Fresh Water and Smarter Growth: Restoring Healthy Land-water Connections

The paper describes water resources in the United States, discusses the principles of the land-water connection, outlines the current regulatory framework, and explains the impact of climate change. It also introduces the concept of low impact development while providing examples, and highlights how funders are having an impact on sustainable water management. With bibliographical references

Sustainable Glasgow

The Sustainable Glasgow Initiative aims to help Glasgow become one of Europe’s most sustainable cities. For Glasgow sustainability means achieving a mix of objectives – reducing carbon – but also achieving urban regeneration; delivering jobs and training; helping change the city’s image; regenerating communities, and tackling fuel poverty

The inhabited environment, infrastructure development and advanced urbanization in China's Yangtze River Delta Region

This paper analyzes the relationship among the inhabited environment, infrastructure development and environmental impacts in China's heavily urbanized Yangtze River Delta region. Using primary human environment data for the period 2006-2014, we examine factors affecting the inhabited environment and infrastructure development: urban population, GDP, built-up area, energy consumption, waste emission, transportation, real estate and urban greenery. Then we empirically investigate the impact of advanced urbanization with consideration of cities' differences. Results from this study show that the growth rate of the inhabited environment and infrastructure development is strongly influenced by regional development structure, functional orientations, traffic network and urban size and form. The effect of advanced urbanization is more significant in large and mid-size cities than huge and mega cities. Energy consumption, waste emission and real estate in large and mid-size cities developed at an unprecedented rate with the rapid increase of economy. However, urban development of huge and mega cities gradually tended to be saturated. The transition development in these cities improved the inhabited environment and ecological protection instead of the urban construction simply. To maintain a sustainable advanced urbanization process, policy implications included urban sprawl control polices, ecological development mechanisms and reforming the economic structure for huge and mega cities, and construct major cross-regional infrastructure, enhance the carrying capacity and improvement of energy efficiency and structure for large and mid-size cities

Seeing the invisible: from imagined to virtual urban landscapes

Urban ecosystems consist of infrastructure features working together to provide services for inhabitants. Infrastructure functions akin to an ecosystem, having dynamic relationships and interdependencies. However, with age, urban infrastructure can deteriorate and stop functioning. Additional pressures on infrastructure include urbanizing populations and a changing climate that exposes vulnerabilities. To manage the urban infrastructure ecosystem in a modernizing world, urban planners need to integrate a coordinated management plan for these co-located and dependent infrastructure features. To implement such a management practice, an improved method for communicating how these infrastructure features interact is needed. This study aims to define urban infrastructure as a system, identify the systematic barriers preventing implementation of a more coordinated management model, and develop a virtual reality tool to provide visualization of the spatial system dynamics of urban infrastructure. Data was collected from a stakeholder workshop that highlighted a lack of appreciation for the system dynamics of urban infrastructure. An urban ecology VR model was created to highlight the interconnectedness of infrastructure features. VR proved to be useful for communicating spatial information to urban stakeholders about the complexities of infrastructure ecology and the interactions between infrastructure features.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2019.102559Published versio

Public entities driven robotic innovation in urban areas

Cities present new challenges and needs to satisfy and improve lifestyle for their citizens under the concept “Smart City”. In order to achieve this goal in a global manner, new technologies are required as the robotic one. But Public entities unknown the possibilities offered by this technology to get solutions to their needs. In this paper the development of the Innovative Public Procurement instruments is explained, specifically the process PDTI (Public end Users Driven Technological Innovation) as a driving force of robotic research and development and offering a list of robotic urban challenges proposed by European cities that have participated in such a process. In the next phases of the procedure, this fact will provide novel robotic solutions addressed to public demand that are an example to be followed by other Smart Cities.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Launching the Grand Challenges for Ocean Conservation

The ten most pressing Grand Challenges in Oceans Conservation were identified at the Oceans Big Think and described in a detailed working document:A Blue Revolution for Oceans: Reengineering Aquaculture for SustainabilityEnding and Recovering from Marine DebrisTransparency and Traceability from Sea to Shore:  Ending OverfishingProtecting Critical Ocean Habitats: New Tools for Marine ProtectionEngineering Ecological Resilience in Near Shore and Coastal AreasReducing the Ecological Footprint of Fishing through Smarter GearArresting the Alien Invasion: Combating Invasive SpeciesCombatting the Effects of Ocean AcidificationEnding Marine Wildlife TraffickingReviving Dead Zones: Combating Ocean Deoxygenation and Nutrient Runof

Integrative Review of Decentralized and Local Water Management Concepts as Part of Smart Cities (LoWaSmart)

An evidence-based assessment of decentralized and local water management concepts and how they relate to smart city concepts is presented. Decentralized water management is based on the principle of integrated water cycle management and water-sensitive urban design. A “smart city” is generally defined as a city seeking to address public issues via information and communication technology (ICT)-based solutions on the basis of a multi-stakeholder, municipally based partnership. Using evidence-based review principles it is shown that when ICT is applied to water management in cities, it enables the collection of data for better understanding of how a city functions and to improve it to the benefits of its inhabitants and the environment.CIENS / KL

An Observatory Framework for Metropolitan Change: Understanding Urban Social-Ecological-Technical Systems in Texas and Beyond

In Texas and elsewhere, the looming realities of rapid population growth and intensifying effects of climate change mean that the things we rely on to live—water, energy, dependable infrastructure, social cohesion, and an ecosystem to support them—are exposed to unprecedented risk. Limited resources will be in ever greater demand and the environmental stress from prolonged droughts, record-breaking heat waves, and destructive floods will increase. Existing long-term trends and behaviors will not be sustainable. That is our current trajectory, but we can still change course. Significant advances in information communication technologies and big data, combined with new frameworks for thinking about urban places as social–ecological–technical systems, and an increasing movement towards transdisciplinary scholarship and practice sets the foundation and framework for a metropolitan observatory. Yet, more is required than an infrastructure for data. Making cities inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable will require that data become actionable knowledge that change policy and practice. Research and development of urban sustainability and resilience knowledge is burgeoning, yet the uptake to policy has been slow. An integrative and holistic approach is necessary to develop e ective sustainability science that synthesizes different sources of knowledge, relevant disciplines, multi-sectoral alliances, and connections to policy-makers and the public. To address these challenges and opportunities, we developed a conceptual framework for a “metropolitan observatory” to generate standardized long-term, large-scale datasets about social, ecological, and technical dimensions of metropolitan systems. We apply this conceptual model in Texas, known as the Texas Metro Observatory, to advance strategic research and decision-making at the intersection of urbanization and climate change. The Texas Metro Observatory project is part of Planet Texas 2050, a University of Texas Austin grand challenge initiative.ArchitectureOffice of the VP for Researc

Life cycle thinking and machine learning for urban metabolism assessment and prediction

The real-world urban systems represent nonlinear, dynamical, and interconnected urban processes that require better management of their complexity. Thereby, we need to understand, measure, and assess the structure and functioning of the urban processes. We propose an innovative and novel evidence-based methodology to manage the complexity of urban processes, that can enhance their resilience as part of the concept of smart and regenerative urban metabolism with the overarching intention to better achieve sustainability. We couple Life Cycle Thinking and Machine Learning to measure and assess the metabolic processes of the urban core of Lisbon’s functional urban area using multidimensional indicators and measures incorporating urban ecosystem services dynamics. We built and trained a multilayer perceptron (MLP) network to identify the metabolic drivers and predict the metabolic changes for the near future (2025). The prediction model’s performance was validated using the standard deviations of the prediction errors of the data subsets and the network’s training graph. The simulated results show that the urban processes related to employment and unemployment rates (17%), energy systems (10%), sewage and waste management/treatment/recycling, demography & migration, hard/soft cultural assets, and air pollution (7%), education and training, welfare, cultural participation, and habitatecosystems (5%), urban safety, water systems, economy, housing quality, urban void, urban fabric, and health services and infrastructure (2%), consists the salient drivers for the urban metabolic changes. The proposed research framework acts as a knowledge-based tool to support effective urban metabolism policies ensuring sustainable and resilient urban development.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio