Renewable Energies and Urban Environment in Spain

Sustainable development is a type of development that advocates first of all the harmonization between economic development and environmental protection, adding social progress; it would therefore be a development in which high and stable growth in the production of goods and services is compatible with widespread social progress, environmental protection, and prudent and efficient use of natural resources. Among the different sectoral areas transferred by the idea of sustainable development is undoubtedly the field of urban planning and housing. The activity generated in cities has an important environmental impact, so it is necessary to orient urban structures, homes, and buildings under premises that are as respectful as possible with the environment, also taking advantage of its economic potential and its effect on the social fabric that inhabits it. It is about promoting integrated actions in the urban environment that are in tune with the objectives.

Commuter Mobility Patterns in Social Media: Correlating Twitter and LODES Data

The Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics Origin-Destination Employment Statistics (LODES) are an important city planning resource in the USA. However, curating these statistics is resource-intensive, and their accuracy deteriorates when changes in population and urban structures lead to shifts in commuter patterns. Our study area is the San Francisco Bay area, and it has seen rapid population growth over the past years, which makes frequent updates to LODES or the availability of an appropriate substitute desirable. In this paper, we derive mobility flows from a set of over 40 million georeferenced tweets of the study area and compare them with LODES data. These tweets are publicly available and offer fine spatial and temporal resolution. Based on an exploratory analysis of the Twitter data, we pose research questions addressing different aspects of the integration of LODES and Twitter data. Furthermore, we develop methods for their comparative analysis on different spatial scales: at the county, census tract, census block, and individual street segment level. We thereby show that Twitter data can be used to approximate LODES on the county level and on the street segment level, but it also contains information about non-commuting-related regular travel. Leveraging Twitter’s high temporal resolution, we also show how factors like rush hour times and weekends impact mobility. We discuss the merits and shortcomings of the different methods for use in urban planning and close with directions for future research avenues.

Few-Shot Learning for Post-Earthquake Urban Damage Detection

Among natural disasters, earthquakes are recorded to have the highest rates of human loss in the past 20 years. Their unexpected nature has severe consequences on both human lives and material infrastructure, demanding urgent action to be taken. For effective emergency relief, it is necessary to gain awareness about the level of damage in the affected areas. The use of remotely sensed imagery is popular in damage assessment applications; however, it requires a considerable amount of labeled data, which are not always easy to obtain. Taking into consideration the recent developments in the fields of Machine Learning and Computer Vision, this study investigates and employs several Few-Shot Learning (FSL) strategies in order to address data insufficiency and imbalance in post-earthquake urban damage classification. While small datasets have been tested against binary classification problems, which usually divide the urban structures into collapsed and non-collapsed, the potential of limited training data in multi-class classification has not been fully explored. To tackle this gap, four models were created, following different data balancing methods, namely cost-sensitive learning, oversampling, undersampling and Prototypical Networks. After a quantitative comparison among them, the best performing model was found to be the one based on Prototypical Networks, and it was used for the creation of damage assessment maps. The contribution of this work is twofold: we show that oversampling is the most suitable data balancing method for training Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) when compared to cost-sensitive learning and undersampling, and we demonstrate the appropriateness of Prototypical Networks in the damage classification context.

Anthropogenic Stressors in Upland Rivers: Aquatic Macrophyte Responses. A Case Study from Bulgaria

Upland rivers across Europe still exhibit undisturbed conditions and represent a treasure that we cannot afford to lose. We hypothesize that the combination of pristine and modified conditions could demonstrate biological responses along the stressor gradients. Thus, the response of aquatic macrophyte communities to anthropogenic stressors along upland rivers in Bulgaria was studied. Six stressors were selected out of 36 parameters grouped into hydromorphological, chemical variables and combined drivers (catchment land use). The stressors strongly affected species richness on the basis of biological type (bryophytes vs. vascular plants) and ecomorphological type (hydrophytes vs. helophytes). Hydrological alteration expressed by the change of the river’s base flow and altered riparian habitats has led to a suppression of bryophytes and a dominance of riverbank plant communities. Seventy-five percent of mountain sites were lacking bryophytes, and the vegetation at semi-mountainous sites was dominated by vascular plants. It can be concluded that hydropeaking, organic and inorganic pollution, and discontinuous urban structures caused important modifications in the aquatic macrophyte assemblages. Macrophyte abundance and the biological and ecomorphological type of aquatic macrophytes reflect multi-stressor effects in upland rivers.

SELECTED ASPECTS OF TALL BUILDING VISUAL PERCEPCION – EXAMPLE OF EUROPEAN CITIES

The article provides a preliminary analysis of selected factors that influence city visual perception, in particular tall buildings, in the cityscape. The research area includes selected European cities of a diverse urban structures and cityscape types. The cities also represent various strategies for the development of tall buildings. The article discusses tall building observation parameters, perception conditions and urban composition and geometry. It also describes techniques of digital cityscape analysis used by the author in her planning practice.

Analysis of urban elements orientations to characterize the spatial extension of the foundation of the Roman city of Amida

The structure of the historical center of the city of Diyarbakır is largely inherited from the Roman city of Amida, through numerous testimonies still present in certain urban elements, such as buildings or cadastral parcels. The detailed analysis of the orientation of these urban elements in the current urban plan of Diyarbakır can contribute in particular to a better understanding of the different eras of foundation of the city of Amida and their spatial extensions. This research proposes to compare two methods of extraction of orientations from urban elements of the city of Diyarbakır. First, historians carried out a manual survey of the orientations from an aerial photograph, which made it possible to bring out two frames corresponding to two eras of the founding of the Roman city of Amida. These orientations were then compared with those extracted automatically from the geographic databases of cadastral parcels and built-up urban elements captured at a large scale. If the results obtained with the two methods converge, they also show differences, both on the orientation values and on the spatial extension of the two frames observed. These differences may contradict the initial observations, but are also sources of new perspectives of research on the spatial extension of the different periods of foundation of the Roman city of Amida. Finally, the results of this research tend to show that the two approaches prove to be complementary in detecting ancient urban structures in a contemporary city plan.

The Ecological Aspects of Urban Structure of Balige District Kabupaten Toba, Indonesia

Balige is the capital of Toba Samosir Regency. Balige District continues to develop dynamically, marked by the development and changes of the physical city structure Balige. It is about the real implications of a city’s physical growth and development that move dynamically, which can be seen from urban, suburban, and rural land-use patterns. The aim is to determine the ecological aspects of urban structures in the Balige District. The method used in selection is done through secondary data that does not directly provide data to researchers or analyzed documents and concluded. Initially, Balige City was centered on the pier up to Sisingamangaraja’s field, evidenced by water transportation still used today. However, the result of the study showed changes in the pattern of land use due to economic growth and social transformation.

Paved Paradise: Belowground Parking Structures Sustain Urban Mosquito Populations in Washington, DC

ABSTRACT After notification of mosquitoes within federal buildings in Washington, DC, we surveyed belowground levels of nearby parking structures for mosquitoes and standing water in the summer months of 2018 and 2019. Aedes aegypti, Ae. albopictus, and members of the Culex pipiens Assemblage were found. Genotyping revealed pipiens, molestus, and quinquefasciatus ancestry among Cx. pipiens Assemblage mosquitoes, and allele frequency comparisons indicated a stable, resident population. Winter and spring aboveground temperatures ranged from −11°C to 35°C, while belowground temperatures never dropped below 5°C or exceeded 30°C, and winter temperatures were significantly higher belowground compared with aboveground. Moderated winter conditions suggest that belowground urban structures could act as refugia for warmer-climate species, like Ae. aegypti and Cx. quinquefasciatus, allowing them to overcome assumed thermal barriers. Surveys of parking structures should be incorporated into integrated vector management programs in urban areas.

VR and AR Restoration of Urban Heritage: A Virtual Platform Mediating Disagreement from Spatial Conflicts in Korea

This study sought to uncover (1) the disagreement of spatial conflict between urban heritage and surrounding urban structure using two case studies from Korea—the main gate of the royal palace (Gwanghwamun) and the urban park containing celebrity graves (Hyoch’ang Park)—and (2) whether digital heritage restoration may mediate spatial conflict. A historical literature review and field surveys were conducted, with three main findings. First, the place identity of Gwanghwamun and Hyoch’ang Park, rooted in the Josŏn Dynasty, was seriously damaged during the Japanese colonial period. Although there were national attempts to recover the place identities of these sites during the modern period, limitations existed. Second, the restoration of Gwanghwamun’s Wŏltae (podium) and the relocation of Ŭiyŏlsa (the shrine of Hyoch’ang Park), which involved spatial transformation based on heritage, emerged in conflict with their surrounding urban structures—we identify a spatial conflict between local residents and stakeholders’ memories and the histories of these sites. Third, Donŭimun (the west gate of the city wall of the Josŏn Dynasty) digital restoration is a case mediating the conflict by restoring a sense of place in a virtual space and activating the cultural memory of the public by showcasing properties.

Can the Pandemic Be a Catalyst of Spatial Changes Leading Towards the Smart City?

The worldwide spread of Covid-19 infections has had a pervasive influence on cities and the lives of their residents. The current crisis has highlighted many urban problems, including those related to the functionality of urban structures, which directly affect the quality of life. Concurrently, the notion of “smart cities” is becoming a dominant trend in the discourse on urban development. At the intersection of these two phenomena, questions about the effects of Covid-19 on the future of cities arise. These are concerned with the possible roles of the pandemic in the process of urban regeneration and the development of smart solutions. The article aims to create a conceptual framework that will allow researchers to assess the influence of Covid-19-related changes on urban structures and their functionality in the following areas: city structure, connectivity and mobility, public spaces, access to green areas, and digital transformation. In the empirical part of the article, the influence of pandemic-caused changes on the development of various aspects of smart cities is discussed. The article concludes with an analysis of the effects the pandemic might have on digital urban regeneration.