Unraveling urban form and collision risk: The spatial distribution of traffic accidents in Zanjan, Iran

Official statistics demonstrate the role of traffic accidents in the increasing number of fa-talities, especially in emerging countries. In recent decades, the rate of deaths and injuries caused by traffic accidents in Iran, a rapidly growing economy in the Middle East, has risen significantly with respect to that of neighboring countries. The present study illustrates an exploratory spatial analysis’ framework aimed at identifying and ranking hazardous locations for traffic accidents in Zanjan, one of the most populous and dense cities in Iran. This framework quantifies the spatiotem-poral association among collisions, by comparing the results of different approaches (including Kernel Density Estimation (KDE), Natural Breaks Classification (NBC), and Knox test). Based on descriptive statistics, five distance classes (2–26, 27–57, 58–105, 106–192, and 193–364 meters) were tested when predicting location of the nearest collision within the same temporal unit. The empirical results of our work demonstrate that the largest roads and intersections in Zanjan had a significantly higher frequency of traffic accidents than the other locations. A comparative analysis of distance bandwidths indicates that the first (2–26 m) class concentrated the most intense level of spatiotem-poral association among traffic accidents. Prevention (or reduction) of traffic accidents may benefit from automatic identification and classification of the most risky locations in urban areas. Thanks to the larger availability of open-access datasets reporting the location and characteristics of car accidents in both advanced countries and emerging economies, our study demonstrates the potential of an integrated analysis of the level of spatiotemporal association in traffic collisions over metropolitan regions

Lost in Complexity, Found in Diversity: A Summary Look at the Social Geography of a Mediterranean City

The present work formulates a descriptive framework looking at the most evident socio-demographic dynamic characteristics of contemporary Mediterranean cities. It has been taken as a paradigmatic case of (changing) social geography of interest to analyse other regions with similar territorial features. An interpretation of social geography in Southern European cities is proposed according to local governance and economic structures, in the view to contain spatial disparities between urban and rural areas. Given the persistence of a deep crisis that affects the economy, institutions and social classes, a unifying interpretation of the development of different forms of expanding cities is reviewed and extensively discussed, introducing the specific case of Athens, Greece. This contribution concludes with a debate of development trajectories of future Mediterranean cities, outlining similarities and differences in the short term