scholarly journals An integrative approach to mosquito dynamics reveals differences in people's everyday experiences of mosquitoes

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michelle V Evans ◽  
Siddharth Bhatnagar ◽  
John M. Drake ◽  
Courtney C. Murdock ◽  
Shomen Mukherjee

Urban environments are heterogeneous landscapes of social and environmental features, with important consequences for human-nature entanglements, such as that of mosquito-borne disease. Investigations into this intra-urban heterogeneity in mosquito dynamics find conflicting results, likely due to the complex socio-ecological interactions and the importance of place-based context. Integrative research, which synthesizes multiple disciplines and epistemologies, can help place ecological results into their social context to explore these place-based differences. Here, we develop an integrative approach to understanding spatial patterns of mosquito burdens in urban systems by combining entomological surveys, semi-structured interviews, and sketch maps. Although we found no evidence for a difference in mosquito abundance across an urban gradient, there were differences in individuals' everyday experiences with mosquitoes. These differences were mediated by how individuals moved through public space and their vulnerability to hazards in these spaces. This example of integrative research illustrates what can be gained from the inclusion of multiple epistemologies, particularly for research in socio-ecological systems.

Author(s):  
Rita Occhiuto

Rita Occhiuto Faculté d’Architecture. Université de Liège, ULG. 1, Rue Courtois 4000 Liège (BE) Tél. +3242217900   e-mail : [email protected] Keywords: public space, park system, green and water infrastructure, morphological green writings, landscape memory The rapid transformation and the trivialization of landscapes in Wallonia (BE), require reformulating tools and objectives of morphological studies. Built fabrics and landscapes show the effects of abandoning or losing interest in the interrelations between natural and human actions. This contribution focuses on studies of cities and territories that have ceased to be the object of spatial policies attentive to the relationship between the need to live, maintain or care for green or natural spaces. After the systematic reduction of urban environments to simple green covers, morphological reading allows the recognition of traces of park systems or green infrastructures, whose communities often do not remember. The research's focus has shifted from the building to the green space structure. This displacement of interest makes it possible to find commons cultures that have acted on the territory of Liège (industrial city) on the one hand, through the building’s extension and on the other hand, through the project of forests, walks, squares, parks and public gardens. Now, these fragmented places become the main resource for reorganizing natural and human systems in order to offer new - social and spatial - coherence for tomorrow. Thus the historical green systems become a strong structuring link which serves to seek new dialectics of balance between existing fabrics and green systems. This system’s regeneration stands, on the one hand, to the hybridization of materials - water, green and buildings - and, on the other hand, to the physical and mental memory of the inhabited environments that populations keep. Green systems impose themselves as powerful vectors for the construction of new socio-spatial balances of cities and territories of globalization, as in the study case for the landscape systems in Liège and for the water and landscapes infrastructure in Chaudfontaine.References Foxley, A. (2010), Distance & engagement. Walking, thinking and making landscape. Vogt landscape architects, Lars Müller Publishers Cronon,W., Coll., Uncommon ground. Rethinking the Human Place in Nature. W.W.Norton & Company New York/London McHarg, I.(1969), Design with Nature, 1th, New York Spirn, A.W. (1994), The granite garden. Urban Nature and Human Design, ed. Basic Book Ravagnati, C. (2012), L’invenzione del Territorio. L’atlante inedito di Saverio Muratori, ed. Franco Angeli, Milano 


2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 123 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ana Luísa Brandão ◽  
Pedro Brandão

<p>Spatial growth of cities corresponded to new theoretical and practical knowledge capacities with new kinds of urban infrastructures, new services organisation and new construction methods, of XIX and most of XX century’s industrial space production. The decline of those capacities and a “crisis” of modern models, followed by the still on-going post-industrial transition process of the past 50 years are translated in many different forms of spatial, social, economic and cultural organisation and diversity of emerging urban contexts. Contemporary processes seem to carry difficulties in understanding and conducting urban transformation in such diverse and changing context. What strategic elements can be used to interpret and act in such contexts?<br />In this paper we intend to show an interdisciplinary perspective of public space as part of strategic and theoretical principles recognised by several fields of urban knowledge and practice: we include the spatial continuity of the Commons in those structuring principles, as a notion of urban “publicness”. These new perspectives require a perception of public space that goes beyond traditional city references, to other peripheral or scattered urban areas, but maintaining its fundamental structuring role, as systemic and interactive reference for complex urban environments. Through a study on the specific case of the South Bank of Lisbon Metropolitan Area, we present a conceptual operative matrix, based on the hypothesis of strategic interaction between urban systems, aiming for its structuring potential for spatial continuity – public space, infrastructure and landscape.<br />Outputs of this study aim at a contribution to a more flexible and interactive structuring approach to urban design and planning, focused on interdisciplinary perspectives of public space production.</p>


2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-37
Author(s):  
Hans Walter Behrens ◽  
K. Selçuk Candan ◽  
Xilun Chen ◽  
Yash Garg ◽  
Mao-Lin Li ◽  
...  

Urban systems are characterized by complexity and dynamicity. Data-driven simulations represent a promising approach in understanding and predicting complex dynamic processes in the presence of shifting demands of urban systems. Yet, today’s silo-based, de-coupled simulation engines fail to provide an end-to-end view of the complex urban system, preventing informed decision-making. In this article, we present DataStorm to support integration of existing simulation, analysis and visualization components into integrated workflows. DataStorm provides a flow engine, DataStorm-FE , for coordinating data and decision flows among multiple actors (each representing a model, analytic operation, or a decision criterion) and enables ensemble planning and optimization across cloud resources. DataStorm provides native support for simulation ensemble creation through parameter space sampling to decide which simulations to run, as well as distributed instantiation and parallel execution of simulation instances on cluster resources. Recognizing that simulation ensembles are inherently sparse relative to the potential parameter space, we also present a density-boosting partition-stitch sampling scheme to increase the effective density of the simulation ensemble through a sub-space partitioning scheme, complemented with an efficient stitching mechanism that leverages partial and imperfect knowledge from partial dynamical systems to effectively obtain a global view of the complex urban process being simulated.


2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Renita Murimi

AbstractCities are microcosms representing a diversity of human experience. The complexity of urban systems arises from this diversity, where the services that cities offer to their inhabitants have to be tailored for their unique requirements. This paper studies the complexity of urban environments in terms of the assimilation of its communities. We examine the urban assimilation complexity with respect to the foreignness between communities and formalize the level of complexity using information-theoretic measures. Our findings contribute to a sociological perspective of the relationship between urban complex systems and the diversity of communities that make up urban systems.


2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 54-69
Author(s):  
Heather Harrington

Abstract How people move and appear in public spaces is a reflection of the cultural, religious and socio-political forces in a society. This article, built on an earlier work titled ’Site-Specific Dance: Women in the Middle East’ (2016), addresses the ways in which dance in a public space can support the principles of freedom of expression and gender equality in Tunisia. I explore the character of public space before, during, and after the Arab Spring uprisings. Adopting an ethnographic and phenomenological approach, I focus on the efforts of two Tunisian dancers – Bahri Ben Yahmed (a dancer, choreographer and filmmaker based in Tunis, who has trained in ballet, modern dance and hip hop) and Ahmed Guerfel (a dancer based in Gabès, who has trained in hip hop) – to examine movement in a public space to address political issues facing the society. An analysis of data obtained from Yahmed and Guerfel, including structured interviews, videos, photos, articles and e-mail correspondence, supports the argument that dance performed in public spaces is more effective in shaping the politics of the society than dance performed on the proscenium stage. Definitions and properties of everyday choreography, site and the proscenium stage are analysed, along with examples of site-specific political protest choreography in Egypt, Turkey and Tunisia. I engage with the theories of social scientist Erving Goffman, which propose that a public space can serve as a stage, where people both embody politics and can embody a protest against those politics.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Franchi

Public Space is a photographic and video project examining the relationship between the public sphere and private corporations. The project explores various sites throughout Toronto and New York that are on private property but have been built with the intention of allowing the general public to have unrestricted access to these areas. These spaces are referred to as Privately Owned Public Space or “POPS”. The goal of the project is to question and document, through photographic and video practice, these spaces within the urban environment and to challenge others to consider whether these spaces are effective in achieving their intended use and if they are truly accessible to the general public. Loss of the public space is an ongoing issue that faces cities and developers often receive concessions to bylaw zoning requirements in exchange for incorporating POPS. This thesis project is a personal exploration of how these spaces are changing the urban environments of North American cities in the twenty first century.


Author(s):  
Luciano Cupelloni

AbstractThe theme is the urban re-qualification, applied in particular to the architectural heritage and the public space. The goal is the ongoing challenge of outlining a new perspective aimed at “common good” and sustainability. The instrument chosen is the “environmental technological design,” understood as a cultural, scientific, and social position, that is, as a position on the role of architecture. The contribution reiterates the urgency of restoring the transformative power of the design mission to the project, too often reduced to a set of technical compilation procedures. In the best cases, a position that is lost in the complication of procedures, in the extension of time, in the waste of economic and human resources. A crisis of the project as “anticipation” of progressive scenarios, precisely in the most acute, ever more serious phase, of the urgency of the reorganization of urban systems, with a view to environmental, social and economic sustainability. Not a recent urgency, today only brought to light, dramatically, by the reality of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. Among the solutions, the design experimental research, well beyond the objective of flexibility, up to the notion of “functional indifference,” understood not as shapeless neutrality, but as the maximum functionality of spatial, architectural and urban quality.


2018 ◽  
Vol 13 ◽  
pp. 18-27
Author(s):  
Aurelija Daugelaite ◽  
Indre Gražulevičiūte-Vileniške ◽  
Mantas Landauskas

The concept of urban acupuncture, which has been gaining ground in recent decades, is based on the activation and revitalization of urban environments using small architectural or landscape architectural interventions in precise carefully selected locations of urban fabric. However, the rapid and unexpected design solutions of urban acupuncture, based on ecological design, nature dynamics, street art, material re-use, can cause different social and psychological reactions of urban population and these reactions may vary depending on cultural contexts. Consequently, in order to implement successful urban acupuncture projects in Lithuanian cities, it is very important to find out public opinion and priorities in the fields of public space management, aesthetics, and public art. The aim of the research was to analyze the opinion of Kaunas city residents regarding these issues. For this purpose, a sociological questionnaire survey was used. The questionnaire containing 20 questions was designed, with the aim to find out the trends of use of public spaces in the city, the attitudes of residents towards street art and other small-scale initiatives in public spaces implemented in the recent years, possibilities of creating landscape architecture based on ecological ideas in urban environment, the attitude of inhabitants towards community spaces and community space design in the city, etc. 100 residents of Kaunas participated in this online administered survey. The survey has demonstrated general positive attitude towards contemporary design trends of public spaces and public art; however, the surveyed population expressed preferences towards fully equipped public spaces offering possibilities for a wide range of activities.


PLoS ONE ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. e0248339
Author(s):  
Megan A. Lewis ◽  
Laura K. Wagner ◽  
Lisa G. Rosas ◽  
Nan Lv ◽  
Elizabeth M. Venditti ◽  
...  

Background An integrated collaborative care intervention was used to treat primary care patients with comorbid obesity and depression in a randomized clinical trial. To increase wider uptake and dissemination, information is needed on translational potential. Methods The trial collected longitudinal, qualitative data at baseline, 6 months (end of intensive treatment), 12 months (end of maintenance treatment), and 24 months (end of follow-up). Semi-structured interviews (n = 142) were conducted with 54 out of 409 randomly selected trial participants and 37 other stakeholders, such as recruitment staff, intervention staff, and clinicians. Using a Framework Analysis approach, we examined themes across time and stakeholder groups according to the RE-AIM (Reach, Effectiveness, Adoption, Implementation, and Maintenance) framework. Results At baseline, participants and other stakeholders reported being skeptical of the collaborative care approach related to some RE-AIM dimensions. However, over time they indicated greater confidence regarding the potential for future public health impact. They also provided information on barriers and actionable information to enhance program reach, effectiveness, adoption, implementation, and maintenance. Conclusions RE-AIM provided a useful framework for understanding how to increase the impact of a collaborative and integrative approach for treating comorbid obesity and depression. It also demonstrates the utility of using the framework as a planning tool early in the evidence-generation pipeline.


Author(s):  
HaeLi Kang ◽  
Dong Ha Kim ◽  
Seunghyun Yoo

Cycling provides opportunities to promote healthy and sustainable cities. However, few studies examine cyclists’ perceived attributes of a bicycle-friendly environment in relation to compact urban contexts. This study explored the attributes of perceived bikeability and urban context related to the cycling experience in Seoul, Korea. Purposive sampling with public recruitment and a snowball technique was used to recruit twenty-two cyclists and three bicycle-related community service providers from a bikeable environment. Qualitative multi-methods, including semi-structured interviews and bicycle tours with a GPS device, were adopted. The main themes of perceived bikeability were derived through thematic analysis. Cyclists perceived the attributes of a bicycle-friendly physical environment as essential components of bikeability. In urban environments where cycling is not yet recognized as the main transportation mode, internal conflict among cyclists and external conflicts between cyclists and other transportation users were evident. A supportive community system included developing an appropriate environment, providing information, and expanding riding opportunities. A bicycle-friendly culture accumulated over a long period influenced the initiation and maintenance of cycling and contributed to a more bikeable community environment. Cyclists’ attitude, behaviors, and perceived environment differed according to purpose. Policy, system, and environmental changes are required to promote cycling in compact urban contexts.


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