Monitoring and Understanding Urban Transformation: A Mixed Method Approach

Cities must address many challenges including air quality, climate change and the health and wellbeing of communities. Public authorities and developers increasingly look to improve these through the implementation of interventions and innovations, such as low traffic neighbourhoods, deep housing retrofits and green infrastructure. Monitoring the impacts of interventions is essential to determine the success of such projects and to build evidence for broader urban transformation. In this paper we present a mixed-method cross-disciplinary approach that brings together cutting edge atmospheric and data science, measurements of activity in public spaces and novel methods to assess wellbeing-promoting behaviours. The Manchester Urban Observatory focuses on living areas that have a high density of inter-related systems, which require observation, understanding and intervention at multiple levels. This must be completed in line with urban planning goals as well as a clear and succinct data solution that allows robust scientific conclusions to be made and viewed in real time. Delivery of such a monitoring strategy is not trivial and is time, resource and expertise heavy. This paper discusses the methods employed by the Manchester Urban Observatory to monitor the effectiveness off interventions implemented within cities and effective communication strategies with local communities.

Change by Activism: Insurgency, Autonomy, and Political Activism in Potosí-Jerusalén, Bogotá, Colombia

Cities today face a context in which traditional politics and policies struggle to cope with increasing urbanisation rates and growing inequalities. Meanwhile, social movements and political activists are rising up and inhabiting urban spaces as sites of contestation. However, through their practices, urban activists do more than just occupy spaces; they are fundamental drivers of urban transformation as they constantly face—and contest—spatial manifestations of power. This article aims to contribute to ongoing discussions on the role of activism in the field of urban design, by engaging with two concepts coming from the Global South: <em>insurgency</em> and <em>autonomy</em>. Through a historical account of the building of the Potosí-Jerusalén neighbourhood in Bogotá in the 1980s, it illustrates how both concepts can provide new insight into urban change by activism. On the one hand, the concept of insurgency helps unpack a mode of bottom-up action that inaugurates political spaces of contestation with the state; autonomy, on the other hand, helps reveal the complex nature of political action and the visions of urban transformation it entails. Although they were developed at the margins of conventional design theory and practice, both concepts are instrumental in advancing our understanding of how cities are shaped by activist practices. Thus, this article is part of a broader effort to (re)locate political activism in discussions about urban transformation, and rethink activism as a form of urban design practice.

São Paulo’s strategic master plan and the challenges of sustainable urban transformation

Cities play an essential role in the challenge of sustainability, and urban planning is one of the main tools for guiding urban transformation processes. This paper analyses the São Paulo Master Plan 2014, considering the principles and guidelines on compact cities, sustainable adaptation and ecosystem-based adaptation. An urban development model within sustainable parameters, however, involves conflict dynamics. In this sense, the views and demands of the main stakeholders seeking to influence the regulatory arena of São Paulo's urban policy are mapped. The analysis focuses on attempts to change the zoning law that would affect several of the definitions agreed in the Master Plan, prioritising mainly the interests of real estate developers.

SOLVING SOCIAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES AND VALUING TOURISTIC POTENTIAL USING GIS-BASED TECHNOLOGY STUDY CASE: BIOUGRA CITY, MOROCCO

In the last 2 decades, Morocco has known rapid growth of urban transformation followed by significant Population growth, which causes serious environmental problems related to water pollution and scarcity, and social with the deficiencies of infrastructures. And this has been witnessed in the city of Biougra which requires taking serious steps and adopting new projects to solve these issues as soon as possible. And as a reflection of that, this paper takes advantage of Geographic information system (GIS) coupled tools in the first place to locate future sites for building new schools using weighted overlay analysis approach, to improve the education system. And in the second place to choose potential sites for implementing new wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) by adopting multicriteria analysis (MCA). Finally, as a part of saving cultural heritage, and improving the social and economic situation for local citizens, we aim to value cooperative of this region as a replacement of poor touristic quality in the city, by making a track of the existing cooperative and profit from 3d modeling as a part of providing the traveler the best possible guide to reach these points of interest and also develop a desktop application for editing and manipulating different types of file related to cooperatives. This study showed successful results by localizing a new site to build a school in the northeastern of the city, and a match between the found site for WWTP and the existing station but with giving a possibility for expansion.

Towards Sustainable and Smart Cities: Replicable and KPI-Driven Evaluation Framework

Sustainability is pivotal in the urban transformation strategy in order to reach more resource-efficient, resilient and smarter cities. The goal of being a sustainable city should drive the decisions for city interventions. Nonetheless, impacts need to be quantified, lacking of standard and/or common methodologies that could be replicable across multiple cities. There exist many initiatives aiming at defining indicators and assessment procedures, but without convergence in the definition of terms and application methodologies, making complex its real implementation. Within mySMARTLife project (GA#731297), a KPI-driven evaluation framework is defined with the aim of covering the multiple pillars of a city (i.e. energy, mobility, citizens, economy) in a holistic way. This methodology also defines the concepts and terms to guide urban planners and/or experts at time of implementing the framework in a specific city. The evaluation framework has been deployed in the three cities of Nantes, Hamburg and Helsinki and some lessons learnt have been extracted, such as the necessity of providing a definition of measurement boundary to avoid interpretations. Thanks to a co-creation strategy, the main difficulties and issues from the cities have been taken into consideration for increasing the replicability.

How Digitalization Is Affecting Urban Transformation

The chapter aims to analyze the role that digital innovation has whenever it is connected in shaping urban spatial and functional transformations. It is capable of governing any kind of urban project that must find a new platform to engage in diverse modernity. The smart city implementation is one of the results of the new relationship between technology and physical settlement, but it still does not find methodological completeness as it is still linked to connected sensors and numerical flows of data. The chapter explores the critical issues and opens up new research paths following the study of some ongoing urban experimentations as have been amplified in the ongoing new phases in this post-pandemic 2021. The digital network can be a newly established matrix for both the territory and cities, just as roads and railways networks have been in the past – if it becomes a work of public interest on par with conventional urbanization infrastructure ones.

Ecological Areas and Challenges of Urbanization

Ecological areas are the network of protected areas that contribute to the ecosystem's productivity and services. With increased human demands, towns and cities are blooming with changes in landuse patterns around their peripheral areas or in the immediate vicinity. Land intensification and disproportionate urbanization have inflicted various challenges such as qualitative and quantitative depletion of natural resources, ecosystem services, and degradation of environmental quality in and around ecological areas. The chapter will focus on the circumstantial elucidation of ecological areas, their recorded challenges caused by urbanization, and the need for their conservation in previous research studies. The authors explore reported challenges encompassing ecological areas by urbanization. This will help understand the various aspects of urban transformation, like physical, social, cultural, and economic change in and around the ecological areas, and develop measures and strategies for ecosystem conservation and environmental restoration in ecological areas.

Transformation pathways towards sustainable urban development by the inclusion of peri-urban farmland in green infrastructure strategies

Urbanization and agricultural land use are two of the main drivers of global changes with effects on ecosystem functions and human wellbeing. Green infrastructure is a new and promising approach in spatial planning contributing to sustainable urban development, but rarely considers spatial and functional potentials of utilizable agricultural land as an integral part. This doctoral thesis addresses this gap and investigates how peri-urban farmland can promote green infrastructure and sustainable urban development. The results contribute to the conceptual understanding of urban green infrastructures as a strategic spatial planning approach that incorporates inner-urban utilizable agricultural land and the agriculturally dominated landscape at the outer urban fringe. Four strategies are introduced for spatial planning with the contribution to a strategically planned multifunctional network. Finally, this thesis sheds light on the opportunities that arise from the integration of peri-urban farmland in the green infrastructure concept to support transformation towards a more sustainable urban development. This work concludes that the linkage of peri-urban farmland with the green infrastructure concept is a promising action field for the development of new pathways for urban transformation towards sustainable urban development. Along with these outcomes, attention is drawn to limitations that remain to be addressed by future research.