Big Data: The Engine to Future Cities—A Reflective Case Study in Urban Transport

In an era of smart cities, artificial intelligence and machine learning, data is purported to be the ‘new oil’, fuelling increasingly complex analytics and assisting us to craft and invent future cities. This paper outlines the role of what we know today as big data in understanding the city and includes a summary of its evolution. Through a critical reflective case study approach, the research examines the application of urban transport big data for informing planning of the city of Sydney. Specifically, transport smart card data, with its diverse constraints, was used to understand mobility patterns through the lens of the 30 min city concept. The paper concludes by offering reflections on the opportunities and challenges of big data and the promise it holds in supporting data-driven approaches to planning future cities

Balancing environment, economy and equity

By 2050, 66 per cent of the world’s population will be living in urban areas, with approximately 90 per cent of this increase occurring across Africa and Asia. While urbanisation is proving to be rewarding in terms of providing access to employment and infrastructure, its rapid pace is equally challenging to deal with as poverty, urban sprawl and environmental degradation are some outcomes of urban life that far outweigh the positives. Most often noticeable in developing countries is a trend of disproportionate distribution of population across urban areas, which in most cases has led to huge pressures on land, infrastructure, environment and economy(s) of cities. This paper seeks to examine the role of urban planning and the integration of current concerns of environment, economy and equity into master planning of three cities, on the basis that master plans can be more effective in enabling the sustainable growth of cities. The master plans of three cities – Sawai Madhopur in India, Curitiba in Brazil and Ulaanbaatar in Mongolia, are discussed in this paper with the intention of examining how these cities have dealt with rapid urbanisation and economic growth by employing master planning initiatives that seek to protect the environment, while allowing for sustainable growth in terms of the city’s landuse and its infrastructure

An Overview of Demand Response : From its Origins to the Smart Energy Community

The need to improve power system performance, enhance reliability, and reduce environmental effects, as well as advances in communication infrastructures, have led to demand response (DR) becoming an essential part of smart grid operation. DR can provide power system operators with a range of flexible resources through different schemes. From the operational decision-making viewpoint, in practice, each scheme can affect the system performance differently. Therefore, categorizing different DR schemes based on their potential impacts on the power grid, operational targets, and economic incentives can embed a pragmatic and practical perspective into the selection approach. In order to provide such insights, this paper presents an extensive review of DR programs. A goal-oriented classification based on the type of market, reliability, power flexibility and the participants’ economic motivation is proposed for DR programs. The benefits and barriers based on new classes are presented. Every involved party, including the power system operator and participants, can utilize the proposed classification to select an appropriate plan in the DR-related ancillary service ecosystem. The various enabling technologies and practical strategies for the application of DR schemes in various sectors are reviewed. Following this, changes in the procedure of DR schemes in the smart community concept are studied. Finally, the direction of future research and development in DR is discussed and analyzed.© 2021 IEEE. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. For more information, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed

Supply Chain Disruptors and their Impact on the Future of Manufacturing, Logistics, and Distribution

In this paper, we outline some of the changes occurring in the world and how businesses are adapting to these changes. We also list disruptors – factors or new ideas that disrupt the status quo – and their impact on manufacturing, supply chain, logistics, and distribution

Rescaling climate justice: sub-national issues and innovations for low carbon futures

Climate justice is emerging as a discourse for mobilising activism around the globe. The language of justice is less explicit as a policy principle despite long standing attention to negotiating responsibilities for causing climate changes and bearing costs related to reducing climate change emissions. Nevertheless there are significant justice issues in terms of how mitigation and adaptation will have differential impacts for people in different places. Even where responsibility and equity negotiations have taken place they have tended to occur at the nation state scale through global institutions and events. However, justice implications of climate change are much more socially and geographically variegated than this would suggest. This paper will examine the arena of beyond-national climate justice issues and actions specifically highlighting the range of beyond-national innovations that seek just transitions to low carbon futures. It will examine the regulatory conditions for supporting such initiatives and relate these findings to the current Irish rhetorical commitment to a green economy.Climate, justice, Ireland, NGOs

BRICS Cities: Facts & Analysis 2016

BRICS Cities: Facts & Analysis is a compendium of research produced through a partnership between the South African Cities Network (SACN) and the South African Research Chair in Spatial Analysis and City Planning (SA&CP) in the School of Architecture and Planning at the University of the Witwatersrand. It presents key general and thematic descriptive and comparative information about urban growth and development in the five BRICS states: Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. The comparative analysis includes a section relating to cities in Africa, while the detailed Factsheets cover thirty-one of the largest BRICS cities. BRICS Cities provides a first-of-its-kind research base to inform ongoing sub-national BRICS research and policy consideration. Recent reports on urbanization point out that over the next 20-30 years, almost all of the expected growth in the world population will be concentrated in the urban areas of the less developed countries of which a significant 42% will occur in cities in BRICS countries. Despite the fact that the distribution of the urbanization figures will be highly unequal between the different countries, considering the currently high levels of urbanization in Russia and Brazil and the extremely low levels (just over 35%) in India, the realities of large scale urbanization can and no doubt will have substantial impacts on the material conditions of urban life, governance, service provision, social relations and the environment. There has also been, and will continue to be, the expansion of networks of all kinds far beyond designated urban boundaries. In some cases, these challenges and the expanding boundaries have been met with additional layers of government, innovations in policy-making, and the reconfiguring of relationships between urban actors. However little is known in a comparative sense around some of the most important sites and cities in the BRICS countries , and insufficient research has been undertaken to learn from the differences that have been identified. The SACN and SA&CP, in line with our mutual interest around the nature and shape of urbanization and urban processes in South Africa and in BRICS countries, have developed a compendium of comparable information around key cities in the BRICS countries. BRICS Cities will serve as a useful reference of important base line information but also offers comment on the state of key areas of shared concern: innovation-driven economies, transport and mobility, and green energy. Furthermore, the publication provides a careful analysis of these factors in a comparative and relational framing.AA2017https://www.wits.ac.za/archplan/research-entities/spatial-analysis-and-city-planning/featured-projects/brics-fact-sheet-book

Agent-Based Simulation for Evaluating the Effect of Different Walking and Driving Speed on Disaster Evacuation in Aceh

Agent-Based Modeling and Simulation (ABMS) was implemented to build and develop an evacuation simulation model. In this research, ABMS is simulated in several evacuation scenarios with an output: the evacuation rate of two different decision choice evacuation modes (walking or driving to the evacuation points). The result of this tsunami evacuation simulation shows that the decision choices on the evacuation mode are highly correlated to the evacuation rate. Observed in the simulation that there is a typical choice that leads to the higher evacuation rate, the choice is by maximizing the pedestrian agents on the population distribution