COLORADO'S URBAN EXTENSION PILOT PROGRAM

Teaching/Communication/Extension/Profession,

Mapping and assessment of ecosystems and their services. Urban ecosystems

Action 5 of the EU Biodiversity Strategy to 2020 requires member states to Map and Assess the state of Ecosystems and their Services (MAES). This report provides guidance for mapping and assessment of urban ecosystems. The MAES urban pilot is a collaboration between the European Commission, the European Environment Agency, volunteering Member States and cities, and stakeholders. Its ultimate goal is to deliver a knowledge base for policy and management of urban ecosystems by analysing urban green infrastructure, condition of urban ecosystems and ecosystem services. This report presents guidance for mapping urban ecosystems and includes an indicator framework to assess the condition of urban ecosystems and urban ecosystem services. The scientific framework of mapping and assessment is designed to support in particular urban planning policy and policy on green infrastructure at urban, metropolitan and regional scales. The results are based on the following different sources of information: a literature survey of 54 scientific articles, an online-survey (on urban ecosystems, related policies and planning instruments and with participation of 42 cities), ten case studies (Portugal: Cascais, Oeiras, Lisbon; Italy: Padua, Trento, Rome; The Netherlands: Utrecht; Poland: Poznań; Spain: Barcelona; Norway: Oslo), and a two-day expert workshop. The case studies constituted the core of the MAES urban pilot. They provided real examples and applications of how mapping and assessment can be organized to support policy; on top, they provided the necessary expertise to select a set of final indicators for condition and ecosystem services. Urban ecosystems or cities are defined here as socio-ecological systems which are composed of green infrastructure and built infrastructure. Urban green infrastructure (GI) is understood in this report as the multi-functional network of urban green spaces situated within the boundary of the urban ecosystem. Urban green spaces are the structural components of urban GI. This study has shown that there is a large scope for urban ecosystem assessments. Firstly, urban policies increasingly use urban green infrastructure and nature-based solutions in their planning process. Secondly, an increasing amount of data at multiple spatial scales is becoming available to support these policies, to provide a baseline, and to compare or benchmark cities with respect to the extent and management of the urban ecosystem. Concrete examples are given on how to delineate urban ecosystems, how to choose an appropriate spatial scale, and how to map urban ecosystems based on a combination of national or European datasets (including Urban Atlas) and locally collected information (e.g., location of trees). Also examples of typologies for urban green spaces are presented. This report presents an indicator framework which is composed of indicators to assess for urban ecosystem condition and for urban ecosystem services. These are the result of a rigorous selection process and ensure consistent mapping and assessment across Europe. The MAES urban pilot will continue with work on the interface between research and policy. The framework presented in this report needs to be tested and validated across Europe, e.g. on its applicability at city scale, on how far the methodology for measuring ecosystem condition and ecosystem service delivery in urban areas can be used to assess urban green infrastructure and nature-based solutions

The effects of new urbanization pilot city policies on urban innovation: Evidence from China

The new urbanization city pilot policy is China’s most recent policy on urban urbanization. This paper uses new urbanization pilot policies as a quasi-natural experiment to empirically test the impact of new urbanization pilot policies on urban innovation through the difference-in-differences (DID) method using panel data from 199 cities in China from 2011 to 2019. The results show that: (1) The new urbanization city pilot policy has significantly enhanced urban innovation. (2) The theoretical mechanism test shows that the pilot policy of new urbanization promotes urban innovation through the level of human capital. (3) The results of the heterogeneity analysis show that the new urbanization pilot policies have obvious city-level heterogeneity and regional heterogeneity on the improvement of urban innovation levels. The impact effect of new urbanization pilot policies is higher in first-tier and second-tier cities than in fourth-tier and fifth-tier cities; the effect of new urbanization pilot policies is higher in western regions than in eastern and middle regions.National Natural Science Foundation of Chin

Grassroots Agency: Participation and Conflict in Buenos Aires Shantytowns seen through the Pilot Plan for Villa 7 (1971–1975)

open access articleIn 1971, after more than a decade of national and municipal policies aimed at the top-down removal of shantytowns, the Buenos Aires City Council approved the Plan Piloto para la Relocalización de Villa 7 (Pilot Plan for the Relocation of Shantytown 7; 1971–1975, referred to as the Pilot Plan hereinafter). This particular plan, which resulted in the construction of the housing complex, Barrio Justo Suárez, endures in the collective memory of Argentines as a landmark project regarding grassroots participation in state housing initiatives addressed at shantytowns. Emerging from a context of a housing shortage for the growing urban poor and intense popular mobilizations during the transition to democracy, the authors of the Pilot Plan sought to empower shantytown residents in novel ways by: 1) maintaining the shantytown’s location as opposed to eradication schemes that relocated the residents elsewhere, 2) formally employing some of the residents for the stage of construction, as opposed to “self-help” housing projects in which the residents contributed with unpaid labor, and 3) including them in the urban and architectural design of the of the new housing. This paper will examine the context in which the Pilot Plan was conceived of as a way of re-assessing the roles of the state, the user, and housing-related professionals, often seen as antagonistic. The paper argues that residents’ fair participation and state intervention in housing schemes are not necessarily incompatible, and can function in specific social and political contexts through multiactor proposals backed by a political will that prioritizes grassroots agency

Random Access Protocols for Massive MIMO

5G wireless networks are expected to support new services with stringent requirements on data rates, latency and reliability. One novel feature is the ability to serve a dense crowd of devices, calling for radically new ways of accessing the network. This is the case in machine-type communications, but also in urban environments and hotspots. In those use cases, the high number of devices and the relatively short channel coherence interval do not allow per-device allocation of orthogonal pilot sequences. This article motivates the need for random access by the devices to pilot sequences used for channel estimation, and shows that Massive MIMO is a main enabler to achieve fast access with high data rates, and delay-tolerant access with different data rate levels. Three pilot access protocols along with data transmission protocols are described, fulfilling different requirements of 5G services

Whether the Establishment of Pilot Free Trade Zones Improves Urban Carbon Emission Efficiency: An Analysis Based on Difference-in-Difference Model

Pilot free trade zones are the key to achieving green and sustainable economic development and promoting high-level protection of the ecological environment. Based on the panel data of 282 cities from 2006 to 2018, this paper uses the non-radial DDF model to measure the urban carbon emission efficiency based on the establishment of pilot free trade zones, and establishes a double differential model to empirically analyze the impact of the establishment of pilot free trade zones on urban carbon emission efficiency and the impact mechanism therein. The results show that the establishment of pilot free trade zones can significantly promote the improvement of urban carbon emission efficiency, and this conclusion is still valid after a series of robustness tests such as PSM-DID and excluding other policy interference. Its mechanism analysis shows that the establishment of pilot free trade zones mainly affects urban carbon emission efficiency by improving urban energy efficiency and technical level, and promoting the optimization and upgrading of urban industrial structure. This paper provides useful policy enlightenment for promoting the green development of pilot free trade zones, achieving economic efficiency improvement and carbon emission reduction

A Random Access Protocol for Pilot Allocation in Crowded Massive MIMO Systems

The Massive MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output) technology has great potential to manage the rapid growth of wireless data traffic. Massive MIMO achieves tremendous spectral efficiency by spatial multiplexing of many tens of user equipments (UEs). These gains are only achieved in practice if many more UEs can connect efficiently to the network than today. As the number of UEs increases, while each UE intermittently accesses the network, the random access functionality becomes essential to share the limited number of pilots among the UEs. In this paper, we revisit the random access problem in the Massive MIMO context and develop a reengineered protocol, termed strongest-user collision resolution (SUCRe). An accessing UE asks for a dedicated pilot by sending an uncoordinated random access pilot, with a risk that other UEs send the same pilot. The favorable propagation of Massive MIMO channels is utilized to enable distributed collision detection at each UE, thereby determining the strength of the contenders' signals and deciding to repeat the pilot if the UE judges that its signal at the receiver is the strongest. The SUCRe protocol resolves the vast majority of all pilot collisions in crowded urban scenarios and continues to admit UEs efficiently in overloaded networks.Comment: To appear in IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, 16 pages, 10 figures. This is reproducible research with simulation code available at https://github.com/emilbjornson/sucre-protoco

Virtual reality urban modelling - an overview

This paper offers an overview of the increasing use of Virtual Reality (VR) technologies for the simulation of urban environments. It provides a summary of cities worldwide where three-dimensional computer modelling is being utilised to aid urban planning. The study considers the need for a digital representation of cities and raises issues pertaining to advantages, barriers and ownership. A case study of a pilot project on the visualisation of Newcastle upon Tyne is examined to show an approach adopted for the representation of this city in North East England. The process of this visualisation is summarised and future research is outlined in relation to this city model

California four cities program, 1971 - 1973

A pilot project in aerospace-to-urban technology application is reported. Companies assigned senior engineering professionals to serve as Science and Technology Advisors to participating city governments. Technical support was provided by the companies and JPL. The cities, Anaheim, Fresno, Pasadena, and San Hose, California, provided the working environment and general service support. Each city/company team developed and carried out one or more technical or management pilot projects together with a number of less formalized technology efforts and studies. An account and evaluation is provided of the initial two-year phase of the program

Pilot Survey – Queue Management Strategies for Urban Traffic Control Systems

BACKGROUND 1.1 Advances in traffic signal optimization have produced increases in the capacity of urban road networks, but recent growth in demand has meant that many junctions operate at or above saturation levels. Delay costs increase dramatically when queues extend to block upstream junctions and queue management strategies are now required to ensure that local traffic signals operate effectively when oversaturated conditions occur. 1.2 The aims of this SERC-funded "Queue Management Strategies" project are as follows: (a) To generalise the strategies for queue management that were developed and tested empirically in Bangkok (See ITS WP 249 and WP 251); (b) To develop a computer graphics model to represent queue propagation; (c) To test the strategies' applicability and performance in UK networks; (d) To investigate their incorporation into standard signal optimization programs