The Yamanote Loop: Unifying Rail Transportation and Disaster Resilience in Tokyo

As climate change and population growth persist, and as the world rapidly urbanizes, major cities across the globe will face unprecedented strains. The risk of devastating impact from natural disasters increases in areas with a growing concentration of people. Megacities in Asia are the most at-risk of natural disasters, given their geographic location and high population density. With the highest projected population growth in the world, Asian cities must quickly expand and adapt their existing infrastructure to accommodate the transforming global conditions. A remarkable anomaly amongst Asian megacities, Tokyo, Japan is effectively adapting to its earthquake-prone environment. Within the last century, Japan has implemented seismically reinforced buildings and educational resources for earthquake preparedness. Amongst other technological innovations, investments in railway transportation have permitted major cities like Tokyo to expand and adjust according to its changing needs. The Yamanote Line is the primary commuter rail line in Tokyo. Its antecedent originated in 1885 and has since undergone significant changes to evolve into the highly sophisticated system it is today. By examining the evolvement of the Yamanote line from its conception and into the 21st century, this study explores the correlation between local rail transportation networks and their city’s resilience to natural disasters. A descriptive analysis aligned with four constructs of transportation resilience—robustness, redundancy, resourcefulness, and rapidity—observes instances in which the Yamanote line potentially strengthens Tokyo’s comprehensive disaster preparedness. The following study intentionally circumvents normative-prescriptive conclusions and focuses primarily on the impact of transformations of railway transportation on its broader urban context over time respective to disaster resilience and with consideration of other relative factors

How to monitor sustainable mobility in cities? Literature review in the frame of creating a set of sustainable mobility indicators

The role of sustainable mobility and its impact on society and the environment is evident and recognized worldwide. Nevertheless, although there is a growing number of measures and projects that deal with sustainable mobility issues, it is not so easy to compare their results and, so far, there is no globally applicable set of tools and indicators that ensure holistic evaluation and facilitate replicability of the best practices. In this paper, based on the extensive literature review, we give a systematic overview of relevant and scientifically sound indicators that cover different aspects of sustainable mobility that are applicable in different social and economic contexts around the world. Overall, 22 sustainable mobility indicators have been selected and an overview of the applied measures described across the literature review has been presented

Resilient planning for sporting mega-events: designing and managing safe and secure urban places for London 2012 and beyond

Since the 1960s both regeneration and security have been prominent themes in Olympic planning. However, this paper argues that the prominence given to post event 'legacies' in London's bid to host the 2012 Summer Games has fomented a merger of these hitherto distinct ambitions oriented around notions of 'resilience'. In addition to identifying this merger, based on analysis of planning for the 2012 Games the paper sets out its component features and considers a range of key implications. These include the accommodation of Olympic security amid shifting national security arrangements and, at a local level, the impact and importance of the 2011 London riots on Olympic safety and security processes. Organised over four areas of discussion - the first three comprising of the coupling of spatial strategies of resilient planning and design with concerns for security; the temporal framework of such approaches; analysis of the altered physical and institutional landscape of London ahead of the 2012 Olympic Games - the paper concludes by identifying and discussing the ways in which urban rejuvenation and securitisation which are increasingly being combined into resilient designs and master plans in the Olympic context and, crucially, standardised, exported and transferred to new urban hosts of similar events

European local authorities’ financial resilience in the face of austerity: a comparison across Austria, Italy and England

European local authorities have been particularly stricken by the current context of decline and cutback management, and represent an ideal place where to study how governments respond to shocks affecting their financial conditions and management. Along these lines, this paper adopt the perspective of financial resilience for looking at the current context of austerity, and related responses, by shedding new lights on the role of internal capacities and conditions in influencing such responses and, ultimately, performance. Through a multiple case study analysis based on 12 European local authorities in Austria, Italy and England, the paper identifies the main shocks perceived by local management, the related short-term and long-term responses, highlighting the dynamics of financial vulnerabilty, awareness, anticipatory capacity, flexibility and recovery ability (ie, financial resilience) in its interaction with the external context and shocks. From the analysis, four patterns of resilience emerge: pro-active resilience, adaptive resilience, passive/fatalist resilience, complacent resilience

Modeling the polycentric transition of cities

Empirical evidence suggest that most urban systems experience a transition from a monocentric to a polycentric organisation as they grow and expand. We propose here a stochastic, out-of-equilibrium model of the city which explains the appearance of subcenters as an effect of traffic congestion. We show that congestion triggers the unstability of the monocentric regime, and that the number of subcenters and the total commuting distance within a city scale sublinearly with its population, predictions which are in agreement with data gathered for around 9000 US cities between 1994 and 2010.Comment: 11 pages, 12 figure

Robustness and Closeness Centrality for Self-Organized and Planned Cities

Street networks are important infrastructural transportation systems that cover a great part of the planet. It is now widely accepted that transportation properties of street networks are better understood in the interplay between the street network itself and the so called \textit{information} or \textit{dual network}, which embeds the topology of the street network navigation system. In this work, we present a novel robustness analysis, based on the interaction between the primal and the dual transportation layer for two large metropolis, London and Chicago, thus considering the structural differences to intentional attacks for \textit{self-organized} and planned cities. We elaborate the results through an accurate closeness centrality analysis in the Euclidean space and in the relationship between primal and dual space. Interestingly enough, we find that even if the considered planar graphs display very distinct properties, the information space induce them to converge toward systems which are similar in terms of transportation properties