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Experience is conceptualised in both academic and policy circles as a more-or-less direct effect of the design of the built environment. Drawing on findings from a research project that investigated people’s everyday experiences of designed urban environments in two UK towns, this paper suggests at least two reasons why sensory encounters between individuals and built environments cannot in fact be understood entirely as a consequence of the design features of those environments. Drawing from empirical analysis based on surveys, ethnographic ‘walk-alongs’ and photo-elicitation interviews, we argue that distinct senses of place do depend on the sensory experiencing of built environments. However, that experiencing is significantly mediated in two ways. First, it is mediated by bodily mobility: in particular, the walking practices specific to a particular built environment. Secondly, sensory experiences are intimately intertwined with perceptual memories that mediate the present moment of experience in various ways: by multiplying, judging and dulling the sensory encounter. In conclusion, it is argued that work on sensory urban experiencing needs to address more fully the diversity and paradoxes produced by different forms of mobility through, and perceptual memories of, built environments.

Despite growing recognition of the important role of cities in economic, political and environmental systems across the world, comparative, global-scale research on cities is severely limited. This paper examines the similarities and differences in urban form and growth that have occurred across 25 mid-sized cities from different geographical settings and levels of economic development. The results reveal four city types: low-growth cities with modest rates of infilling; high-growth cities with rapid, fragmented development; expansive-growth cities with extensive dispersion at low population densities; and frantic-growth cities with extraordinary land conversion rates at high population densities. Although all 25 cities are expanding, the results suggest that cities outside the US do not exhibit the dispersed spatial forms characteristic of American urban sprawl.

This paper develops a set of quantitative variables to characterise urban forms at the metropolitan level and, in particular, to distinguish compactness from 'sprawl'. It first reviews and analyses past research on the definitions of urban form, compactness and sprawl, and corresponding quantitative variables. Four quantitative variables are developed to measure four dimensions of urban form at the metropolitan level: metropolitan size, activity intensity, the degree that activities are evenly distributed, and the extent that high-density sub-areas are clustered. Through a series of simulation analyses, the global Moran coefficient, which characterises the fourth dimension, distinguishes compactness from sprawl. It is high, intermediate and close to zero for monocentric, polycentric and decentralised sprawling forms respectively. In addition, the more there is more local sprawl, composed of discontinuity and strip development, the lower is the Moran coefficient.

The results of a recent survey conducted in eight residential areas in the Greater Oslo Region support the hypothesis that there is a connection between land use characteristics and household consumption of energy and transport. Findings from the survey also lend great support to the compact city as a sustainable urban form. However, three distinct findings indicate that decentralised concentration could lead to even lower energy use in households: while the extent of everyday travel decreases in densely populated areas, the central urban areas represent the highest level of leisure-time travel by plane; the access to a private garden limits the extent of leisure travel; and, the difference in energy use for housing between single-family and multifamily housing is reduced in housing built after 1980, indicating that the established conclusions on the most energy-efficient housing should be questioned.

This paper examines the role of biophysical and anthropogenic factors as potential drivers of land degradation in a large Mediterranean urban region. The sensitivity of land to degradation is examined in relation to the territorial disparities observed within Rome's metropolitan area (Italy), and to the changes in its spatial organisation resulting from urban shrinkage. We derive a composite index of land sensitivity to degradation using the Environmentally Sensitive Areas Index (ESAI) at the municipal level. The observed regional disparities in ESAI scores are analysed diachronically for the period 1990–2008, based on elevation, distance from the coast and population density. The results indicate that spatial disparities in ESAI recorded in 1990 had decreased by 2008, although the degree of land sensitivity had increased throughout the urban region. We subsequently relate these changes to different models of urban organisation (i.e. 'compact growth' vs 'sprawl') observed in Rome since the 1990s. In 1990, the highest degree of land sensitivity was on the urban fringe of Rome, whereas by 2008 the greatest increase in land sensitivity was observed within suburban municipalities. This sensitivity progressively spread further away from the main urban centre during the study period. The results suggest the need to reconsider the polycentric spatial framework as an environmentally sustainable model for Rome and other urban regions in the Mediterranean.

The aim of this work is to test empirically the validity of Gibrat's law on the growth of cities, using data on the complete distribution of cities (without size restrictions) from three countries (the US, Spain and Italy) for the entire 20th century. In order to achieve this, different techniques are used. First, panel data unit root tests tend to confirm the validity of Gibrat's law in the upper-tail distribution. Secondly, when the entire distribution is considered using non-parametric methods, it is found that Gibrat's law does not hold exactly in the long term (in general, size affects the variance of the growth process but not its mean). Moreover, the log-normal distribution works well as a description of city size distributions across the whole century when no truncation point is considered.

In most metropolitan regions throughout the globe, urbanised land area is increasing to accommodate increasing population size. This article provides a simple yet powerful mathematical description of this urban expansion. Specifically, the following scaling relationship is proposed: land area (A) increases proportionally to population size (P) raised to a power in) — i.e. A oc P\". During 1950-2000, this relationship is found to hold well for US Census urban areas (UAs) with a greater than 10 per cent increase in population. Values for the parameter n vary among UAs, with a central tendency value of ~ 2, suggesting that, on average, newcomers to urban areas occupy about twice the land area per capita of existing residents. If n were exactly equal to 2, then the parameter group $P/\\sqrt A $ (called 'linear population density', or LPD) would be constant over time. LPD (units: people per metre) is the number of people in a metrewide strip across an urban area. LPD is distinct from, and behaves somewhat differently than, population density. Distributions of LPD values among US UAs during 1950-2000 show surprisingly little variability over multidecade time-scales. For example, from 1950 to 2000, average population, land area and population density changed by more than a factor of 2, but average LPD changed less than 10 per cent. Few, if any, other attributes of urban form have remained so constant during this half-century time-period. International data corroborate the finding that LPD distributions are roughly constant over multidecadal time-scales. These results suggest an underlying pattern to how people arrange themselves within and among urban areas.囎For US UAs, rank-size rules similar to the generalised version of Zipf's rule hold for population, land area, LPD and population density. LPD is an important predictor of the emissions-to-inhalation relationship for motor vehicle emissions. Results presented here are important for theoretical, practical and empirical investigations of urban form and of how urban areas expand over time.

Saskia Sassen's concept of the 'global city' has evolved in a complex relation with other urban, economic and social students that deal with these strategic sites of the contemporary global urban architecture. This multidisciplinary set of authors could be metaphorically grouped within what John Friedmann described as the 'invisible college' of world city researchers. In light of this tradition, the global city is described here in its various theoretical guises, in a chronological account from the early 1900s roots to present-day formulations, in order to establish an eclectic understanding that can speak beyond the college, opening the dialogue on globalisation and cities beyond urban studies. In this sense, the essay describes the 'global city' as the status of connectedness to the global attained by some world cities, which rests upon an urban entrepreneurial spirit that situates these metropolises as the strategic hinges of globalisation.

This article discusses the role of the neighbourhood in an era of increased mobility. It explores the consequences of the \"new mobilities paradigm\", which argues that the growing importance of flows - of people, goods and information - results in a deterritorialization of social practices. Rows thus gain prominence in comparison to places like regions and neighbourhoods. At the same time, however, neighbourhoods continue to play a role in the actions and imaginations of people, neighbourhood organizations, and government policies. People still live in neighbourhoods, and governments still try to solve often severe social problems through neighbourhood policies. We argue that the neighbourhood has to be re-imagined as a collection of hybrid nodes connecting a multiplicity of flows that bind actors and objects in order to understand the potential effectiveness of these policies. From this new mobilities perspective, we make suggestions for future neighbourhood research.

This article explores the interrelation of gentrification and public policies in the neighbourhoods of Prenzlauer Berg (Berlin) and Harlem (New York City). It draws on Karl Polanyi's concept of a 'double movement' and argues that gentrification is fundamentally a political process. Thus, while demise in the face of market forces, or even an active support of gentrification, is clearly visible in both neighbourhoods, the relation between public policies and gentrification is also highly unstable and contradictory. The cases studied highlight that the resources to push or prevent gentrification are contingent; they are not built into the essence of urban development.