City Competitiveness and Spatial Location

Author(s):  
Diana Sarita Hamburger

This chapter discusses the importance of Information Technology to spatial location and city competitiveness. Understanding spatial location in urban networks can be informed by economic geography concepts, especially those with insights into how urban areas form and develop. Relative distance to markets and the flow of goods and services influences the spatial position of cities, shapes how urban settlements evolve, and helps explain their distribution. Concepts like accessibility and centrality—and strategies for measuring them—can be used to determine a good place to locate a business or transportation hub. This chapter makes a case for the importance of considering information utilities, especially telecommunication networks, as important part of economic geography, and ultimately the growth and competitiveness of cities.

2021 ◽  
pp. 001955612110016
Author(s):  
Anurima Mukherjee Basu ◽  
Rutool Sharma

Current urbanisation trends in India show a quantum jump in number of ‘census towns’, which are not statutorily declared as urban areas, but have acquired all characteristics of urban settlements. Sizeable number of such census towns are not located near any Class 1 city. Lack of proper and timely planning has led to unplanned growth of these settlements. This article is based on a review of planning legislations, institutional framework and planning process of four states in India. The present article analyses the scope and limitations of the planning process adopted in the rapidly urbanising rural areas of these states. The findings reveal that states are still following a conventional approach to planning that treats ‘urban’ and ‘rural’ as separate categories and highlights the need for adopting an integrated territorial approach to planning of settlements.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (13) ◽  
pp. 7313
Author(s):  
Mawuna Donald Houessou ◽  
Annemijn Cassee ◽  
Ben G. J. S. Sonneveld

A Rapid Food Security Appraisal among 240 rural and urban dwellers in southern Benin was conducted, using univariate and bivariate analyses, to evaluate the effects of the imposed COVID-19 ‘cordon sanitaire’ on food consumption patterns. As this is one of the first empirical studies on the COVID-19 food security nexus, we found that the raging pandemic has affected the food security pillars (availability, accessibility, utilization, and stability) in both rural and urban areas, within and outside the cordon sanitaire. The steepest decline was observed among respondents who live inside the cordon sanitaire, where rural producers and urban inhabitants without access to allotment gardens were hit hard. Increased food prices, disruptions in food logistics, and inability to work due to movement restrictions were most frequently indicated as reasons for the decline. Access to allotment gardens effectively supported households in mitigating the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the food crisis.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Madhura Yeligeti ◽  
Wenxuan Hu ◽  
Yvonne Scholz ◽  
Kai von Krbek

<p>Solar photovoltaic (PV) systems will foreseeably be an integral part of future energy systems. Land cover area analysis has a large influence on estimatiin of long-term solar photovoltaic potential of the world in high spatial detail. In this regard, it is often seen in contemporary works, that the suitability of various land cover categories for PV installation is considered in a yes/no binary response. While some areas like natural parks, sanctuaries, forests are usually completely exempted from PV potential calculations, other land over categories like urban settlements, bare, sparsely vegetated areas, and even cropland can principally support PV installations to varying degrees. This depends on the specific land use competition, social, economic and climatic conditions, etc. In this study, we attempt to evaluate these ‘factors of suitability’ of different land cover types for PV installations.</p><p>As a basis, the openly available global land cover datasets from the Copernicus Land Monitoring Service were used to identify major land cover types like cropland, shrubland, bare, wetlands, urban settlements, forests, moss and snow etc. For open area PV installations, with a focus on cropland, we incorporated the promising technology of ‘Agri-voltaics’ in our investigation. Different crops have shown to respond positively or negatively, so far, to growing under PV panels according to various experimental and commercial sources. Hence, we considered 18 major crops of the world (covering 85% of world cropland) individually and consequently, evaluated a weighted overall suitability factor of cropland cover for PV, for three acceptance scenarios of future.</p><p>For rooftop PV installations in urban areas, various socio-economic and geographical influences come in play. The rooftop area available and further usable for PV depends on housing patterns (roof type, housing density) which vary with climate, population density and socio-economic lifestyle. We classified global urban areas into several clusters based on combinations of these factors. For each cluster, rooftop area suitability is evaluated at a representative location using the land cover maps, the Open Street Map and specific characteristics of the cluster.</p><p>Overall, we present an interdisciplinary approach to integrate technological, social and economic aspects in land cover analysis to estimate PV potentials. While the intricacies may still be insufficient for planning small localized energy systems, this can reasonably benefit energy system modelling from a regional to international scale.</p>


2016 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 225-232 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Elizabeth Araujo Ajalla ◽  
Sonia Maria Oliveira de Andrade ◽  
Edson Mamoru Tamaki ◽  
William Waissmann ◽  
Sandra Helena Correia Diettrich ◽  
...  

Abstract In Brazil, leprosy is endemic in three regions: the North, Northeast, and Mid-West. Counties with contiguous binational urban areas are characterized by a constant fow of people, goods, and services, which facilitates the transmission of diseases and influences the epidemiological profile of leprosy. The purpose of this study was to examine territorial differences in relation to the incidence of leprosy, focusing on border counties with contiguous binational urban areas or otherwise. Each county was taken as an information unit for leprosy cases reported during 2001-2011, based on data from original notification records of the state's Department of Health. In counties with contiguous binational urban areas detection rates showed tendency to increase, Virchowian (lepromatous) disease and disability grade II predominated when compared with Groups II and III: 0.64 and 0.54/100,000 inhabitants for Virchowian desease and 0.14 and 0.27/100,000 inhabitants for disability grade II respectively, and were associated with higher transmission rates. The findings demonstrate the role of border areas in maintaining the endemicity of leprosy.


Author(s):  
Bamidele Ola ◽  
Iyobor Egho-Promise

The emergence of ecommerce almost three decades ago has completely transformed the approach to purchasing goods and services across various countries in the world. Almost every country in the globe, now have some form of ecommerce operations, this has further been enhanced by the stay at home COVID-19 induced lockdowns. The value and volume of transactions has also increased in transactions. However, there has been security concerns impacting ecommerce operations, which has in part, led to increasing adoption of hosting ecommerce systems in the public cloud. Threat modelling offer mechanisms to enhance the security of information technology (IT) systems. In this paper, we apply different threat modelling techniques to decompose the migration of an on-premise hosted ecommerce system to the public cloud and also evaluate these threat modelling techniques.


Author(s):  
Syed Zainol Abidin ◽  
Ronny D. Nasihien ◽  
Hery Budiyanto

Urban Farming utilizing land intensification, in order to meet the needs of fresh vegetables and fruits everyday for the community residential / housing in urban areas. Air Inflated Greenhouse as urban farming facilities, can be built and transferred to a residential location / specific housing is easy, safe, fast and lightweight (0,55mm PVC tarpaulin) so that urban farming products closer to consumers in urban settlements, the price impact getting cheaper, but quality. Long-term goal is to develop prototype Air inflated Greenhouse as facilities Urban Farming which fulfills the power, speed, effectiveness, comfort and encourage crops of fruit / vegetable hydroponic hygienic, cheap and profitable, so that the product Air Inflated Greenhouse automatically support an increase in food production, specific target is the availability prototype Air Inflated Greenhouse as Urban Farming facility in order to increase productivity of crops of fruit / vegetable hydroponic hygienic, cheap and profitable, so the high prospects for mass production by SMEs Partners to meet national food requirements. Methods using methods Experiments and Action Research, beginning with the development of design, manufacture, testing and repair of prototype Air Inflated Greenhouse includes (1) a test of strength and endurance of materials Air Inflated Greenhouse to the weather, (2) test material Air Inflated Greenhouse most effective as a component of the structure, (3) test the speed of manufacture, transport, assembly, installation, dismantling Air Inflated Greenhouse, (4) test the temperature, humidity and air pressure in the Air Inflated Greenhouse.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-30
Author(s):  
SALONI BHUTANI ◽  
ALOK KUMAR MISHRA

This paper carries out an empirical study to examine the contribution of urban areas in generating tax revenue and growth at 28 Indian state levels. The study is based on the hypothesis that the productivity and agglomeration externality effects present in cities, known as “wider economic benefits”, lead to enhanced tax bases of State Governments. The cross-sectional estimation has confirmed that urbanization and state gross domestic product per capita significantly contribute to the tax bases of State Governments, such as sales tax, stamps, registration duty and motor vehicle tax. These three agglomeration taxes (including goods and services tax) are recommended for sharing with urban local bodies.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
CharLotte Krawczyk ◽  
Christopher Wollin ◽  
Stefan Lüth ◽  
Martin Lipus ◽  
Christian Cunow ◽  
...  

<p>The de-carbonization strategy of the city of Potsdam, Germany, incorporates the utilization of its geothermal potential.  As a first step of developing a deep geothermal project for district heating, an urban seismic exploration campaign of the Stadtwerke Potsdam took place in December 2020 in the city centre of Potsdam.  Since urban measurements are often difficult to setup and a low-footprint alternative is sought for, we supplemented the contractor-performed Vibroseis survey along three profiles by distributed acoustic sensing (DAS).  In close cooperation with the municipal utilities, we interrogated a 21 km-long dark telecommunication fibre whose trajectory followed the seismic lines as close as possible.  This was accompanied by a network of 15 three-component geophones for further control and research.</p><p>In this contribution we present the data set, the approach for geo-referencing the fibre, and first results regarding DAS recording capabilities of vibroseismic signals in an urban environment.  Following the paradigm that the high density of telecommunication networks in urban areas may facilitate the exploration of the often insufficiently known local geology, we strive to further shed light on the possibilities of their employment for urban exploration.  In this respect we aim at tackling the question of the accuracy of fibre localization, recording sensitivity and range of active stimulation.</p>


2019 ◽  
pp. 1624-1644
Author(s):  
Gabriele Nolè ◽  
Rosa Lasaponara ◽  
Antonio Lanorte ◽  
Beniamino Murgante

This study deals with the use of satellite TM multi-temporal data coupled with statistical analyses to quantitatively estimate urban expansion and soil consumption for small towns in southern Italy. The investigated area is close to Bari and was selected because highly representative for Italian urban areas. To cope with the fact that small changes have to be captured and extracted from TM multi-temporal data sets, we adopted the use of spectral indices to emphasize occurring changes, and geospatial data analysis to reveal spatial patterns. Analyses have been carried out using global and local spatial autocorrelation, applied to multi-date NASA Landsat images acquired in 1999 and 2009 and available free of charge. Moreover, in this paper each step of data processing has been carried out using free or open source software tools, such as, operating system (Linux Ubuntu), GIS software (GRASS GIS and Quantum GIS) and software for statistical analysis of data (R). This aspect is very important, since it puts no limits and allows everybody to carry out spatial analyses on remote sensing data. This approach can be very useful to assess and map land cover change and soil degradation, even for small urbanized areas, as in the case of Italy, where recently an increasing number of devastating flash floods have been recorded. These events have been mainly linked to urban expansion and soil consumption and have caused loss of human lives along with enormous damages to urban settlements, bridges, roads, agricultural activities, etc. In these cases, remote sensing can provide reliable operational low cost tools to assess, quantify and map risk areas.


Author(s):  
Kudzanai Bvochora ◽  
Bernard Kusena

Many urban areas which have sprouted around the world owe their economic and social origins in growth points and market centers. Situated about 15 kilometers south-east of Harare, Epworth became one of Zimbabwe's largest peri-urban settlements due to the combined effect of demographic, political, and socioeconomic factors, among others. This chapter interrogates the various forces behind this unprecedented population growth. It demonstrates the relationship between Epworth's ballooning population and the various pull and push factors of urbanization. For example, immigration contributed immensely to this rise, although natural increase in births also contributed fairly significantly. This chapter examines the impact of population dynamics and other variables that were linked to the rapid expansion of Epworth on the overall development processes, arguing that economic and social infrastructure became conditioned by such dynamics.


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