected areas experienced larger and longer-term increases in segregation, particularly in traditionally hypersegregated cities in the Midwest and Northeast.

We present a gridded 8 km-resolution data product of the estimated composition of tree taxa at the time of Euro-American settlement of the northeastern United States and the statistical methodology used to produce the product from trees recorded by land surveyors. Composition is defined as the proportion of stems larger than approximately 20 cm diameter at breast height for 22 tree taxa, generally at the genus level. The data come from settlement-era public survey records that are transcribed and then aggregated spatially, giving count data. The domain is divided into two regions, eastern (Maine to Ohio) and midwestern (Indiana to Minnesota). Public Land Survey point data in the midwestern region (ca. 0.8-km resolution) are aggregated to a regular 8 km grid, while data in the eastern region, from Town Proprietor Surveys, are aggregated at the township level in irregularly-shaped local administrative units. The product is based on a Bayesian statistical model fit to the count data that estimates composition on the 8 km grid across the entire domain. The statistical model is designed to handle data from both the regular grid and the irregularly-shaped townships and allows us to estimate composition at locations with no data and to smooth over noise caused by limited counts in locations with data. Critically, the model also allows us to quantify uncertainty in our composition estimates, making the product suitable for applications employing data assimilation. We expect this data product to be useful for understanding the state of vegetation in the northeastern United States prior to large-scale Euro-American settlement. In addition to specific regional questions, the data product can also serve as a baseline against which to investigate how forests and ecosystems change after intensive settlement. The data product is being made available at the NIS data portal as version 1.0.

The Dutch cities Utrecht and Wijk bij Duurstede were founded by the Romans around 50 B.C. and the village Fijnaart and Graft-De Rijp around 1600 A.D. The soils of these villages are polluted with Pb (up to ~5000 mg/kg). Lead isotope ratios were used to trace the sources of Pb pollution in the urban soils. In ~75% of the urban soils the source of the Pb pollution was a mixture of glazed potsherd, sherds of glazed roof tiles, building remnants (Pb sheets), metal slag, Pb-based paint flakes and coal ashes. These anthropogenic Pb sources most likely entered the urban soils due to historical smelting activities, renovation and demolition of houses, disposal of coal ashes and raising and fertilization of land with city waste. Since many houses still contain Pb-based building materials, careless renovation or demolition can cause new or more extensive Pb pollution in urban soils. In ~25% of the studied urban topsoils, Pb isotope compositions suggest Pb pollution was caused by incinerator ash and/or gasoline Pb suggesting atmospheric deposition as the major source. The bioaccessible Pb fraction of 14 selected urban soils was determined with an in vitro test and varied from 16% to 82% of total Pb. The bioaccessibility appears related to the chemical composition and grain size of the primary Pb phases and pollution age. Risk assessment based on the in vitro test results imply that risk to children may be underestimated in ~90% of the studied sample sites (13 out of 14).

This article presents a reflection on the past and current history, uses, and significance of the Luiz Rau creek to the municipality of Novo Hamburgo, Rio Grande do Sul. Its waters have always been important to the region, quenching the thirst of the local population and their livestock and providing venues for shared social interactions, but also as a destination for municipal industrial and household waste, which has polluted the waters of the creek. Our primary objective is to present and discuss these aspects with the purpose of elucidating the historical importance of this watercourse to the city of Novo Hamburgo. Toward that end, we conducted an exploratory survey to obtain the necessary inputs for such a discussion. We also employed texts from the now-defunct Jornal 5 de Abril and from Jornal NH, the highest-circulating newspaper in the region, to illustrate some situations experienced by the community. We found that municipal waste continues to be dumped into the creek, which has made it rather unloved by the local residents, but it remains firmly present in their daily lives.

The evolution of infrastructure networks such as roads and streets are of utmost importance to understand the evolution of urban systems. However, datasets describing these spatial objects are rare and sparse. The database presented here represents the road network at the french national level described in the historical map of Cassini in the 18th century. The digitization of this historical map is based on a collaborative methodology that we describe in detail. This dataset can be used for a variety of interdisciplinary studies, covering multiple spatial resolutions and ranging from history, geography, urban economics to network science.

Charles Lucas (1713-1771) was one of the most controversial popular politicians to stride the Irish political stage in the eighteenth century. Though the descendant of a beneficiary of the Cromwellian plantation, Lucas's personal inheritance was small, and he was apprenticed in his teens to an apothecary in Dublin. Lucas prospered in that capacity, both as an advocate of higher standards within the profession, and as a representative on the lower house (the common council) of Dublin Corporation. Predisposed to challenge what he perceived as abuses by vested and established interests, Lucas made a name for himself as an outspoken critic of the oligarchical pretensions of the lord mayor and aldermen, which comprised the upper chamber of the Corporation. His successes were few, but he was possessed of a fluent pen, and a precocious awareness that he could best communicate with his natural audience through the use of print. As a result, he became the darling of an emerging popular political interest, which shared his vision of a reformed Protestant constitution. Encouraged by this positive response, Lucas offered himself to the electorate of Dublin in 1749, but though he campaigned vigorously, and polled well, he was not elected. More consequently for Lucas personally, his extension of his critical gaze from the municipality to the larger canvas of national and Anglo-Irish politics elicited the hostile notice of the most powerful figures in the land, which prompted him to flee the country to avoid imprisonment. Lucas was not inactive during his eleven-year 'exile', but these were comparatively quiet years by comparison with his final decade when, following his return to Ireland in 1761, he acquired a national profile as MP for Dublin City, a vigorous advocate, and a tireless proponent of Patriot policies.

Introduction: In addition to his contributions to medicine, Charles Lucas had a long career in politics, starting in the 1740s as a guild representative on the lower house of Dublin corporation, and culminating in his election to the Irish House of Commons in 1761. By examining the background in Dublin and Irish politics, this paper explores Lucas' impact on the electorate, and how it was that he was able to win a parliamentary seat in Dublin and retain it for a decade while he campaigned in support of a range of important Patriot issues., Lucas' Political Career: Lucas had none of the qualifications that would normally be required for a successful politician. His father held some land, but as a younger son who had to make a living, Charles was apprenticed to a Dublin apothecary. Nor did he have the political connections that might have compensated for a lack of land, wealth, or status. But Lucas possessed other advantages, notably an education that enabled him to read the city's medieval charters, identifying areas where the Dublin freemen had lost 'ancient rights', and some experience of publishing, so that he could appeal to the electorate., Conclusion: Lucas' remarkable political success stemmed from both local circumstances and his own personal qualities.

The article considers activity of municipal self-governments of Russia concerning support of sanitary epidemiological well-being of cities in the late XIX--early XX centuries. The acuteness of problem of sanitary conditions of urban settlements particularly became visible in post-reform period due to increasing of number of urban population, alteration of setup and rhythm of life in cities, appearance of new forms of worker's daily chores. Al this, against the background of underdevelopment of communal sphere aggravated epidemiological situation in cities. The impulse to improvement and development of sanitary control was made by the city regulations of 1870 presenting to town authorities the right to deal with sanitary issues. The significant input into improvement of cities was made first of all at the expense of construction of water supplies and sewerage and support of sanitary control of these spheres of municipal economy. Under town councils of many cities the sanitary commissions were organized to support permanent sanitary control in town. The development of town sanitation followed the way of specialization. The housing and communal, trade and food, school and sanitary and sanitary and veterinary control were organized.

Through the reflections of interviewees from New York, Montreal, and Sydney, this article investigates the affective qualities of urban ruins and the role they have played in gay male experience and identity construction from 1970 to 2000. Along with other places on the margins of regulated space, urban ruins operate as points of transition--passages from reason to myth at the interstices of ordered urban space. The article argues that the sensual feelings and memories conjured by these ruins enable alternative modes of being for gay men that stand in contrast to the more regimented modes of everyday life.

During a period of demographic and urban growth of the city of Porto, the need arose for a new hospital. The Santa Casa da Misericórdia of Porto, in charge of erecting the new health facility, appointed the British architect John Carr to design the project. By means of the analysis of a set of archival sources and sundry literature on the topic, we examine the criteria chosen for the design and construction of Hospital Geral de Santo António and if it fulfilled expectations, becoming a special space in the city. This article opens up a perspective on the study of the development of the city and the creation of this health facility, contributing to the historical trajectory of hospital architecture.

We investigate the growth dynamics of Greater London defined by the administrative boundary of the Greater London Authority, based on the evolution of its street network during the last two centuries. This is done by employing a unique dataset, consisting of the planar graph representation of nine time slices of Greater London's road network spanning 224 years, from 1786 to 2010. Within this time-frame, we address the concept of the metropolitan area or city in physical terms, in that urban evolution reveals observable transitions in the distribution of relevant geometrical properties. Given that London has a hard boundary enforced by its long standing green belt, we show that its street network dynamics can be described as a fractal space-filling phenomena up to a capacitated limit, whence its growth can be predicted with a striking level of accuracy. This observation is confirmed by the analytical calculation of key topological properties of the planar graph, such as the topological growth of the network and its average connectivity. This study thus represents an example of a strong violation of Gibrat's law. In particular, we are able to show analytically how London evolves from a more loop-like structure, typical of planned cities, toward a more tree-like structure, typical of self-organized cities. These observations are relevant to the discourse on sustainable urban planning with respect to the control of urban sprawl in many large cities which have developed under the conditions of spatial constraints imposed by green belts and hard urban boundaries.

Hundreds of years ago, the ancient Chinese implemented several outstanding projects to cope with the changing climate and violent floods. Some of these projects are still in use today. These projects evolved from the experience and knowledge accumulated through the long coexistence of people with nature. The concepts behind these ancient stormwater management practices, such as low-impact development and sustainable drainage systems, are similar to the technology applied in modern stormwater management. This paper presents the cases of the Hani Terrace in Yunnan and the Fushou drainage system of Ganzhou in Jiangxi. The ancient Chinese knowledge behind these cases is seen in the design concepts and the features of these projects. These features help us to understand better their applications in the contemporary environment. In today's more complex environment, integrating traditional and advanced philosophy with modern technologies is extremely useful in building urban and rural stormwater management systems in China.

This paper evaluates the regulation of medical practice from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries in two Habsburg cities, Vienna and Osijek, in the light of the spread of medical knowledge and practice from the centre to the periphery of the Habsburg Monarchy. Although both cities were part of the Habsburg Monarchy for much of the early modern period, there were more differences than similarities between them. This may be explained by appealing to a variety of factors, including geographical position, population structure, religion, government type, and professional organisations, all of which contributed to making medical practice very different in the two cities. The divergence occurred in spite of a central agenda for ensuring uniformity of medical practice throughout the Habsburg Monarchy. Although the legislation governing medical practice was the same in both cities, it was more strictly implemented in Vienna than in Osijek. In consequence, Osijek was the setting for some unique patterns of medical practice not to be found in the Habsburg capital., (Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Because of advances in methods and theory, archaeology now addresses issues central to debates in the social sciences in a far more sophisticated manner than ever before. Coupled with methodological innovations, multiscalar archaeological studies around the world have produced a wealth of new data that provide a unique perspective on long-term changes in human societies, as they document variation in human behavior and institutions before the modern era. We illustrate these points with three examples: changes in human settlements, the roles of markets and states in deep history, and changes in standards of living. Alternative pathways toward complexity suggest how common processes may operate under contrasting ecologies, populations, and economic integration.

The current condition and development tendencies of natural environment of capital of Georgia - Tbilisi are directly connected with the anthropogenesis. Analyze of changing of environment peculiarities of rapid expansion of Tbilisi city and according to it revealing its landscape-climatic changes is the aim of the research paper. The diverse landscape of Tbilisi suburbs is represented by forests, forest-steppes, steppes, shrubs, etc. The variety can be attributed to complex reliefs geological structure, diversity of climate, flora and fauna, and to the location between two different geostructural areas - the mountain system (Trialeti, Saguramo-Ialno) and intermountain valleys (Mameuli and Gardabani lowlands). Natural landscapes have been partly preserved in the city suburbs, but even they are gradually being replaced by new anthropogenic landscapes: new roads and residential and industrial zones. According to the data prior to 2007, the city territory totaled 372 km2, while presently, under the modified municipal decree, it is 504 km2. Transformation of natural landscape of territory of Tbilisi into the anthropogenic one, has changed the physical condition of underlying surface. Especially, heat balance of the city was changed, which was followed by increase in air mean temperature (0.4-0.5 degrees C) and precipitation and reduction of wind speed.