Spectacle Urbanism

This article addresses the current and rapid transformations that have occurred with the imposition of new "urban consensus" and also the new rules that replaced "modern planning" - strongly characterized by State actions and domination, by strategic or "competitive planning between cities ” which is intended to be flexible, but highly permissible. Therefore, we detect the phenomenon of the glamor of the market economy and the emergence of the unique thinking of cities defined as a kind of common conceptual matrix at the origin of new urban strategies that multiply throughout the world, globalizing and homogenizing cities considering culture as the identity anchor of the new urbanism of the spectacle at the expense of social well-being. Idealizing the new aesthetics of architectures in this new urban scenario grafted on artificialities, we toured cities impacted by calendars of major events, such as the city of Munich, due to the 2006 World Cup, and the city of Rio de Janeiro due to the World Cup in 2014 and the Olympic Games in 2016 successively, to elucidate the purposes of new ventures that excel in intense communication and promotion with a view to building an adequate image for the city through the image making policy or the city marketing strategy launching the city into the world, or rather, selling the city.

Location-Aware Node Management Solution for Multi-Radio Dual Connectivity Scenarios

The location of user equipments (UEs) allows application developers to customize the services for users to perceive an enhanced experience. In addition, this UE location enables network operators to develop location-aware solutions to optimize network resource management. Moreover, the combination of location-aware approaches and new network features introduced by 5G enables to further improve the network performance. In this sense, dual connectivity (DC) allows users to simultaneously communicate with two nodes. The basic strategy proposed by 3GPP to select these nodes is based only on the power received by the users. However, the network performance could be enhanced if an alternative methodology is proposed to make this decision. This paper proposes, instead of power-based selection, to choose the nodes that provide the highest quality of experience (QoE) to the user. With this purpose, the proposed system uses the UE location as well as multiple network metrics as inputs. A dense urban scenario is assumed to test the solution in a system-level simulation tool. The results show that the optimal selection varies depending on the UE location, as well as the increase in the QoE perceived by users of different services.

Construction of LWCNN Framework and its Application to Pedestrian Detection with Segmentation Process

To solve the challenges in traffic object identification, fuzzification, and simplification in a real traffic environment, it is highly required to develop an automatic detection and classification technique for roads, automobiles, and pedestrians with multiple traffic objects inside the same framework. The proposed method has been evaluated on a database with complicated poses, motions, backgrounds, and lighting conditions for an urban scenario where pedestrians are not obstructed. The suggested CNN classifier has an FPR of less than that of the SVM classifier. Confirming the significance of automatically optimized features, the SVM classifier's accuracy is equal to that of the CNN. The proposed framework is integrated with the additional adaptive segmentation method to identify pedestrians more precisely than the conventional techniques. Additionally, the proposed lightweight feature mapping leads to faster calculation times and it has also been verified and tabulated in the results and discussion section.

Investigating the practical viability of walk-sharing in improving pedestrian safety

Walk-sharing is a cost-effective and proactive approach that promises to improve pedestrian safety and has been shown to be technically (theoretically) viable. Yet, the practical viability of walk-sharing is largely dependent on community acceptance, which has not, until now, been explored. Gaining useful insights on the community’s spatio-temporal and social preferences in regard to walk-sharing will ensure the establishment of practical viability of walk-sharing in a real-world urban scenario. We aim to derive practical viability using defined performance metrics (waiting time, detour distance, walk-alone distance and matching rate) and by investigating the effectiveness of walk-sharing in terms of its major objective of improving pedestrian safety and safety perception. We make use of the results from a web-based survey on the public perception on our proposed walk-sharing scheme. Findings are fed into an existing agent-based walk-sharing model to investigate the performance of walk-sharing and deduce its practical viability in urban scenarios.

Development and Validation of a Masking System for Mitigation of Low-Frequency Audible Noise from Electrical Substations

Low-frequency audible noise generated by the magnetostriction effect inherent to the operation of power transformers has become a major drawback, especially in cases where the electrical substation is located in urban areas subject to strict environmental regulations that impose noise limits, differing for day and night periods. Such regulations apply a +5 dB penalty if a tonal component of noise is present, which is clearly the case of magnetostriction noise, typically concentrated at twice the industrial frequency (50 Hz or 60 Hz, depending on the country). The strategy used to eliminate the tonal characteristics, therefore contributing to establish compliance with the applicable regulation and to alleviate the discomfort it causes to the human ear, consisted in superimposing to the substation noise a masking sound synthesized from “sounds of nature” with suitable intensities, to flatten the noise spectrum while enhancing the soundscape. The masking system (heavy-duty speakers powered by a microprocessor platform) was validated at an already judicialized urban scenario. Measurement results confirmed that the masking solution was capable of flattening the tonal frequencies, whose beneficial effect yielded the cancellation of the public civil action filed by the neighbors. The proposed solution is ready to be replicated in other scenarios.

Development and Validation of a Masking System for Mitigation of Low-Frequency Audible Noise from Electrical Substations

Low-frequency audible noise generated by the magnetostriction effect inherent to the operation of power transformers has become a major drawback, especially in cases where the electrical substation is located in urban areas subject to strict environmental regulations that imposes sound pressure limits, differing for day and night periods. Such regulations apply a +5 dB penalty if a tonal component of noise is present, which is clearly the case of magnetostriction noise, typically concentrated at twice the industrial frequency (50 Hz or 60 Hz, depending on the country). The strategy used to eliminate the tonal characteristics, therefore contributing to establish compliance with the applicable regulation and to alleviate the discomfort it causes to the human ear, consisted in superimposing to the substation noise a masking sound synthesized from “sounds of nature” with suitable intensities, to flatten the noise spectrum while enhancing the soundscape. The masking system (heavy-duty speakers powered by a microprocessor platform) was validated at an already judicialized urban scenario. Measurement results confirmed that the masking solution was capable of flattening the tonal frequencies, whose beneficial effect yielded the cancellation of the public civil action filed by the neighbors. The proposed solution is ready to be replicated to other scenarios.

Agent-Based Simulation to Measure the Effectiveness of Citizen Sensing Applications—The Case of Missing Children

Citizen sensing applications need to have a number of users defined that ensures their effectiveness. This is not a straightforward task because neither the relationship between the size of the userbase or its effectiveness is easily quantified, nor is it clear which threshold for the number of users would make the application ‘effective’. This paper presents an approach for estimating the number of users needed for location-based crowdsourcing applications to work successfully, depending on the use case, the circumstances, and the criteria of success. It circumvents various issues, ethical or practical, in performing real-world controlled experiments and tackles this challenge by developing an agent-based modelling and simulation framework. This framework is tested on a specific scenario, that of missing children and the search for them. The search is performed with the contribution of citizens being made aware of the disappearance through a mobile application. The result produces an easily reconfigurable testbed for the effectiveness of citizen sensing mobile applications, allowing the study of the marginal utility of new users of the application. The resulting framework aims to be the digital twin of a real urban scenario, and it has been designed to be easily adapted and support decisions on the feasibility, evaluation, and targeting of the deployment of spatial crowdsourcing applications.