The Abnormal Population Growth and Urban Sprawl of an Arabian Gulf City: The Case of Abu Dhabi City

The majority of the world's population will live in cities in the next few years and the pace of urbanization worldwide will continue to accelerate over the coming decades. While the number of megacities is projected to increase, the largest population growth is expected to be in cities of less than one million people. Such a dramatic demographic shift can be expected to have an impact on population health. Although there has been historic interest in how city living affects health, a cogent framework that enables systematic study of urban health across time and place has yet to emerge. Four alternate but complementary approaches to the study of urban health today are presented (urban health penalty, urban health advantage, urban sprawl, and an integrative urban conditions model) followed by three key questions that may help guide the study and practice of urban health in coming decades.

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Consuming Abu Dhabi

The New Arab Urban ◽

10.18574/nyu/9781479880010.003.0012 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 256-275

Author(s):

Harvey Molotch

Keyword(s):

Urban Sprawl ◽

Abu Dhabi ◽

Social Stability ◽

Cultural Institutions ◽

The Core ◽

Artistic Representation ◽

Inner Circle

Goods’ consumption plays an outsize role in shaping the urban Gulf. As mainstay of the ‘contract’ between the sheikdom’s inner-circle and its’ other citizens, comes the wherewithal for massive purchase of goods, with houses and cars at the core. Extreme urban sprawl follows on. Building and maintaining the consumption infrastructure requires extensive and ongoing labor, performed by foreigners. Absent democracy, high levels of consumption yield a specific substitute form of political and social stability. Consumption also arguably includes the import of prestige cultural institutions. They are part of the work-arounds that enable modernization, globalization and permissive practices – among certain types of people in demarcated zones – toward sexuality, food, finance, alcohol, and artistic representation. Among the most important tools is separation into special geographic spaces that permit exception for activities like western-style education, tourism, and cross-gender mixing.

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RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN POPULATION GROWTH WITH CHANGING LAND-USE PATTERN AND ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGES IN KOLKATA, WEST BENGAL

10.36106/ijar/1712897 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 57-61

Author(s):

Arunima Dasgupta

Keyword(s):

Land Use ◽

Land Cover ◽

Population Growth ◽

Environmental Degradation ◽

Urban Sprawl ◽

West Bengal ◽

Environmental Changes ◽

Capital City ◽

Special Focus ◽

Rapid Urbanization

Given that urbanization is considered as one of the most signicant anthropogenic alteration of the overall environment, the present study attempts to understand spatial-temporal characteristics of urban population growth and its implications on land-use as well as understanding their relationship with environmental degradation with special focus on the Kolkata, the capital city of West Bengal. Urbanization is one of the major driving forces behind the development of today's land-use and land cover system. A large number of contemporary urbanization has been characterized as urban sprawl namely in an extensive form of land-use for urban uses that have environmentally detrimental effects. There are indications of Urban sprawl and city expansion in our Study Area of Kolkata indicating expansion of settlements and built-up area and thus causing environmental degradation in the city area. The process of urbanization always had signicant implications that can affect cumulative changes in demographic characteristics and/or transformation of the physical environment; unplanned, unsystematic and rapid urbanization can cause intense impacts on various environmental aspects, specically on land and air and water. A thorough understanding of the dynamic relationship between urbanization and its generated land-cover changes thus becomes completely essential for managing environmental changes and enabling sustainability of the environment and its resources.

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Wave Climate at Shallow Waters along the Abu Dhabi Coast

Water ◽

10.3390/w10080985 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 10 (8) ◽

pp. 985 ◽

Cited By ~ 5

Author(s):

Waleed Hamza ◽

Letizia Lusito ◽

Francesco Ligorio ◽

Giuseppe Tomasicchio ◽

Felice D’Alessandro

Keyword(s):

Shallow Water ◽

Numerical Models ◽

Grid Point ◽

Arabian Gulf ◽

Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler ◽

Wave Climate ◽

Abu Dhabi ◽

Water Conditions ◽

Key Factor ◽

Offshore Wave

High-resolution, reliable global atmospheric and oceanic numerical models can represent a key factor in designing a coastal intervention. At the present, two main centers have the capabilities to produce them: the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in the U.S.A. and the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF). The NOAA and ECMWF wave models are developed, in particular, for different water regions: deep, intermediate, and shallow water regions using different types of spatial and temporal grids. Recently, in the Arabian Gulf (also named Persian Gulf), the Abu Dhabi Municipality (ADM) installed an ADCP (Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler) to observe the atmospheric and oceanographic conditions (water level, significant wave height, peak wave period, water temperature, and wind speed and direction) at 6 m water depth, in the vicinity of the shoreline of the Saadiyat beach. Courtesy of Abu Dhabi Municipality, this observations dataset is available; the recorded data span the period from June 2015 to January 2018 (included), with a time resolution of 10 min and 30 min for the atmospheric and oceanographic variables, respectively. At the ADCP deployment location (ADMins), the wave climate has been determined using wave propagation of the NOAA offshore wave dataset by means of the Simulating WAves Nearshore (SWAN) numerical model, the NOAA and ECMWF wave datasets at the closest grid point in shallow water conditions, and the SPM ’84 hindcasting method with the NOAA wind dataset used as input. It is shown that the best agreement with the observed wave climate is obtained using the SPM ’84 hindcasting method for the shallow water conditions.

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