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"Siedlung"
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Ziyaret Tepe : exploring the Anatolian frontier of the Assyrian Empire
Ziyaret Tepe, the ancient city of Tushan, was a provincial capital of the Assyrian Empire, in its day the greatest empire the world had ever seen. The excavations captured in this innovative book uncovered the palace of the governor, the mansions of the elite and the barracks of the rank and?le, charting the history of the empire from its expansion in the early 9th century BC to its fall three centuries years later.0The great mound of Ziyaret Tepe, with its accumulated layers rising 22 metres above the surrounding plain, is a record of thousands of years of human occupation. In the course of 18 seasons of?eldwork, both the lower town and the mound looming up over it yielded the secrets of Tu?han, today in southeast Turkey, near the border with Syria. This has always been frontier country.0Elaborate wall paintings, a hoard of luxury items burned in a cremation ritual 2,800 years ago, and a cuneiform tablet that hints at a previously unknown language are among the team?s exceptional?nds.0The story of the project is told by the specialists who dedicated years of their lives to it. Geophysicists, ceramicists, readers of cuneiform, experts in weaving, board games and Neo-Assyrian politics joined archaeologists, zooarchaeologists, archaeobotanists and many others.0But this is no dry?eld book of dusty digging. Both accessible and scholarly, it is a lively, copiously illustrated record of excavations involving the whole team, a compelling demonstration of the collaboration? the science, artistry and imaginative reconstruction? that makes modern achaeology so absorbing.
Book
Building up or spreading out? Typologies of urban growth across 478 cities of 1 million
Urban form in both two- (2D) and three-dimensions (3D) has significant impacts on local and global environments. Here we developed the largest global dataset characterizing 2D and 3D urban growth for 478 cities with populations of one million or larger. Using remote sensing data from the SeaWinds scatterometer for 2001 and 2009, and the Global Human Settlement Layer for 2000 and 2014, we applied a cluster analysis and found five urban growth typologies: stabilized, outward, mature upward, budding outward, upward and outward. Budding outward is the dominant typology worldwide, per the largest total area. Cities characterized by upward and outward growth are few in number and concentrated primarily in China and South Korea, where there has been a large increase in high-rises during the study period. With the exception of East Asia, cities within a geographic region exhibit remarkably similar patterns of urban growth. Our results show that every city exhibits multiple urban growth typologies concurrently. Thus, while it is possible to describe a city by its dominant urban growth typology, a more accurate and comprehensive characterization would include some combination of the five typologies. The implications of the results for urban sustainability are multi-fold. First, the results suggest that there is considerable opportunity to shape future patterns of urbanization, given that most of the new urban growth is nascent and low magnitude outward expansion. Second, the clear geographic patterns and wide variations in the physical form of urban growth, within country and city, suggest that markets, national and subnational policies, including the absence of, can shape how cities grow. Third, the presence of different typologies within each city suggests the need for differentiated strategies for different parts of a single city. Finally, the new urban forms revealed in this analysis provide a first glimpse into the carbon lock-in of recently constructed energy-demanding infrastructure of urban settlements.
Journal Article
Early human settlement of Sahul was not an accident
The first peopling of Sahul (Australia, New Guinea and the Aru Islands joined at lower sea levels) by anatomically modern humans required multiple maritime crossings through Wallacea, with at least one approaching 100 km. Whether these crossings were accidental or intentional is unknown. Using coastal-viewshed analysis and ocean drift modelling combined with population projections, we show that the probability of randomly reaching Sahul by any route is <5% until ≥40 adults are ‘washed off’ an island at least once every 20 years. We then demonstrate that choosing a time of departure and making minimal headway (0.5 knots) toward a destination greatly increases the likelihood of arrival. While drift modelling demonstrates the existence of ‘bottleneck’ crossings on all routes, arrival via New Guinea is more likely than via northwestern Australia. We conclude that anatomically modern humans had the capacity to plan and make open-sea voyages lasting several days by at least 50,000 years ago.
Journal Article
The Miracle of Microfinance? Evidence from a Randomized Evaluation
This paper reports results from the randomized evaluation of a group-lending microcredit program in Hyderabad, India. A lender worked in 52 randomly selected neighborhoods, leading to an 8.4 percentage point increase in takeup of microcredit. Small business investment and profits of preexisting businesses increased, but consumption did not significantly increase. Durable goods expenditure increased, while \"temptation goods'' expenditure declined. We found no significant changes in health, education, or women's empowerment. Two years later, after control areas had gained access to microcredit but households in treatment area had borrowed for longer and in larger amounts, very few significant differences persist.
Journal Article
Over the hills and further away from coast: global geospatial patterns of human and environment over the 20th-21st centuries
Proximity to the coast and elevation are important geographical considerations for human settlement. Little is known, however, about how spatial variation in these factors exactly relates to human settlements and activities, and how this has developed over time. Such knowledge is important for identifying vulnerable regions that are at risk from phenomena such as food shortages and water stress. Human activities are a key driving force in global change, and thus detailed information on population distribution is an important input to any research framework on global change. In this paper we assess the global geospatial patterns of the distribution of human population and related factors, with regard to the altitude above sea level and proximity to the coast. The investigated factors are physical conditions, urbanisation, agricultural practices, economy, and environmental stress. An important novel element in this study, is that we included the temporal evolution in various factors related to human settlements and agricultural practices over the 20th century, and used projections for some of these factors up to the year 2050. We found population pressure in the proximity of the coast to be somewhat greater than was found in other studies. Yet, the distribution of population, urbanisation and wealth are evolving to become more evenly spread across the globe than they were in the past. Therefore, the commonly believed tendency of accumulation of people and wealth along coasts is not supported by our results. At the same time, food production is becoming increasingly decoupled from the trends in population density. Croplands are spreading from highly populated coastal zones towards inland zones. Our results thus indicate that even though people and wealth continue to accumulate in proximity to the coast, population densities and economic productivity are becoming less diverse in relation to elevation and distance from the coast.
Journal Article
Convolutional neural networks for global human settlements mapping from Sentinel-2 satellite imagery
Spatially consistent and up-to-date maps of human settlements are crucial for addressing policies related to urbanization and sustainability, especially in the era of an increasingly urbanized world. The availability of open and free Sentinel-2 data of the Copernicus Earth Observation program offers a new opportunity for wall-to-wall mapping of human settlements at a global scale. This paper presents a deep-learning-based framework for a fully automated extraction of built-up areas at a spatial resolution of 10 m from a global composite of Sentinel-2 imagery. A multi-neuro modeling methodology building on a simple Convolution Neural Networks architecture for pixel-wise image classification of built-up areas is developed. The core features of the proposed model are the image patch of size 5 × 5 pixels adequate for describing built-up areas from Sentinel-2 imagery and the lightweight topology with a total number of 1,448,578 trainable parameters and 4 2D convolutional layers and 2 flattened layers. The deployment of the model on the global Sentinel-2 image composite provides the most detailed and complete map reporting about built-up areas for reference year 2018. The validation of the results with an independent reference dataset of building footprints covering 277 sites across the world establishes the reliability of the built-up layer produced by the proposed framework and the model robustness. The results of this study contribute to cutting-edge research in the field of automated built-up areas mapping from remote sensing data and establish a new reference layer for the analysis of the spatial distribution of human settlements across the rural–urban continuum.
Journal Article
Landscape predictors of human–leopard conflicts within multi-use areas of the Himalayan region
Conflict with humans is a significant source of mortality for large carnivores globally. With rapid loss of forest cover and anthropogenic impacts on their habitats, large carnivores are forced to occupy multi-use landscapes outside protected areas. We investigated 857 attacks on livestock in eastern Himalaya and 375 attacks in western Himalaya by leopards between 2015 and 2018. Multivariate analyses were conducted to identify the landscape features which increased the probability of livestock depredation by leopards. The risk of a leopard killing livestock increased within a heterogeneous landscape matrix comprising of both closed and open habitats (very dense forests, moderate dense forests, open forests, scrubland and non-forests). We used the results to map potential human–leopard conflict hotspots across parts of the Indian Himalayan region. Our spatial risk maps indicate pockets in the eastern, central and western part of eastern Himalaya and the central, northern part of western Himalaya as hotspots of human–leopard conflicts. Most of the attacks occurred when livestock were grazing freely within multi-use areas without supervision of a herder. Our results suggest that awareness about high risk areas, supervised grazing, and removing vegetation cover around human settlements should be initiated to reduce predation by leopards.
Journal Article
Resilience Pathways of Informal Settlements in Nairobi: Stasis, Decline, Adaptation, and Transformation
This study investigates resilience pathways of informal settlements, and their diverse impacts through community-based participatory research in Mathare and Korogocho, Nairobi. Results reveal that resilience pathways were relatively stable in the 1970s and 1980s, declined in the 1990s, and changed towards more adaptive approaches in the 2000s. Each period accommodates a dynamic mix of maladaptive, adaptive, and transformative resilience initiatives. Adaptive resilience initiatives are sustainable and adopt frugal practice to cope with resource constraints, without harming others. Transformative resilience initiatives are rare, as they require a significant shift in societal norms and institutions. The study emphasizes the need to recognize the dynamics and variety of resilience initiatives in informal settlements. The study therefore recommends (1) recognizing and supporting adaptive and transformative resilience initiatives; (2) recognizing the dynamics and variety of resilience initiatives of informal settlements; and (3) addressing inhibiting institutional settings of informal settlements.
Journal Article
Testing the influence of habitat experienced during the natal phase on habitat selection later in life in Scandinavian wolves
t. The Scandinavian wolf research project (SKANDULV) has been funded by the Norwegian Environment Agency, Swedish Environmental Protection Agency, Norwegian Research Council, Swedish Research Council Formas, Norwegian Institute for Nature Research, Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Ofce of Environmental Afairs in Hedmark County, Swedish Association for Hunting and Wildlife Management, WWF (Sweden), Swedish Carnivore Association, Olle and Signhild Engkvists Foundations, Carl Tryggers Foundation, and Marie-Claire Cronstedts Foundation.
Journal Article
The Economics of Slums in the Developing World
The global expansion of urban slums poses questions for economic research as well as problems for policymakers. We provide evidence that the type of poverty observed in contemporary slums of the developing world is characteristic of that described in the literature on poverty traps. We document how human capital threshold effects, investment inertia, and a “policy trap” may prevent slum dwellers from seizing economic opportunities offered by geographic proximity to the city. We test the assumptions of another theory—that slums are a just transitory phenomenon characteristic of fastgrowing economies—by examining the relationship between economic growth, urban growth, and slum growth in the developing world, and whether standards of living of slum dwellers are improving over time, both within slums and across generations. Finally, we discuss why standard policy approaches have often failed to mitigate the expansion of slums in the developing world. Our aim is to inform public debate on the essential issues posed by slums in the developing world.
Journal Article