Environmental control: charting a course for the Navajo reservation through road construction, 1945–1978

This article examines the history of road planning in the decades following the Second World War on the Navajo Nation. Federal highway planners and Navajo residents had conflicting ideas about the role of roads in the Nation's postwar development. The planners’ support for highways near uranium mines undermined efforts towards Navajo self-development and modernization. Federally planned and subsidized highways granted extractive industries control over large portions of the Nation. Those highways locked in a regime of environmental exploitation that caused severe and debilitating public health consequences for Navajo communities.

A Novel K-Means Clustering Algorithm with a Noise Algorithm for Capturing Urban Hotspots

With the development of cities, urban congestion is nearly an unavoidable problem for almost every large-scale city. Road planning is an effective means to alleviate urban congestion, which is a classical non-deterministic polynomial time (NP) hard problem, and has become an important research hotspot in recent years. A K-means clustering algorithm is an iterative clustering analysis algorithm that has been regarded as an effective means to solve urban road planning problems by scholars for the past several decades; however, it is very difficult to determine the number of clusters and sensitively initialize the center cluster. In order to solve these problems, a novel K-means clustering algorithm based on a noise algorithm is developed to capture urban hotspots in this paper. The noise algorithm is employed to randomly enhance the attribution of data points and output results of clustering by adding noise judgment in order to automatically obtain the number of clusters for the given data and initialize the center cluster. Four unsupervised evaluation indexes, namely, DB, PBM, SC, and SSE, are directly used to evaluate and analyze the clustering results, and a nonparametric Wilcoxon statistical analysis method is employed to verify the distribution states and differences between clustering results. Finally, five taxi GPS datasets from Aracaju (Brazil), San Francisco (USA), Rome (Italy), Chongqing (China), and Beijing (China) are selected to test and verify the effectiveness of the proposed noise K-means clustering algorithm by comparing the algorithm with fuzzy C-means, K-means, and K-means plus approaches. The compared experiment results show that the noise algorithm can reasonably obtain the number of clusters and initialize the center cluster, and the proposed noise K-means clustering algorithm demonstrates better clustering performance and accurately obtains clustering results, as well as effectively capturing urban hotspots.

Revitalization and gentrification in Newtown: Can urban regeneration strengthen an existing community?

<p>This thesis examines gentrification and the process of urban regeneration through proposing an adaption of a modernist heritage building in Newtown, Wellington, New Zealand to prevent the displacement of an existing community. Council policies for urban regeneration support future residential development in Newtown (eg. Adelaide Road – Planning for the Future, Wellington Urban Growth Plan 2014-2043, NZ Transport Agency (Let’s Get Wellington Moving Project)) and, as funding is geared towards upgrading the city to become more liveable, private investment will potentially occur. These initiatives may attract affluent user groups, increasing the likelihood of lower income residents becoming displaced. Newtown therefore is a suburb where existing residents may be displaced as gentrification occurs. Although there have been studies on urban regeneration and the effects of gentrification in Wellington, none have attempted to offer a built environment design solution to mitigate the adverse effects of gentrification on an existing community in Wellington. The Riddiford Building, which is part of an Institutional Precinct - a hospital site, and may be demolished. This thesis argues that building adaption to accommodate a new user group for this building is feasible and could save a building with cultural significance from demolition. Further, the building could accommodate students and lower socio-economic occupants in order to prevent the displacement of existing Newtown residents.</p>

Revitalization and gentrification in Newtown: Can urban regeneration strengthen an existing community?

<p>This thesis examines gentrification and the process of urban regeneration through proposing an adaption of a modernist heritage building in Newtown, Wellington, New Zealand to prevent the displacement of an existing community. Council policies for urban regeneration support future residential development in Newtown (eg. Adelaide Road – Planning for the Future, Wellington Urban Growth Plan 2014-2043, NZ Transport Agency (Let’s Get Wellington Moving Project)) and, as funding is geared towards upgrading the city to become more liveable, private investment will potentially occur. These initiatives may attract affluent user groups, increasing the likelihood of lower income residents becoming displaced. Newtown therefore is a suburb where existing residents may be displaced as gentrification occurs. Although there have been studies on urban regeneration and the effects of gentrification in Wellington, none have attempted to offer a built environment design solution to mitigate the adverse effects of gentrification on an existing community in Wellington. The Riddiford Building, which is part of an Institutional Precinct - a hospital site, and may be demolished. This thesis argues that building adaption to accommodate a new user group for this building is feasible and could save a building with cultural significance from demolition. Further, the building could accommodate students and lower socio-economic occupants in order to prevent the displacement of existing Newtown residents.</p>

On the Road Without a Map: Why We Need an “Ethic of Road Ecology”

Over the past two decades, our knowledge of the ecological impacts of roads has increased rapidly. It is now clear that the environmental effects of transportation infrastructure are inextricable from transportation benefits to economic, social, and cultural values. Despite the necessity of optimizing these multiple values, road planners, scientists, and practitioners have no established methodology or pluralistic approach to address growing ethical complexities. We articulate five ethical issues that could be addressed by developing an ethic of road ecology in order to facilitate the identification, reasoning, and harmonization of ethical dimensions of road planning and development. This inquiry into road ecology can draw lessons from existing applied ethics, such as in ecological restoration and urban planning, to build a narrative that is informed by both science and ethics. We illustrate five ethical issues presented through case studies that elaborate on the motivations, responsibilities, and duties that should be considered in ethically and scientifically complicated road building decisions. To address these issues, we encourage the development of a code of ethics, dedicated intellectual forums, and practical guidance to assist road planners, and more broadly transportation practitioners, to resolve complex ethical quandaries systematically. We hope this perspective encourages conversation for a holistic yet pragmatic approach to this applied ethics problem, while also assisting responsible parties as they navigate difficult moral terrain.

Highways and Hierarchies

This edited collection explores the contemporary proliferation of roads in South Asia and the Tibet-Himalaya region, showing how new infrastructures simultaneously create fresh connections and reinforce existing inequalities. Bringing together ethnographic studies on the social politics of road development and new mobilities in 21st-century Asia, it demonstrates that while new roads generate new forms of hierarchy, older forms of hierarchy are remade and re-established in creative and surprising new ways. Focused on South Asia but speaking to more global phenomena, the chapters collectively reveal how road planning, construction and usage routinely yield a simultaneous reinforcement and disruption of social, political, and economic relations.

Automatic Generation of Urban Road Planning Network Under Deep Learning

With the rapid advancement of China’s urbanization process and the rapid increase of the number of motor vehicles, now the vast majority of cities in China are faced with traffic congestion, environmental pollution, noise pollution and other problems. Facing these problems, a road network with reasonable structure, proper layout and sufficient capacity has become an important basic condition for the sustainable development of urban traffic system. This paper mainly studies the automatic generation method of urban road planning network based on deep learning. In this paper, a model based on deep neural network is proposed, which integrates the knowledge of road planning domain and generative adversarial network, and can realize the generation of road network simply and quickly.

Landscape Structure of Woody Cover Patches for Endangered Ocelots in Southern Texas

Few ecological studies have explored landscape suitability using the gradient concept of landscape structure for wildlife species. Identification of conditions influencing the landscape ecology of endangered species allows for development of more robust recovery strategies. Our objectives were to (i) identify the range of landscape metrics (i.e., mean patch area; patch and edge densities; percent land cover; shape, aggregation, and largest patch indices) associated with woody vegetation used by ocelots (Leopardus pardalis), and (ii) quantify the potential distribution of suitable woody cover for ocelots across southern Texas. We used the gradient concept of landscape structure and the theory of slack combined with GPS telemetry data from 10 ocelots. Spatial distribution of high suitable woody cover is comprised of large patches, with low shape-index values (1.07–2.25), patch (27.21–72.50 patches/100 ha), and edge (0–191.50 m/ha) densities. High suitability landscape structure for ocelots occurs in 45.27% of woody cover in southern Texas. Our study demonstrates a new approach for measuring landscape suitability for ocelots in southern Texas. The range of landscape values identified that there are more large woody patches containing the spatial structure used by ocelots than previously suspected, which will aid in evaluating recovery and road planning efforts.

Highways and Hierarchies

This edited collection explores the contemporary proliferation of roads in South Asia and the Tibet-Himalaya region, showing how new infrastructures simultaneously create fresh connections and reinforce existing inequalities. Bringing together ethnographic studies on the social politics of road development and new mobilities in 21st-century Asia, it demonstrates that while new roads generate new forms of hierarchy, older forms of hierarchy are remade and re-established in creative and surprising new ways. Focused on South Asia but speaking to more global phenomena, the chapters collectively reveal how road planning, construction and usage routinely yield a simultaneous reinforcement and disruption of social, political, and economic relations.