Evaluation of dimensions, approaches and concepts of resilience in urban societies with an emphasis on natural disasters

Despite the passage of more than three decades from conducting primary researches on resilience of cities, yet this concept lacks a comprehensive and operational understanding in various scientific fields, including disasters  management. Most of existing contradictions on the meaning of urban resilience is resulting from cognitive tendencies, methodological methods, and existing basic conceptual differences, as well as viewpoints focusing on research in ecological, social systems or a combination of both.A city will be considered fully resilient when all indices, components and dimensions of resilience in that city to be placed ina better situation and are in growth and promotion mode. Perhaps an uneven  promotion of different dimensions of turban resilience will not be much led to resilience of totality of a city and its people. Leading social - economic dimension as a dimension that has the most relationship with people and citizens is very important in resilience of cities. The aim of this research is to examine the social and economic dimensions, approaches and concepts of resilient city as one of the new approaches in the field of reducing vulnerability and promoting crisis  management. This research is a review study, which has been collected and investigated and analyzed from various library and documentary resources.Keywords: dimensions, approach, resilience, disasters, urban societie

Intuitive Cities: Pre-Reflective, Aesthetic and Political Aspects of Urban Design

Evidence affirms that aesthetic engagement patterns our movements, often with us barely aware. This invites an examination of pre-reflective engagement within cities and also aesthetic experience as a form of the pre-reflective. The invitation is amplified because design has political implications. For instance, it can draw people in or exclude them by establishing implicitly recognized public-private boundaries. The Value Sensitive Design school, which holds that artifacts embody ethical and political values, stresses some of this. But while emphasizing that design embodies implicit values, research in this field lacks sustained attention to largely unconscious background biases or values, rooted in cultural attitudes and personal interests, that lead theorists and planners—often too narrowly—to promote design organized around specific values such as defensibility. In examining these points, I draw on J. J. Gibson, a central figure for some writing on aesthetics and cities, and whom pragmatists and phenomenologists in turn influenced. Taking a cue from pragmatists in particular, I argue Gibson’s perceptual theory of affordances entails a theory of values, meaning our perception and therewith movements are inherently value-based. I advocate design that accounts for relatively constantly held values such as safety, while also handling the vast pluralism that exists and not crushing the aesthetic vibrancy of city life

Significant of teritorry to increase sense of place in behavioural settlements

Cities have transformed collecting public places into private spaces. While in the past, public places as an urban place had a specific identity for themselves. Nowadays in nonexistence of connection between public and private life residents are forced to create their social life within their own control and are not entered to identity in public space. Urban spaces are made regardless to social needs of residents and their cultural origins. Formation of urban spaces impact to quality of its social and spatial and cannot be absorbed potential of environmental and social. For reproduction of social identity is required the behaviour-milieu this behaviour-milieu is a place for standing of pattern behaviour. In this way the role of neighborhood center as behavioural setting appears to be helping as to establish the distinctive identity of the place and create the conditions in which residents can develop their relationships and control. Behavioural complex also provide context of social partnership. Places can be considered as a physical form with their spatial territory which supports activity, ceremonies, and events and helps to sense of place formation. Feeling of neighborhood territory will exacerbate dependence and sense of place to it. The most important aspect of sense of place is attachment of people to their home or neighborhood sphere. Belonging to them make a territory feeling. Sense of place supports the cultural concept, social and culture relationship of society in the place and achieves to individual identity. This paper reviews recent research and literature review into the concept of sense of place and their assessment. The aim of this study was to evaluate the sense of place in the traditional urban to be carried out in the contemporary urban setting. The discussion presents the relationship between four groups of sense of place, territory, dependence, and finally provides a conceptual model as to show how these factors affect to sense of place. The result of this study indicates a model that mentions a relationship between dimensions of sense of place. This paper argues that territory in behavioural setting as the subset of place dependence is the best instrument to improve the sense of plac

Cognitive barriers during monitoring-based commissioning of buildings

Monitoring-based commissioning (MBCx) is a continuous building energy management process used to optimize energy performance in buildings. Although monitoring-based commissioning (MBCx) can reduce energy waste by up to 20%, many buildings still underperform due to issues such as unnoticed system faults and inefficient operational procedures. While there are technical barriers that impede the MBCx process, such as data quality, the focuses of this paper are the non-technical, behavioral and organizational, barriers that contribute to issues initiating and implementing MBCx. In particular, this paper discusses cognitive biases, which can lead to suboptimal outcomes in energy efficiency decisions, resulting in missed opportunities for energy savings. This paper provides evidence of cognitive biases in decisions during the MBCx process using qualitative data from over 40 public and private sector organizations. The results describe barriers resulting from cognitive biases, listed in descending order of occurrence, including: risk aversion, social norms, choice overload, status quo bias, information overload, professional bias, and temporal discounting. Building practitioners can use these results to better understand potential cognitive biases, in turn allowing them to establish best practices and make more informed decisions. Researchers can use these results to empirically test specific decision interventions and facilitate more energy efficient decisions

Destination image analytics through traveller-generated content

The explosion of content generated by users, in parallel with the spectacular growth of social media and the proliferation of mobile devices, is causing a paradigm shift in research. Surveys or interviews are no longer necessary to obtain users' opinions, because researchers can get this information freely on social media. In the field of tourism, online travel reviews (OTRs) hosted on travel-related websites stand out. The objective of this article is to demonstrate the usefulness of OTRs to analyse the image of a tourist destination. For this, a theoretical and methodological framework is defined, as well as metrics that allow for measuring different aspects (designative, appraisive and prescriptive) of the tourist image. The model is applied to the region of Attica (Greece) through a random sample of 300,000 TripAdvisor OTRs about attractions, activities, restaurants and hotels written in English between 2013 and 2018. The results show trends, preferences, assessments, and opinions from the demand side, which can be useful for destination managers in optimising the distribution of available resources and promoting sustainability

Community Lynching and the US Asthma Epidemic

We explore the implications of IR Cohen's work on immune cognition for understanding rising rates of asthma morbidity and mortality in the US. Immune cognition is inherently linked with central nervous system cognition, and with the cognitive function of the embedding sociocultural networks by which individuals are acculturated and through which they work with others to meet challenges of threat and opportunity. Externally-imposed patterns of 'structured stress' can, through their effect on a child's socioculture, become synergistic with the development of immune cognition, triggering the persistence of an atopic Th2 phenotype, a necessary precursor to asthma and other immune diseases. Structured stress in the US particularly includes the cross sectional and longitudinal effects of a systematic destruction of minority urban communities occurring since the end of World War II which we characterize as community lynching. Reversal of the rising tide of asthma and related chronic diseases in the US thus seems unlikely without a 21st Century version of the earlier Great Urban Reforms which ended the scourge of infectious diseases, in particular an end to the de-facto ethnic cleansing of minority neighborhoo

Immune cognition, social justice and asthma: structured stress and the developing immune system

We explore the implications of IR Cohen's work on immune cognition for understanding rising rates of asthma morbidity and mortality in the US. Immune cognition is conjoined with central nervous system cognition, and with the cognitive function of the embedding sociocultural networks by which individuals are acculturated and through which they work with others to meet challenges of threat and opportunity. Using a mathematical model, we find that externally- imposed patterns of 'structured stress' can, through their effect on a child's socioculture, become synergistic with the development of immune cognition, triggering the persistence of an atopic Th2 phenotype, a necessary precursor to asthma and other immune disease. Reversal of the rising tide of asthma and related chronic diseases in the US thus seems unlikely without a 21st Century version of the earlier Great Urban Reforms which ended the scourge of infectious diseases

Telepresence and the Role of the Senses

The telepresence experience can be evoked in a number of ways. A well-known example is a player of videogames who reports about a telepresence experience, a subjective experience of being in one place or environment, even when physically situated in another place. In this paper we set the phenomenon of telepresence into a theoretical framework. As people react subjectively to stimuli from telepresence, empirical studies can give more evidence about the phenomenon. Thus, our contribution is to bridge the theoretical with the empirical. We discuss theories of perception with an emphasis on Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Gibson, the role of the senses and the Spinozian belief procedure. The aim is to contribute to our understanding of this phenomenon. A telepresence-study that included the affordance concept is used to empirically study how players report sense-reactions to virtual sightseeing in two cities. We investigate and explore the interplay of the philosophical and the empirical. The findings indicate that it is not only the visual sense that plays a role in this experience, but all senses