Simulating Future Societies in Isobenefit Cities

Environment, history and chance, shape people and cultures, which shape cities, which shape people and cultures, and so forth, in a Systemic Retroactive Game. The quintessential essence of Isotropic (or Isobenefit) Urbanism is to solve Systemic Retroactive Game problems downstream rather than upstream and, also, to give a beautiful city to everyone, rather than just to the richer. Spatial Equilibrium assumptions, Underground Hedonic Theory and Isobenefit Lines, are shortly reminded in order to have a better vision of the Isotropic approach. The Isotropic City is the habitat of a virtual future society that aspires to live in a city where each individual can enjoy an equal level of wellbeing and advantage from the urban quality, services and job location. It is shown by a few visionary examples of virtual future societies habitats such as the Ring City (a city without the ‘city centre’, where the ‘city centre’ is all around the peripherical ring, or in a series of rings), the Homogeneous City (a city where the ‘city centre’ is everywhere), the Annulus City (a city without any geometrical centre in the city) and the Punctiform City (an interconnected net of urban hyperdense ‘points’ throughout nature, parks and lands). Finally I will show some simulations on more realistic cases which could be of interest as support to urban and public policies in respect to a social well-being point of view as well as to urban theory such as urban economy (i.e., by the relation between an Isobenefit scenario and Property value), urban morphology (influence of different urban forms), urban sociology (how the different location of centralities and amenities give advantage for social life and wellbeing of citizens)

Mathematize urbes by humanizing them : cities as Isobenefit Landscapes

The city reading proposed is a modern-postmodern urbanism approach which quantifies but by passing through subjectivism. The isobenefit lines shown translate cities into benefit landscapes, subjective and continually changeable according to personal moods/needs/preferences and urban transformations. They read attractiveness and how they flow throughout the city. Doing it for each urban point and for each urban attraction, we obtain the isobenefit orography of the city, namely a map of its urban attractions and of their flows. This is a liquid surface rather than solid, as it varies across time and people. It is in this liquidness where resides the complexity of cities, their bottom-up spirit and the dynamicity of equilibriums and networks. People do not necessarily go in the most accessible points, but where they need and want to, and, they flow through paths they need or choose to pass through. It is also introduced the likeability of places and paths: in addition to the usual parameters currently used – which weight distances in terms of physical distance, cost, time or mental easiness representations – psycho- economical distances used in the isobenefit lines proposed here, also consider how a place and a path pleases us. According to the Underground Hedonic Theory, this pleasure to pass through or to stay in agreeable areas has an underground and an inertia effect too which contributes to delight our lives. The final purpose of the science of cities and urban design is to understand cities and make them efficient and attractive to please our lives in them

Hedonic inertia and underground happiness

The happiness of people is formulized by an Underground Hedonic Theory taking into account several levels. A formal way to think of and measure Underground happiness passes through the idea of Hedonic Inertia. This is the “residual happiness”, the “substratum of feeling” given by our experiences lived in each different moment of our days. The concept of happiness as the temporal integral of momentary utility is focused, pointing out the role that one or more events in our day can influence our mood throughout the entire day. We also refer to the underground happiness coming from our general situation (love, career, money, national politics, etc.), and from the underground scenario of our daily activities (urban beauty, noisiness, comfort, etc.). Finally we summarize the logical steps to design a certain Profile of Hedonic Response for a certain person, or personality typology, as a set of particular Curves of Hedonic Ponderation. This is also explained in a mathematical way by an “equation of happiness”

Monetary, Subjective and Quantitative Approaches to Assess Urban Quality of Life and Pleasantness in Cities

The magnitude increase of Urban Quality of Life studies is directly connected with the increase of the urban population in the world. Urban Quality of Life is a hierarchical multi-attribute concept whose attributes can be defined and evaluated by several kinds of methods such as Monetary (Hedonic Price, Willingness-to-pay, Cost-Benefit, Positional Value), Subjective (life satisfaction, subjective wellbeing, ranking/rating evaluation) and Quantitative (how many urban attractions there are in the city, and how they are distributed on its planimetry). As real examples of monetary approaches, 107 empirical literature results are briefly shown, quantifying the increase of property value in relation to urban factors such as green, open space, noise, public transport, pleasant view, etc. The result of a Willingness-to-Pay survey, and the definition of Positional Value are also shown; it is the part of property value coming from the characteristics of the area in which the property is. An analysis of Turin illustrated that the quality of the area (the Positional Value) can change the value of a property up to 143%. This value is, in a certain way, a monetary mirror of the quality of life of the areas. As a concrete example of subjective approaches two rating method surveys on Turin are rapidly exposed, as well as a recent subjective wellbeing study comparing the life satisfaction in cities and in the countryside. As quantitative approaches are proposed the concepts of Isobenefit Lines and the Isobenefit Orography, both from the spatial urban amenities distribution and quantity

A study of the impacts of variable factors on built environment graduates’ prospects

This paper investigates the impacts of variable factors, such as practical experience and factors related to study style, on employment outcomes and patterns of built environment graduates in Australia. This paper also compares the employment prospects of different built environment sub-disciplines, including Architecture, Construction, Real Estate and Urban Planning and Regional Studies. Practical experience and the possibility of work with final year employers after graduation were found to have a statistically significant impact on the employment outcomes for graduates of built environment and all of its sub-disciplines. However, degree level and type of university attended were not found to have a statistically significant impact. Attendance type and employment mode in the final year of study had a statistically significant impact on the employment patterns for graduates of built environment and all of its sub-disciplines. The graduates who studied part-time and worked full-time in their final year of study were more likely to secure full-time jobs after graduation. The findings of this paper can be used by built environment graduates to identify the variable factors which they can change in order to enhance their employment prospects

National Science Foundation Advisory Committee for Cyberinfrastructure Task Force on Campus Bridging Final Report

The mission of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Advisory Committee on Cyberinfrastructure (ACCI) is to advise the NSF as a whole on matters related to vision and strategy regarding cyberinfrastructure (CI). In early 2009 the ACCI charged six task forces with making recommendations to the NSF in strategic areas of cyberinfrastructure: Campus Bridging; Cyberlearning and Workforce Development; Data and Visualization; Grand Challenges; High Performance Computing (HPC); and Software for Science and Engineering. Each task force was asked to offer advice on the basis of which the NSF would modify existing programs and create new programs. This document is the final, overall report of the Task Force on Campus Bridging.National Science Foundatio

New type of cities for liveable futures

We need a conceptually different idea of cities which paradigmatically shifts their forms and structures toward more liveable future environments, both for us and our planet. The Isobenefit Urbanism is conceived within a medium-long term perspective mixing a macro top-down planning with a micro bottom-up spontaneous evolution in an attempt to moderate the human forces which typically induce agglomeration benefits and costs, maintaining the former while limiting the latter. It indicates a simple efficient urban genetic code to generate cities that are walkable, carless, low carbon, adaptive, connected, compact, multifunctional settlements throughout nature, with unplanned forms and unlimitedly extendible, in which one can feel both urbanity and nature. They are flexible cities and dynamically changeable. By holding constant the number of inhabitants of a usual city or megacity, its counterpart Isobenefit city would enjoy the same economies of scale benefits but without their costs. The Isobenefit Urbanism model might offer a potential solution to current issues of wild cementification, urban heat island effects, destruction of natural land and biodiversity, carbon emissions, congestions and related air pollution, as well as provide an urban model to host the enormous new urban inhabitants our world must accommodate in the next few decades. Its ultimate ambition is to enjoy the economies of agglomeration without incurring to the diseconomies of agglomeration, manifested by sublinear and superlinear outputs, typically infrastructural the former and socioeconomic the latter

On Urban Morphology and Mathematics

Cities are ultimately the results of human behaviour whose understanding might be reductive if solely framed within a strictly ‘mathematical’ confine1 . Human behaviour “is so complex and influenced by such a wide range of factors that any claim to provide precise, deterministic prediction is unrealistic” (Inglehart 2018, p. 10). But there is another side of the coin: quantification and mathematical modelling are means enabling us to discover partially predictable macro paths of our behaviours otherwise unreadable. Even if “not deterministic […,] some trajectories are more probable than others” (Inglehart 2018, p. 11): the mathematical language helps both in seeing these trajectories and in quantifying these probabilitie

DO GOVERNMENT EXPENDITURES AND TRADE DEFICITS AFFECT EACH OTHER IN THE SAME WAY? EVIDENCE FROM TURKEY

The purpose of this study is to determine the causality between trade deficits and government expenditure for the Turkish economy in different time horizons and in the case of different shock types between year 1987 and 2014. By doing so, we aim to understand whether the twin deficit hypothesis is valid in the Turkish economy or whether government expenditures have more ability to cause the movements of trade deficit. To do this, we employ asymmetric causality test developed by Hatemi-J (2012) and Hatemi-J and Roca (2014) and rolling windows causality test developed by Balcilar et al. (2010) methods. Results obtained from all tests imply that there is a bi-directional causality between variables. Different from other causality analysis, asymmetric causality analysis results indicate that an increase in government expenditures reduces trade deficit contrarily to existing literature. This means twin divergence hypothesis might be valid in the Turkish economy instead of twin deficit hypothesis