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Scale is an emergent theme in current scientific and policy debates on low-carbon urban transformations. Yet notions of scale employed in such contexts are typically based on linear and hierarchical ontologies, and miss out on the long-standing development of more nuanced conceptions of scale within Human Geography. This paper aims to advance a relational understanding of scale in the analysis and evaluation of low-carbon urban initiatives (LCUIs). We wish to lay the path towards an innately geographical conceptualisation of low-carbon urban transformations more generally, in which cities are not seen as rigid and passive physical containers for decarbonisation initiatives, but rather as key nodes within vibrant socio-technical networks operating across multiple material sites. Using a case study of the transnational and translocal REACH (Reduce Energy use And Change Habits) project funded by the European Union as illustration, we argue that low-carbon urban transformations are immanently constituted of three sets of relational processes across scale, involving (1) politicisation, (2) enrolment and (3) the hybridisation of human and material agencies.

This paper develops the notion of “energy precarity” in order to uncover the governance practices and material conditions that drive and reproduce the inability of households to secure socially‐ and materially‐necessitated levels of energy services in the home. The overarching aim is to foreground a geographical approach towards the study of domestic energy deprivation, by emphasizing the complex socio‐spatial and material embeddedness of fuel poverty. The paper operationalizes these ideas via a field‐based study of a group that has received limited attention in research and policy on fuel poverty: young adults living in privately rented accommodation. In evoking the experiences of such individuals, I employ energy precarity as a means of unpacking the spaces where energy deprivation is produced, experienced and contested. Among other findings, I highlight that people's fluid lifestyles and specific end‐use energy demand patterns mean that energy deprivation metaphorically and physically overflows the limits of home, creating multiple performativities of precarity that have received very little attention to date.

Many African towns and cities face a range of hazards, which can best be described as representing a \"spectrum of risk\" of events that can cause death, illness or injury, and impoverishment. Yet despite the growing numbers of people living in African urban centres, the extent and relative severity of these different risks is poorly understood. This paper provides a rationale for using a spectrum of methods to address planning for resilience. It describes activities undertaken in a wide-ranging multicountry programme of research, which use multiple approaches to gather empirical data on risk, in order to build a stronger evidence base and provide a more solid base for planning and investment. It concludes that methods need to be chosen in regard to social, political economic, biophysical and hydrogeological context, while also urban centres. The paper concludes that as well as the importance of taking individual contexts into account, there are underlying methodological principles — based on multidisciplinary expertise and multi-faceted and collaborative research endeavours — that can inform a range of related approaches to understanding urban risk in sub-Saharan Africa and break the cycle of risk accumulation. this spectrum of risk, and demonstrates the utility of mixed-methods approaches in recognising the different levels of complexity and institutional capacity in different

Emergency preparedness is a distinctive feature of contemporary anticipatory politics yet “preppers,” a sub-culture who prepare to survive a range of possible crisis events through practices including stockpiling and survival skill development, are subject to media ridicule and academic dismissal. If the hoarder is the symbolic deviant figure of the consumer society, the prepper is that of the security society. Such constructions of prepper pathology, however, work to reinforce the neoliberal security state. By repositioning the prepper as an amplifier of conditions of the present, what emerges is an emblematic and anticipatory figure who troubles the cracks in the security state's governing logics, exposing its social differentiation and rehearsing the inevitability of its future failures. Drawing on qualitative research on UK prepping cultures, I define prepping across three constellations of imaginative-material practices, concerning “value,” “temporalities,” and “crisis.” I argue that prepping exposes the contradictions of infrastructural weakening alongside the networked dependencies and restricted agency felt within late modernity, challenges the expert determination of what constitutes crisis, and unveils the myth of the universality of state security protection. Living with profound crisis attunement, preppers nevertheless recuperate pleasure in material potentiality and skilful practice, in thoughtful engagement with temporalities, and in the vitality of community and meaning formed in the times and spaces in, and around, crisis.

The discovery of a rare fly in a North London cemetery marks my entry point into a wider reflection on the value and significance of urban biodiversity. Using different indices of ecological endangerment, along with a critical reading of new materialist insights, this paper explores the cultural, political, and scientific significance of saproxylic (rotten wood) invertebrate communities in an urban context. The paper brings the fields of urban ecology and post-humanism into closer dialogue to illuminate aspects to urban nature that have not been systematically explored within existing analytical frameworks. We consider a series of intersecting worlds, both human and non-human, as part of a glimpse into saproxylic dimensions to urban nature under a putative transition to a new geo-environmental epoch.

An interview transcript can be a rich source of geographical references whose potential are not always fully realised in their conventional analysis. Geo‐referencing techniques can be used to assign a spatial footprint to place names, adding value to these data and allowing the geographic information within them to be exploited when coupled with GIS technology. This paper discusses a method of analysing and visualising interview transcripts in order to understand the spatial extent of public policy practitioners’ activities. Through aggregation and statistical mapping it is possible to gain insight into the importance of space across a range of public policy themes and to understand the relationship between practitioner‐defined policy themes and the formal administrative boundaries within which they typically work. The research demonstrates that spatial working practices rarely conform to formal administrative boundaries and that there are varying degrees of spatial focus between different policy themes within localities. It also reveals that spatial working practices can continue to be influenced by historic geographies and can be pulled in different directions, reflecting both the devolved nature of the sector and the particular geographical context of the setting. It concludes that mapping the interview transcript can add value and provide additional insights to more conventional analysis.

Connectivity is a central concept in contemporary geographies of nature, but the concept is often understood and utilised in plural ways. This is problematic because of the separation, rather than the confusion, of these different approaches. While the various understandings of connectivity are rarely considered as working together, the connections between them have significant implications. This paper thus proposes re‐thinking connectivity as a “multiple”. It develops a taxonomy of existing connectivity concepts from the fields of biogeography and landscape ecology, conservation biology, socio‐economic systems theory, political ecology and more‐than‐human geography. It then considers how these various understandings might be re‐thought not as separate concerns, but (following Annemarie Mol) as “more than one, but less than many”. The implications of using the connectivity multiple as an analytic for understanding conservation practices are demonstrated through considering the creation of wildlife corridors in conservation practice. The multiple does not just serve to highlight the practical and theoretical linkages between ecological theories, social inequities and affectual relationships in more‐than‐human worlds. It is also suggestive of a normative approach to environmental management that does not give temporal priority to biological theories, but considers these as always already situated in these social, often unequal, always more‐than‐human ecologies.

This paper presents a novel method for path selection by non-expert users in robot trajectory planning using augmented reality (AR). While AR has been used in robot control tasks, current approaches often require manual waypoint specification, limiting their effectiveness for non-expert users. In contrast, our study introduces an innovative AR-based method via a head-mounted display, designed to enhance human-robot interaction by making the process of selecting robotic paths more accessible to users without specialized expertise. The proposed method utilizes the RRT-Connect algorithm to automatically generate pathways from the initial to the goal position, offering choices of 1, 3, or 5 pathways, as well as 3 and 5 pathways with AR text guidance. This guidance provides contextual instructions within the AR environment, displaying the order of pathways from the fewest to the highest number of waypoints. Our findings demonstrate that optimizing the number of AR pathways can reduce user stress and improve operational skills. Path1 exhibited the fastest performance time but had the highest number of obstacle collisions. Methods with AR text guidance showed increased performance time compared to Path1. However, Path3 and Path5 achieved the best balance between performance time and collision avoidance. Qualitative analysis indicated that AR text displays demanded more effort from users. Path3 without AR text guidance was identified as the easiest method for operating the robot. Consequently, Path3 was deemed the most beneficial among the five methods. These results highlight the novelty of our method in enhancing the design of future human-robot interaction systems, focusing on improving efficiency, safety, and user experience for non-expert users using AR interfaces.

Many control techniques rely on the mathematical models of the systems to be controlled. This paper copes with the modelling problem of dynamical systems aiming to develop highly accurate modelling approaches. By an impulse response identification experiment, the dynamical observations with increasing data length are designed for the purpose of capturing the real-time information of systems and serving for on-line identification. According to the different features of the parameters of the systems to be identified, two separable identification models are constructed through the parameter decomposition and the model decomposition for simplifying the structure of the original identification model. On basis of the separable identification models, a separable Newton recursive parameter estimation approach is developed by means of the Newton search for acquiring highly accurate parameter estimates. In terms of the coupled terms in the separated sub-algorithms, a joint estimation algorithm is presented for removing the coupled terms. The experimental results through the Monte-Carlo tests show that the obtained parameter estimates through the separable algorithm are more accurate than those obtained by the Newton recursive estimation method without the model separation.