The Margins of Late Medieval London, 1430-1540

The Margins of Late Medieval London is a powerful study of medieval London’s urban fringe. Seeking to unpack the complexity of urban life in the medieval age, this volume offers a detailed and novel approach to understanding London beyond its institutional structures. Using a combination of experimental digital, quantitative and qualitative methodologies, the volume casts new light on urban life at the level of the neighbourhood and considers the differences in economy, society and sociability which existed in different areas of a vibrant premodern city. It focuses on the dynamism and mobility that shaped city life, integrating the experiences of London’s poor and migrant communities and how they found their place within urban life. It describes how people found themselves marginalized in the city, and the strategies they would employ to mitigate that precarious position.

Urban voids: identifying and optimizing urban voids potential as a revitalization source in enhancing developing countries’ city income

This study attempts to remedy the issue of urban voids, which are one of the possible choices for extra interactive spaces. As a city with a great civilization history, Egypt is also home to many urban voids, mainly buffer zones. This generates the research problem that urban voids result from managing isolated planning sites irrespective of the context and away from the community. Few studies tackled the impact of public spaces on city life; they were mainly theoretically oriented and focused on piazzas without highlighting other spaces or conducting empirical investigations. The study determines that voids could be a testing ground to establish a framework of how these spaces can be reused. Revitalizing urban voids goal is to reconnect these useless spaces with context, achieve users’ needs, integrate technologies with the space to revitalize the city, and increase its income through combining theoretical findings, empirical study, and questionnaires, which generate a framework that helps the planners and designers in developing urban voids and maximizing its efficiency. Currently, adaptive redesign is a hot topic to discuss, and this may be the moment to realize that following the updated design components, meeting community needs, and using technology will always reinvigorate the void.

Smart Culture and Heritage, the “Rare” Category of SSC Classifications

ISO and ITU propose some classifications regarding the smart sustainable cities services: energy, transport, health, tourism, education, safety, environment, governance, commerce, buildings, community. Culture and heritage is a rare category in these classifications, despite the fact they have to be always been included in an SSC ecosystem. They could play a key role in achieving the 17 SDGs due to some critical reasons: their deep roots in humanity, their wide spread across city life and environment, hence their horizontal connections with all the other SSC categories. There are many options of SSC structures, which have the potential to be dedicated on culture and heritage. QR codes, GIS., VR, apps, IoT, virtual events are some of them, widely implemented by cities. Via these ways, culture and heritage could 1) contribute to the humans' welfare index and 2) interact with the other sectors of the city ecosystem. Their added value to the sustainability process creates the necessity to be a distinctive category in international SSC classifications.

Green methods that are used to ensure the sustainable development of the environment and the society

Nowadays, pollution is one of the biggest challenges for human society. Many types of research are directed toward finding sustainable solutions with minimum or no environmental impact. The contaminants affect the ecosystem components and the people's health equally. Cardiovascular and cancer are only two examples of diseases for which air and food adulteration are directly influenced. For each situation, the conditions need to be evaluated. Environmental accidents or rehearsal ones can determine the risk sources. Regardless of the case, prevention measures are always recommended. Different organic wastes recovery represents a possible solution ensuring an endurable process. Such an approach has to be also looked at from an economic point of view. Renewable natural raw materials usually have lower costs. Independent of the considered strategies, they all have to be based on two pilings. One acts by the authority’s involvement using legislation and standards, and the other refers to society through awareness and implication. The paper highlights some of the most recent and significant findings regarding eco-friendly and sustainable techniques newly developed that were presented in recently published articles. The topics considered essential for this approach regarded the improvements made to increase the city life, the industrial environment, and the laboratory techniques.

CRISIS OF URBAN IDENTITY: AMBIVALENCE OF VALUE GROUNDS AND SOCIAL PERSPECTIVES

The article discusses the problem of urban identity in the opposition between global and local processes in urban space. Urban identity is viewed as a type of individual’s social identity in relation to his/her affiliation to a certain urban community. The study of the causes and effects of the urban identity’s crisis is based on the notion of this identity as valuable and meaningful cohesion of individuals and urban community. The problem of urban identity is studied via the analysis of modern concepts of social change in urban space, related to mainstream of human resources, financial, material, information resources. The article indicates that the crisis of identity is represented in the potential loss of individual and personal links to the city, in the loss of affiliation to the place of living, in the vanishing demand for urban identity. The notions of retrospective and prospective urban identity are introduced to identify the ground to maintain urban identity. Retrospective urban identity is based on the existence of so-called “places of memory” in urban space that integrate physical space, fragments of collective memory and individual valuable attitude to this memory as the inclusion to the city history. Prospective urban identity rests on individual’s cohesion and affiliation to future states of urban community as a source of potential social options. Assessments of directions for social change are figured out in positive and negative prospective urban identity, which defines residents’ migration intentions and their active participation in the city life.

A review of computational intelligence methods for traffic management systems

One of the most important challenges in modern city life is to enable effective and efficient traffic management system. Recently, computational intelligence methods have become increasingly popular for traffic management system design, application, and monitoring. Computational intelligence methods are often deployed for managing traffic, that is for reducing mileage, congestion, the use of fuels, and environmental impact. The aim of this paper is twofold. First, to present the three main areas in a computational intelligence approach, namely neural networks, fuzzy logic systems, and evolutionary computation. Second, to emphasize their impact on various traffic management domains, including traffic flow forecasting, traffic light control, traffic fatalities prediction, traffic sign detection, and optimization of transportation networks.

A review of computational intelligence methods for traffic management systems

One of the most important challenges in modern city life is to enable effective and efficient traffic management system. Recently, computational intelligence methods have become increasingly popular for traffic management system design, application, and monitoring. Computational intelligence methods are often deployed for managing traffic, that is for reducing mileage, congestion, the use of fuels, and environmental impact. The aim of this paper is twofold. First, to present the three main areas in a computational intelligence approach, namely neural networks, fuzzy logic systems, and evolutionary computation. Second, to emphasize their impact on various traffic management domains, including traffic flow forecasting, traffic light control, traffic fatalities prediction, traffic sign detection, and optimization of transportation networks.

Key Identity Features of Urban Youth: The Case of Krasnodar Krai

This article is devoted to the study of urban youth local identity in a large and medium city. This identity is manifested in everyday interaction with the urban community, its socio-political institutions and visitors and affect the level of public and political participation, the presence of constructive civic practices. The aim is to identify and describe the main components and place of local youth identity in the system of social identities in large and medium-sized cities of Krasnodar krai (Krasnodar, Novorossiysk, Sochi and Armavir). The empirical basis of the study was made up of focus group transcripts conducted with various groups of young people (schoolchildren, students, and working youth). To verify the conceptual model a modified version of the Kuhn-McPartland method was used. On the basis of the conducted empirical research, the place of local identity in the system of urban youth social and territorial identities was revealed. The dependence between the size of a city and a cohort of young people and a local identity was shown. Such components of young people local identity as awareness of the city and its socio-political life, attitude towards representatives of other communities, a sense of their involvement in city life, the desire to stay and live in the city, the will to work for the benefit of the city, to participate in its socio-political life. The study made it possible to identify the valence of youth identity (negative, neutral, positive). The trajectories of young people spatial mobility that affect the degree of actualization and valence of local identity were also described. The dependence between the strength of youth local identity and participation in public and political activity for the benefit of the city and the region, participation in the activities of public and political organizations has been revealed.

Globalization processes in the modern city

The pace of urbanization at the beginning of the XXI century is accelerating. For large cities, the processes of globalization are becoming significant. Globalization has become one of the powerful factors that determine the formation of both visual-architectural, and cultural-behavioral and economicpolitical spheres of city life. Globalization creates and sets the general trends of behavioral patterns of society, determining their frames of unified processes at the global and regional levels. Ukrainian sociological thought lacks a reception of Western discourses of the city's globalization. The article analyzes a number of theses of modern Western scholars on globalization and urbanization. The interdependence of globalization processes, communication and urbanization is revealed: along with the acceleration of communication processes, globalization, which affects urbanization, is also accelerating. The potential of globalization phenomena in transformational-urban processes is understood: socio-economic, sociopolitical, socio-cultural. Emphasis is placed on the fact that the globalization of the world economy with the simultaneous erosion of national sovereignty of modern states, fragmentation of social and class structure, value transformation in the direction of strengthening the individualistic orientation of mass consciousness, commercialization of higher education forms a new configuration where the most successful and urbanized cities become centers of technological, economic and cultural innovation. The processes of unification and interdependence, which are clearly traced at all levels of globalization practices, especially in the life of cities, are considered. The world is unifying, which causes both positive and negative receptions in social and scientific discourses. The article focuses on the sociological interpretation of the city in the context of urbanism as a way of life (Urbanism as a Way of Life): the influence of urban lifestyle on the transformation of gender roles, the potential of universal inclusion in everyday life – a big city should be tolerant and multicultural.