City and Environment Interactions最新文献

In the busy world of city growth, urban green spaces in Ghana are befallen with destruction due to urbanization. Using a cross-sectional design and case-studying Damongo and Kintampo, this study assessed the perceptions of urban residents and urban planning perspectives about green spaces in enhancing the environmental condition of fast-growing urban areas, and proposed guidelines for the managing green spaces within Ghana’s built environment. The results revealed that underutilization and insufficient funding for greenspace management increase vulnerability to urban encroachment, especially during inward city growth. Again, the exhaustion of the limited resources of the earth could have repercussions for the population of the earth; however, the need for such resources and the level of poverty influences poor environmental decisions. Further, the results showed that planning for urban green and open space ought to be decided at the local level. The study, therefore, recommends a collaborative approach involving city authorities, private sectors, and the public for effective green space management, emphasizing inclusive decision-making and active preservation, and the development of local standards within a national framework, guided by an urban green spaces protection scheme.

Climate change impacts global weather patterns, leading to more frequent and intense extreme weather events. Floods and droughts are the primary hazards caused by climate change, for the number of events, people affected, and global economic impacts. While traditionally addressed separately, their interconnectedness is increasingly recognized in research, policies, and practices. However, research on their interactions is limited, especially in urban areas. Therefore, this paper aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of the interaction between floods and droughts by analyzing their similarities and differences. This understanding will inform multi-hazard analysis and guide urban planning. A literature review was conducted to analyze the existing body of knowledge on floods, droughts, and their interactions, specifically focusing on cities in the context of climate change and risk. First, an analysis of the characteristics and differences between floods and droughts highlights the primary distinction lies in their temporal and spatial spread. Droughts are slow-onset events that impact large areas over extended periods, while floods are rapid-onset events with a more concentrated impact. Additionally, the review identifies commonalities between the two hazards, such as shared causes, cascading effects, mutually negative impacts, potential for joint management strategies, commonly affected sectors, geographical distribution patterns, frequently cited case studies, a growing focus on urban areas, and crucial knowledge gaps that require further investigation. Finally, the paper presents a novel framework for analyzing the interconnected risks of floods and droughts. This framework emphasizes the importance of comprehensive data collection, including risk factors, contextual information, drivers, impacts, responses, and historical event data. This holistic approach aims to improve understanding of these interconnected hazards’ combined causes and effects. The article argues for a paradigm shift in urban planning towards a multi-hazard, multi-sectoral, resilient, and adaptable approach that considers both floods and droughts in the context of climate change. The article concludes with suggestions for further research.

As part of efforts to promote urban green spaces in increasingly urbanized cities of Africa, urban crop farming (UCF) has become a necessary pillar of urban environmental sustainability. Beyond the primary functions of food security and employment, UCF contributes to greening the urban environment and provides valuable options for urban regeneration within the broad components of environmental, social, and economic sustainability. We draw on interviews and focus group discussions in Tamale, a rapidly urbanizing Ghanaian metropolis, to examine the potential of UCF and the question of urban environmental sustainability. Our findings revealed the tremendous contributions of UCF to the provision of greenery, beautiful scenery, healthy spaces, socio-economic inclusion, and environmental restoration. We argue that reflecting and incorporating these findings in policy will be helpful for urban landscape planning and management.

Due to its ever-evolving nature, urbanisation continues to escalate in complexity, further exacerbating the urban sustainability challenges. This necessitates the need for evidence-based policymaking enabled by modelling approaches, to facilitate informed decisions, and propel and gravitate towards urban sustainability. The major constraint is that of identifying the essential characteristics for consideration when modelling cities as complex systems, in a structured manner that integrates these characteristics, cognisant of their relative importance. The distinctive urban systems, corresponding system characteristics and interdependencies impacting the modelling of cities as complex systems, can be identified from peer-reviewed literature. The limiting constraint is, although there is widely available information on cities in research databases, the ability to use this literature for a quantitative model has not been proven, presenting a research gap. This approach results in significant complexities. In order to resolve these complexities, this study seeks a systems-based approach including a 2-tier structured protocol, leveraging qualitative-to-quantitative techniques to automatically extract the key systems which impact the development of city models. Through a systematic literature review, data on 13 key systems is qualitatively extracted from research databases such as Scopus and ScienceDirect, for the duration 2014 – 2024. Through word2vector analysis, machine learning techniques are utilised to perform the quantitative mapping of each urban system into corresponding system characteristics, and quantitatively illustrate them based on relative importance. The results illustrate that this proposed method is significant to characterize the essential systems that constitute a city as a complex system, based on machine learning and text analytics.

Research has highlighted the role of green infrastructure (GI) in addressing climate change impacts and other societal and environmental challenges in semi-arid urban areas. Regardless of this potential, GI implementation and research in arid climate zones is limited. Accordingly, using Amman, Jordan as a case study, this research aims to investigate the barriers that impede and prevent GI implementation in semi-arid urban areas. The GI barriers are conceptualized using the Driving–Pressure–State–Impact–Response (DPSIR) framework which was applied on data collected from semi-structured interviews with GI stakeholders in the city. The findings highlighted 17 general implementation barriers grouped into 6 categories. The DPSIR framework specifically highlighted the role of natural and human drivers (e.g. rapid urbanization, institutional capacities, and lacking financial resources) in creating significant barriers to GI implementation. It also illustrated the focus on open spaces and green cover in GI planning in Amman, lacking performance data on GI best practices in semi-arid contexts, and the need of integrated pathways to overcome the identified barriers. The DPSIR framework presents an easy-to-communicate picture of the state of GI implementation in the city that can be utilized by decision-makers, particularly those lacking access to diverse resources. The outcomes of this study enhances our understanding of GI planning in semi-arid urban areas and are beneficial for policymakers and practitioners looking for pathways to promote resilient urban development strategies. Overall, the study calls for further GI research on semi-arid developing contexts.

As summer heat events cause a further increase of heat load in buildings, the need for indoor overheating assessment by building performance simulations (BPS) for planning is rising. Besides other boundary conditions, the selection of proper weather data is known to significantly influence the outcome of overheating evaluation. Our research pointed out that current standards do not consider weather data including regional differences, urban climate effects or future climate in a sufficient way.

We suggest a new approach to create weather data sets for an average present and an average future summer based on meteorological data from weather stations. Therefore, we define characteristic summer values as indicators. In addition, urban climate is taken into account by mapping the outdoor temperature differences between urban areas and surrounding countryside using Local Climate Zones. We analyse the developed weather data sets for four regions in Germany by comparing the indoor overheating risk by BPS for an exemplary building. The results show that the overheating risk differs significantly between the regions. It is very low for the region of Hamburg, moderate for Dresden and Potsdam and highly critical for Stuttgart. The indoor heat load is at least more than doubled if the building is located in the city centre instead of its surroundings or if future climate conditions are applied. Furthermore, high night-time outdoor temperatures appear to significantly increase indoor overheating. Our approaches are first suggestions and show the relevance of regional and urban climate for indoor overheating assessment by BPS.

The 6^th assessment report by IPCC underscores the necessity to switch from immediate to timely actions to foster (urban) climate change adaptation and mitigation. Green areas such as tactical urban parks could represent a strategic asset towards healthier and more sustainable cities and societies. Specifically studied greenery may indeed improve local microclimate and air quality conditions, supporting the socio-ecological resilience of cities while enhancing social interactions.

Using a multidisciplinary approach, this study aims to evaluate the environmental quality and local community needs of a neighbourhood located near the historic centre of Perugia (Italy) to provide guidelines for its requalification, especially for outdoor spaces. To achieve this goal, the study conducted dedicated environmental monitoring, demonstrating the massive thermal behavior differences (by about 5K in summer) within the same urban area all over the year, and carried out surveys campaigns focusing on outdoor perceptions and needs reported by the local community. The results confirm that local residents mainly use the area as a thoroughfare to access established activities by car (63% of respondants), leading to high vehicular traffic and pollutants emissions during peak hours, with PM10 concentration peaks reaching 55 μg/m³ and 180 μg/m³ close to the parking lot in winter and spring, respectively. An effective intervention was recognized in the introduction of furniture in the area, creating attractive places to spend the lunch break, enabling people to enjoy the outdoors and maximize thermal comfort benefits. Moreover, reducing vehicular traffic and fostering slow mobility also demonstrated to be attractive measures to improve comfort, health and well-being and reduce negative consequences on air quality.

Urban heat island (UHI) and nitrogen dioxide (NO₂) concentration in the air are two significant health hazards arising from urbanization. While much research has focused on the local urban context and micro-conditions for sources and exposures in particular case-studies, the effect of the overall level of urban agglomeration, as measured by population size, remains underreported. We compile the literature that explicitly discusses the relationship between UHI or NO₂ and population size. We synthesize methods and findings qualitatively, then perform a quantified meta-analysis using comparable data from the corpus. We find that the corpus from which population size effects can be retrieved is very thin given the level of urbanization trends and the health impact. Despite a variety of functional specifications, data gathering processes, and metrics, the literature generally agrees on a significant effect of population size on both UHI and NO₂. After pooling data we estimate that each 10-fold increase in population, increases the temperature gap between the city and countryside by almost 2 $°$C or a 40 % increase when cities get very large. We find that NO₂ scales similarly, with a 40 % increase in concentration each time the city population is multiplied by 10. These numbers represent very important health threat given the current urbanization rate and the distribution of city population sizes. We also call for more studies to be conducted, across larger sets of cities, using observed data at higher resolution and comparable city definitions.