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The metropolis of Tehran, the capital and the largest city of Iran, has been affected by the phenomenon of land subsidence in the past years. Up to now, no comprehensive study has been presented on land subsidence in the Tehran metropolis. This study addresses this shortcoming through a comprehensive investigation of surface and sub-surface factors that affect the subsidence and investigates the mechanism of subsidence development in Tehran. Land surface studies involve assessing the subsidence rate by utilizing InSAR technology, tracking the urban development of the city through time, and investigating geomorphological features like the alluvial fans landforms and surface drainage. Sub-surface studies include groundwater and geotechnical assessments. The evaluations indicate that the combinations of soils with a high percentage of fine grains and the drop in the underground water level are the major drivers of subsidence in the south of Tehran. The results of the study showed that the highest rate of land subsidence is 217 mm/year and has happened in the southwest of Tehran city. Districts 10, 11, 16, 17, 18, 19, and 20, which comprise about 26% of Tehran’s population (about 2.3 million people in 2016), are affected by subsidence. According to the results obtained from the geomorphological studies, these areas are located at the end of the alluvial fan of Kan and Chitgar (south and southwest of Tehran). The paper also focuses on the sharp northward growth of the subsidence zone in the northeast corner of Tehran’s subsidence zone. From investigations, it is concluded that changes in four river courses (which lead to a drop in the underground water level) in conjunction with fine grain soil of this area are (probably) the major factors that have played a role in the northward growth of the subsidence zone at the northeastern corner. The paper also identifies the most vulnerable urban districts affected by the subsidence as well as some major infrastructures exposed to subsidence hazards.

The population of Detroit has been steadily declining since the 1950s, but the imaginaries that shape the city are in constant transformation, changing with each successive government or regeneration initiative. Since 2010, downtown Detroit has been targeted by blight removal projects, real-estate speculation and redevelopment plans. These growth-oriented imaginaries shape the ways in which place is perceived and encountered – materially and conceptually – often responding to ruin and decay with erasures and evictions that play out through cultural geographies of precarity, simultaneously disappearing and reproducing conditions of inequality. The changes in the city are reflected in my own experiences of Detroit in 2009 and 2015, using walking and driving methods to support grounded and emplaced encounters with the ‘unbecoming’ ruins in the city. The city of 2009 is being replaced – in imagination, and in reality – by a new way of thinking about Detroit, which asks us to imagine differently, to positively re-envision the future possibilities for growth and change. This article interrogates the different imaginaries of regeneration in the city and considers, through urban ruins, places that are absent from the new way of thinking Detroit. Through Berlant’s ‘precarity’ and Massey’s ‘emplacement’, this discussion reveals a complex process of unbecoming that is typified in the unstable material, cultural and historical geographies that structure the experience of place in Detroit.

InBlack Corona, Steven Gregory examines political culture and activism in an African-American neighborhood in New York City. Using historical and ethnographic research, he challenges the view that black urban communities are \"socially disorganized.\" Gregory demonstrates instead how working-class and middle-class African Americans construct and negotiate complex and deeply historical political identities and institutions through struggles over the built environment and neighborhood quality of life. With its emphasis on the lived experiences of African Americans,Black Coronaprovides a fresh and innovative contribution to the study of the dynamic interplay of race, class, and space in contemporary urban communities. It questions the accuracy of the widely used trope of the dysfunctional \"black ghetto,\" which, the author asserts, has often been deployed to depoliticize issues of racial and economic inequality in the United States. By contrast, Gregory argues that the urban experience of African Americans is more diverse than is generally acknowledged and that it is only by attending to the history and politics of black identity and community life that we can come to appreciate this complexity. This is the first modern ethnography to focus on black working-class and middle-class life and politics. Unlike books that enumerate the ways in which black communities have been rendered powerless by urban political processes and by changing urban economies,Black Coronademonstrates the range of ways in which African Americans continue to organize and struggle for social justice and community empowerment. Although it discusses the experiences of one community, its implications resonate far more widely.

Urban decay is one of the most critical challenges in urban development, whereby old urban districts fall into decrepitude and face serious social, economic, and physical problems. Governments thus implement renewal projects to revitalize physical and functional structures, restore socioeconomic capacity, and improve residents’ quality of life. However, ignoring the complex nature of intervention in old urban areas may have undesirable consequences, including an additional decline in residents’ quality of life. This article assesses residents’ quality of life in neighbourhoods undergoing renewal, supported by experience from Mashhad, Iran. Using a mixed-methods design, it combines quantitative and qualitative methods of impact assessment, including questionnaires, semi-structured interviews, georeferenced data, and direct observation. The results show that a lack of sustainable financing for the Samen Renewal Project has had undesirable physical, sociocultural, and economic effects in the historical district of Mashhad and significantly reduced residents’ quality of life due to focusing on the interests of tourists, pilgrims, and especially private developers.

While high-speed train systems have accelerated mobility in China during the twenty-first century, the train systems of normal speed have gradually been replaced and abandoned, resulting in a \"rust belt\" in some Chinese cities. The reuse of abandoned railways provides a way to rebuild urban public transit based on the traditional tracks, and is also a way to transform towards urban regeneration of the surrounding neighborhood. Previous studies discussed the possibilities of three perspectives of reusing the abandoned rails: as a new transportation route, as a place for tourism and commerce and as a green corridor for the public. As a case study, this paper selects Zhangjiakou City, which is the terminal of the first railway routes built by Chinese, and explores methods of transformation from rail to urban rail transit. Under the background of the Beijing Winter Olympics of 2022 being partly held in Zhangjiakou City, the old North station and a 10-km rail between the North and South Station have been abandoned since 2014. This paper suggests conversion of the railway into an urban tram to meet the increasing commuter flow between the old and new city center. Additionally, transformation of the abandoned railway located in the city center will also trigger the urban space regeneration by increasing more urban functions and promoting urban public space. This research might shed light on other cities with similar transforming transportation facilities by analyzing the reuse possibilities of Beijing-Zhangjiakou Railway in Zhangjiakou City.

Nevers, a medium-sized city of 33,000 inhabitants in the centre of France, has long been regarded as a laboratory for municipal socialism as well as for the union of the left. The socialist party has dominated the local political scene for more than four decades. In 2014, however, a list without any party label put an end to this hegemony by winning the election. The 2020 municipal election confirmed the changeover: the outgoing list won the election, this time in the first round. How to explain this lasting change in a city that has long been a socialist city, in favour of an \"apolitical\" list that does not benefit from partisan resources? If this change is part of a more general movement, characterized by the decline of the “Parti socialiste” (PS) and the “Parti communiste Français” (PCF), we will show that it is also rooted in the socio-demographic transformations that the city has undergone in recent decades. Such as many medium-sized French cities, Nevers is indeed confronted with a long-standing phenomenon of urban decline, particularly marked in the central districts. The departure of managers and middle-level professions and the arrival of precarious populations has contributed to the transformation of the electorate, while the theme of decline has become one of the main issues of the last elections. This article thus proposes to examine the evolution of the local political field in the light of the social, economic, and demographic transformations of the territory. To do so, several databases are used in order to quantify and map these transformations: the results of municipal elections since 1971 and census data at municipal level since 1968 and at the neighbourhood level (Iris) since 1990. These data will be put into perspective with archives relating to municipal elections from 1971 to 2020 as well as interviews and observations conducted during the 2014 and 2020 campaigns. In conclusion, the urban decline, in the case of Nevers, has contributed to bring down municipal socialism in two ways: (1) by weakening its electoral base, (2) by imposing a political agenda that the socialist municipal team cannot keep, which will be blamed on them in 2014.

Infrastructure degradation in many post-industrial cities has increased the availability of potential mosquito habitats, including container habitats that support infestations of invasive disease-vectors. This study is unique in examining both immature and adult mosquito abundance across the fine-scale variability in socio-economic condition that occurs block-to-block in many cities. We hypothesized that abundant garbage associated with infrastructure degradation would support greater mosquito production but instead, found more mosquito larvae and host-seeking adults (86%) in parcels across the higher socio-economic, low-decay block. Aedes albopictus and Culex pipiens were 5.61 (p < 0.001) and 4.60 (p = 0.001) times more abundant, respectively. Most discarded (garbage) containers were dry during peak mosquito production, which occurred during the 5th hottest July on record. Containers associated with human residence were more likely to hold water and contain immature mosquitoes. We propose that mosquito production switches from rain-fed unmanaged containers early in the season to container habitats that are purposefully shaded or watered by mid-season. This study suggests that residents living in higher socioeconomic areas with low urban decay may be at greater risk of mosquito-borne disease during peak mosquito production when local container habitats are effectively decoupled from environmental constraints.

From 10 to 26 February 2006 Turin hosted the XX Olympic Winter Games. The building process of all the necessary infrastructure has been characterized, since the design phase, by exceptional measures for quality control and for environmental protection. The settlement of the \"Olympic District\" in Turin, in the Lingotto area has represented, since the beginning, an opportunity for the re-develop of an historical urban area. Ten years after the event, the Olympic Village area is in a state of strong urban decay, at the building and the social level. The re-conversion had a negative result. The contribution identifies the critical points that brought the project so far away from the original aims, despite the innovative methods of control and management of the process.

La política de vivienda social chilena de los años ochenta y noventa construyó masivos conjuntos de viviendas de escaso metraje y baja calidad, en lo que se constituyó como una periferia segregada, mal servida y con pobre accesibilidad. Al momento de su llegada, los habitantes de estos conjuntos experimentaron el abandono del Estado, que no comparecía en servicios públicos tan básicos como salud, educación o transporte, desencadenando importantes problemáticas sociales en estos territorios. Con el paso del tiempo, se han generado programas públicos orientados a solucionar las problemáticas habitacionales y urbanas de estos territorios, con alternativas que van desde el hermoseamiento hasta la demolición. Se ha pasado de la ausencia del Estado, a su presencia constante a través de diversas intervenciones. Este artículo busca reconstruir, a través de entrevistas en profundidad a habitantes de estos barrios, el modo en que el paso de la ausencia del Estado a la sobre-intervención ha marcado la vida cotidiana de estos territorios.