Cities最新文献

Urban governance and participatory planning have been key concepts in the academic discourse, policy debates and international practice related to spatial planning, urban development and organization of mega-events. However, they are relatively absent in academic debates and international practice pertaining to trade fairs. This paper explores the links of urban governance and participatory planning with trade fair activity. It focuses on the case of Thessaloniki, where trade fair activity has a strong connection with the city and its citizens. Methodologically, this paper utilizes mixed research methods by conducting interviews with key actors, including representatives of TIF-HELEXPO and local institutions in Thessaloniki, and a questionnaire survey to explore the views of Thessaloniki citizens. The results show that a possible adoption of urban governance and participatory planning in trade fair activity can have significant benefits. Urban governance is likely to boost cooperation between stakeholders, while participatory planning can contribute to a greater acceptance of trade fairs by citizens. On these grounds, the paper suggests the adoption of urban governance and participatory planning as a new model of managing, organizing and planning trade fairs that can strengthen their links with the city.

Ensuring city livability and urban sustainability is one of the grand societal challenges of the twenty-first century. This study analyzes the longitudinal relationships between the three dimensions of urban sustainability and city livability, while exploring the moderating effect of business regulatory quality. We test those relationships in a sample of 66 European cities from 2007 to 2019. Our findings suggest that while social urban sustainability is a positive and strong direct predictor of high city livability over time, the relationships between economic and environmental urban sustainability with city livability are more complex since they are conditioned by business regulatory quality. Economic and environmental urban sustainability have a stronger positive effect on city livability when there is an effective and supportive regulatory framework for business development that helps translate economic and environmental efforts into dwellers' well-being improvements. On the contrary, when the quality of business regulations is low, the effect of economic urban sustainability is weaker and the effect of environmental urban sustainability on city livability is negative. Therefore, this study provides new insights into the interrelations between urban sustainability, regulations, and city livability that can help guide livability improvements in cities.

The post-communist period has strongly impacted the former communist Romania's urban industrial areas. Recent debates regarding urban industrial towns in Central and Eastern Europe reveal that their governance has been prone to neglect and that a lack of jobs has led to depopulation, seasonal migration, and a change in local labour skills. Drawing on 20 in-depth interviews with community leaders in Moldova Nouă, Romania, this study presents divergent narratives on the development of the local economy around the reopening of a copper mine and tourism. The findings suggest that, given the town's excellent position on the River Danube and its proximity to the Danube Gorges, tourism is perceived as a long-term solution. However, to date, tourism has not proved to be a major economic engine for the local population but could be of great interest for further local development. On the other hand, although copper mining proved polluting in communist times, some respondents prefer reopening the mines to have better paid jobs.

This paper focuses on the phenomenon of pro-migrant volunteering in urban areas. Its objective is to contribute to our understanding of this phenomenon, which has recently undergone important reconsiderations. Indeed, scholars in migration studies have long contrasted activists in social and political movements with volunteers: the first were usually celebrated for the challenge posed to the status quo, whereas the latter looked down for engaging in a depoliticized form of civic action. Drawing from two research studies conducted between 2017 and 2022 in the Italian city of Milan, this paper shed light on the current processes of hybridization between pro-migrant volunteering and activism, and on the politicization affecting pro-migrant volunteering. Here, politics include instances of micro-politics, in which our way of thinking, behaving and imagining our society is transformed, even without triggering a revolution. To make this point, I presented a typology of volunteers and shed light on some important functions these actors play in the city of Milan vis-à-vis refugees. Underlining the strong interlinkages between these two ‘words’, I also stress the implications for the existing literature.

Jericho is a small Palestinian oasis city located on the far western border of the West Bank near the Dead Sea. As one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, Jericho owes its existence to several springs that irrigate 10 km² of desert for agriculture. The mild winter climate and the abundance of fresh water have made Jericho a prime leisure destination for elites since antiquity, and under the Israeli occupation, Jericho has become a popular destination for wealthy Palestinians to spend weekends. Since the Oslo Agreement (1993), efforts have been made to leverage the longstanding status of Jericho as a leisure destination to create a ‘Las Vegas on the Dead Sea'. For nearly two millennia, Jericho has also attracted religious pilgrims due to its role in events described in the New Testament. In this article, we provide an overview of Jericho's urban history, introduce key issues and actors in Jericho's contemporary urban context and some of the main urban challenges facing Jericho, and highlight the ways in which Jericho, despite its small size and seemingly remote location, can be understood as a ‘global city’ that has been ‘on the map’ since antiquity.

Globalization has led to the polarization of world cities and the increasing prevalence of urban shrinkage, posing a worldwide socio-economic development challenge. As an economic form brought about by information science and informatization, whether the digital economy (DE) impacts urban shrinkage and its internal transmission mechanisms are scientific questions worthy of further investigation. Therefore, this study empirically analyzes 287 prefecture-level cities in China from 2011 to 2021 using fixed effect and mediation models. The results show an upward trend in the development level of DE, with a spatial pattern of “high in the east and low in the west”; urban shrinkage exhibits a high-low-high trend from south to north. Additionally, DE significantly accelerates urban shrinkage by catalyzing the loss of population, technology, and capital factors. Finally, there are notable regional heterogeneity and type difference in the impact of DE on urban shrinkage, with a more pronounced effect in non-Northeast regions and central cities. The study highlights that DE enhances resource allocation efficiency, but it exacerbates regional development imbalances, affecting social equity, justice, and residents' well-being. Therefore, it is crucial to utilize the government's “visible hand” to macro-regulate “market failures” and ensure the implementation of people-oriented equalization of basic public services.

Washington, District of Columbia (DC), like many cities around the world has responded to the UN's call to help national governments deliver on their 2030 Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) covered under the UN's sustainable development goal #13, Climate Action. DC's contributions to the United States NDC include making its transportation sector sustainable. DC is part of the Washington Metro region which includes jurisdictions in Maryland and Virginia and during the week commuters from both states increase DC's population by almost 80 % exacerbating traffic congestion. Each jurisdiction in the region is responsible for its financial, transportation, and land use policies. To determine whether this system of fragmented governance impacts DC's transportation goals, this study used Banister's sustainable mobility framework to analyze transportation projects constructed or implemented in jurisdictions in the region. The results reveal that fragmented governance has led to jurisdictions in Maryland and Virginia placing greater emphasis on transportation projects that widen, extend, or create new roads and this tends to meet neighborhood or county needs instead of regional targets which would facilitate DC's efforts to reach its sustainable development goals. The study also finds regional agencies such as the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, the National Capital Region Transportation Planning Board, and the Transportation Land-Use Connections Program do not have regulatory powers and hence cannot enforce transportation and land use policies nor fund any projects in the region instead each jurisdiction is responsible for its transportation and land use policies. The study also reveals that these regional agencies can be manipulated by local politicians and recommends the creation of a regional governing body that will make decisions on finance, land-use, housing, and transportation and be accountable to constituents and thus avoid interference from local politicians.

The smart city has emerged as a revolutionary concept that connects all the different aspects of our life, and the world is witnessing a change of the cities to become smart. As most of the literature related to smart cities refers to the experience of such projects in the context of developed countries, the primary aim of this study was to examine the factors affecting the implementation of smart city projects in a developing one, namely Jordan, through covering the gaps that existed in previous research. The factors examined were divided into: governmental, economic, social, technological, legal, and environmental. The findings were based on semi-structured interviews undertaken with experts (seven participants from the private sector, five from the public sector, and three from academia) entrenched in smart city projects in Jordan. The findings of the study reveal that a lack of cooperation and coordination, unclear smart city vision, and poor private-public participation from the governmental group are found to be the top factors that hinder the transformation into a smart city. In the other groups, the need for more flexible legislation to obtain funding (economic factors), community involvement (social factors), poor data availability and scalability, integration and convergence issues across IT networks, and the lack of a database and a centralised analytics system (technological factors), the need for open data and access to such datasets, and lack of regulatory norms, policies, and directions (legal factors) and growing population problems (environmental factors) are the significant factors. This research project is useful to the government and policymakers in several ways. The paper ends with a number of recommendations and avenues for future research.

Street-view images are essential data sources for advanced urban analytics. Most of the street-view images that researchers utilize are commercial street views, which can be inadequate for conducting advanced urban analytics, primarily because of their limited spatial coverage and high temporal inconsistency. Thus, there has been a growing need to collect original street-view images. However, the extent to which citizens approve of the collection of street-view images remains unknown. A scientific investigation of citizens' perceptions about the new data collection method is crucial because it provides empirical evidence for successfully collecting street-view images by local planning agencies. By conducting an online survey (n = 411), we examined the relationship between people's privacy concerns, perceived benefits, trust in a local urban planning agency, and acceptance of the collection of street-view images by an urban planning agency. About 83 % of the survey participants living in the U.S. support the idea that local planning agencies collect original street-view images. The structural equation modeling (SEM) results demonstrate that perceived benefits and trust in an urban planning agency are positively associated with acceptance. Lower income is significantly associated with lower acceptance. Lastly, a significantly lower percentage of people prefer drone-based to vehicle-based image collection.

Borrowing size plays a crucial role in promoting urban economic development. In theory, administrative boundaries pose obstacles to borrowing size due to the border effect. However, internet development mitigates the adverse impact of administrative boundaries on borrowing size due to the cross-border effect. To verify the above argument, this paper empirically tests the impact of administrative boundaries and internet development on borrowing size based on the panel data of 214 cities in 14 urban agglomerations in China from 2008 to 2019. The results confirm that the internet development has indeed produced a cross-border effect. The mechanism analysis indicates that specialized division and cost saving are mechanisms of the cross-border effect. The heterogeneity analysis reveals that the cross-border effect of internet development fosters the borrowing size for developing business and technological functions, while not significantly influencing cultural functions.