Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
353,512
result(s) for
"Urban areas"
Sort by:
Where Is the Peri-Urban? A Systematic Review of Peri-Urban Research and Approaches for Its Identification and Demarcation Worldwide
Metropolitan areas worldwide have grown rapidly and are usually surrounded by peri-urban zones that are neither urban nor rural. Despite widespread use of the term ‘peri-urban’, physical determination of these spaces is difficult due to their transient nature and multiple definitions. While many have identified peri-urban areas regionally or globally, questions persist on where exactly the peri-urban is located, and what are the most apt methods to delineate its boundaries. The answers are pertinent towards framing targeted policies for governing the dynamic socio-spatial transformations in these zones. This paper reviews peri-urban research over the last 50-plus years to discern the existing methodologies for its identification/demarcation and their applications. For this, a total of 3124 documents on peri-urban studies were identified through keyword searches in Scopus and Google Scholar databases. Thereafter, 56 documents were examined that explicitly dealt with demarcating peri-urban zones. Results reveal that there is no standout/generalized method for peri-urban demarcation. Rather, these approaches are geographically specific and vary across developed and developing countries, due to differences in land-use patterns, socioeconomic drivers, and political systems. Thus, we recommend developing a ‘pluralistic’ framework for determining peri-urban boundaries at the regional–global scale to enable better framing of relevant policies.
Journal Article
Urbanisation-driven land degradation and socioeconomic challenges in peri-urban areas
Climate change and landscape transformation have led to rapid expansion of peri-urban areas globally, representing new ‘laboratories’ for the study of human–nature relationships aiming at land degradation management. This paper contributes to the debate on human-driven land degradation processes by highlighting how natural and socioeconomic forces trigger soil depletion and environmental degradation in peri-urban areas. The aim was to classify and synthesise the interactions of urbanisation-driven factors with direct or indirect, on-site or off-site, and short-term or century-scale impacts on land degradation, focussing on Southern Europe as a paradigmatic case to address this issue. Assuming complex and multifaceted interactions among influencing factors, a relevant contribution to land degradation was shown to derive from socioeconomic drivers, the most important of which were population growth and urban sprawl. Viewing peri-urban areas as socio-environmental systems adapting to intense socioeconomic transformations, these factors were identified as forming complex environmental ‘syndromes’ driven by urbanisation. Based on this classification, we suggested three key measures to support future land management in Southern European peri-urban areas.
Journal Article
Urban Flood Mapping Using SAR Intensity and Interferometric Coherence via Bayesian Network Fusion
Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) observations are widely used in emergency response for flood mapping and monitoring. However, the current operational services are mainly focused on flood in rural areas and flooded urban areas are less considered. In practice, urban flood mapping is challenging due to the complicated backscattering mechanisms in urban environments and in addition to SAR intensity other information is required. This paper introduces an unsupervised method for flood detection in urban areas by synergistically using SAR intensity and interferometric coherence under the Bayesian network fusion framework. It leverages multi-temporal intensity and coherence conjunctively to extract flood information of varying flooded landscapes. The proposed method is tested on the Houston (US) 2017 flood event with Sentinel-1 data and Joso (Japan) 2015 flood event with ALOS-2/PALSAR-2 data. The flood maps produced by the fusion of intensity and coherence and intensity alone are validated by comparison against high-resolution aerial photographs. The results show an overall accuracy of 94.5% (93.7%) and a kappa coefficient of 0.68 (0.60) for the Houston case, and an overall accuracy of 89.6% (86.0%) and a kappa coefficient of 0.72 (0.61) for the Joso case with the fusion of intensity and coherence (only intensity). The experiments demonstrate that coherence provides valuable information in addition to intensity in urban flood mapping and the proposed method could be a useful tool for urban flood mapping tasks.
Journal Article
Africa’s new cities
New private property investments in Africa’s cities are on the rise, and they often take the form of entirely new cities built up from scratch as comprehensively planned self-contained enclaves. As these new city-making trajectories are expanding and empirical research is emerging, there is a need to provide more conceptual clarity. We systematically examine the diversity of new cities in Africa; elicit their financial trajectories; and set an agenda for critically examining their actual and expected implications, by learning transnational lessons from debates on gated communities, peri-urban land governance and displacement, and older waves of new city building. Although most new cities are private-led projects, they are inserted into diverse and dynamic political economies with states ranging from developmentalist to neoliberal to absent. The consumptive and supply-driven character of many projects so far (resembling gated communities for middle and higher classes), their insertion into ‘rurban’ spaces with complex land governance arrangements, and their tendency to implement post-democratic private-sector-driven governance will make them at best unsuitable for solving Africa’s urban problems, and at worst they will increase expulsions and enclosures of the poor, public funding injustice and socio-spatial segregation and fragmentation.
非洲城市的新私有房产投资呈上升趋势，其形式往往是从零建造全新城市，成为全面规划的自足式飞地。随着这些新的造城趋势铺展，经验研究涌现，有必要在概念上进一步厘清。我们系统考察了非洲新城市的多样性；得出了它们的财务轨迹；并设定了批判式审视其实际意义和预期意义的日程表，包括借鉴国际学界关于封闭式小区、城市边缘区土地管治和拆迁以及过往造城潮流的争论所得到的经验教训。虽然大多数新城是民营企业主导的，但它们插入了多样化且动态的政治经济格局中，其中政府发挥的作用从开发者，到新自由主义式，到完全缺席，各不相同。目前为止许多项目（类似于面向中产阶级和上流阶层的封闭式小区）都呈现出消费和供给驱动特征；这些项目插入了有着复杂土地管治安排的“城郊”空间；并且它们趋向于实施后民主时代的私营部门驱动式治理。这些都使得它们在最好的情况下也并不适合用于解决非洲的城市问题，而在最糟糕的情况下则会加剧对穷人的排斥和包围、公共资金利用的不公正，以及社会空间的区隔和碎片化。
Journal Article
Waterfront promenade design : urban revival strategies
\"Waterfronts, the unique places where land and water meet, are a finite resource, embodying the special history and character of each city. The last decades have witnessed profound changes along abandoned or underused waterfronts, bringing in new pedestrian areas, new business opportunities, and new vitality. This trend is accelerating in cities around the globe. 'Waterfront Promenade Design' seeks to answer to the question of how we can go about rejuvenating waterfronts by promoting good landscape planning and design. In total, 34 great waterfront design practices were selected from all over the world, each with their own unique way of solving the problems posed by their allocated sites, social conditions, and public policies. All resulted in more vibrant, accessible, resilient, and culturally rich public spaces, attuned to these needs. In order to strengthen the waterfront's coherence and connection, this book pays special attention to the design of traversable space along waterfronts, ensuring that promenades are maintained as pedestrian and cyclists-friendly zones. Based on in-depth analysis, this book provides useful design and planning approaches for professionals, decision-makers, and scholars.\"--Cover page 4.
Book
Informality and the Development and Demolition of Urban Villages in the Chinese Peri-urban Area
The fate of Chinese urban villages (chengzhongcun) has recently attracted both research and policy attention. Two important unaddressed questions are: what are the sources of informality in otherwise orderly Chinese cities; and, will village redevelopment policy eliminate informality in the Chinese city? Reflecting on the long-established study of informal settlements and recent research on informality, it is argued that the informality in China has been created by the dual urban–rural land market and land management system and by an underprovision of migrant housing. The redevelopment ofchengzhongcunis an attempt to eliminate this informality and to create more governable spaces through formal land development; but since it fails to tackle the root demand for unregulated living and working space, village redevelopment only leads to the replication of informality in more remote rural villages, in other urban neighbourhoods and, to some extent, in the redeveloped neighbourhoods.
Journal Article