ABSTRACT
Half of the world's population lives in cities, where usually there are few little green space and there are also high levels of air pollution. Moreover, the traditional urbanization of cities contributes to climate change, promotes the loss of global biodiversity and induces serious health problems for citizens. Both climate change and the loss of biodiversity affect negatively to the ecosystems and therefore human health, as they are responsible for providing clean air, food, fresh water, medicines, renewable resources. . . This deterioration increases significantly the risk of human-borne infectious diseases such as coronavirus or HIV. The ability we have to re-naturalize anthropogenic spaces and learn to generate spaces for coexistence will be key for the future of our society. The research presented in this paper aims to do a step forward to achieve that ability by working in three schools of the city of Barcelona and their surroundings. Among other actions, in this project, a diagnosis of neighborhood has been carried out. The diagnosis includes the identification and quantification of relevant indicators regarding neighborhood's biodiversity and also the quality of daily life and the analysis of pollutants (NO2 and PM10) near the schools during the 2021-2022 school year. All these information has been merged in a single geographic data base and relevant hotspots where to act have been identified. The information has been shared with city council and citizens. Copyright © 2023 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda.
ABSTRACT
Landscape architecture has been one of the great contributions of the Modern Movement, both in spatial and aesthetic terms and in terms of its social commitment, which substantially improved the quality of urban life. Today, much of this heritage is affected by the passage of time or requires adaptation to profound contextual changes. In addition, the global health crisis provoked by COVID 19 exposed conflicts - overdensity, social inequality, lack of community spaces - that reposition public space as one of the priority issues on the urban agenda. In this context, schools of architecture find in the re-use of modern public space an opportunity to integrate in their didactic strategies essential themes of our time: the social, cultural and environmental dimension. However, academic programmes are more focused on the artistic and technical education of the architect and have some resistance to integrate these themes. Instead, concepts and tools such as social participation, gender perspective, intersectional and intercultural approaches, collective memory, nature-based solutions, among others, allow transcending the production of objects to design human and healthy spaces with a true sense of inclusion, equity, diversity and innovation. In this sense, this paper proposes a common pedagogical programme that addresses the potential of integrating the open space produced according to Modern Movement principles into an inclusive public space that takes in consideration the contemporary urban challenges. Combining perspectives and knowledge from the north and south, this educational network is based on didactic and research projects developed in Europe (Coimbra, Portugal) and South America (Buenos Aires, Argentina and Campinas, Brazil). © Design: Social Commitment and Quality of Life, Proceedings.All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
Urban open spaces are all the spaces of common use, fully accessible and enjoyable by all, at no cost and without a profit motive. They are present in our contemporary cities in various forms, including parks, boulevards, sidewalks, pathways, play areas, and also as spaces between buildings or roadsides, all of them are significant spaces for a renewed idea of commons. Due to the Coronavirus pandemic, in this post-2020, we experienced the real need to get open spaces next to our houses, often by spontaneously recovering (or re-inventing) several minor (and in many cases marginal and neglected) small and micro places. Also, the conventional uses of those spaces have been re-interpreted by giving them new values and meanings in terms of functions and features. The aim of the Tirana Next Pilot Project (TNPP) is to imagine a new-normal city where public space goes beyond the traditional concepts of a park, a square or a street, leading to a new vision in thinking about new city-forming scenarios which can promote social exchange even within the eventual need of social distancing (spatial dimension) and shortening paths (time dimension) for any daily needs. TNPProject contains a diagnosis of the Capital City, and the greatest city of Albania, Tirana, in the past and actual conditions and through the in-force Master Plan “Tirana 030” vision. Across diverse pilot proposals, within the neighbourhoods of Tirana (Super-Blocks), the researchers want to explore the embodied experience of open spaces and the changing relations between them and the surrounding humanity and spatiality.The pilot cases are researched and analyzed by considering the physical space (hard-scape), the social life on the streets (soft-scape), the human interaction (human-scape), the virtualization process in addition to the conventional physical one (digital-scape), and the processes framework (network-scape). By investigating and analyzing the links between these elements it is expected that this research work might provide a set of practical recommendations and suggestions, pilot-cases based, for a more suitable systemic-punctual urban regeneration in the favor of Tirana neighbourhoods’ quality of life, even “beyond” the in-force city planning formal process. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
ABSTRACT
In this review article, we intend to initiate a discussion on the possibilities of implementing the 15-minute city concept (FMC) in Slovak cities. Our research motivation is the relatively high potential of the idea to contribute to solving current problems of sustainable urban development to strengthen cities' resilience. It is not only about coping with the impacts of the COVID 19 pandemic but also about the need for synergy of mitigation and adaptation measures in the context of climate change and the transition to a low- to the zero-carbon development paradigm. Last but not least, it can be pointed out that the 15-minute city model will also contribute to reducing inequalities between different parts of cities, which is one of the consequences of poorly regulated suburbanization processes. The paper is structured in several parts. In the introductory section, we look for common features of the concept and its theoretical framework within various traditions and paradigms of geographical thought. We then analyse its basic functions and dimensions that are considered when planning this concept in the current conditions of urban life. We also address specific applications in world metropolises while pointing out that the concept is not rigid and can still be adapted to local natural, historical, socio-economic conditions and intraurban structures. In the last section, we present the first examples of implementing the 15-minute city ideas in Slovak cities.
ABSTRACT
The pandemic of COVID-19 has caused severe disruptions in urban lives. Understanding and quantifying these disruptions is important to inform the development of targeted and effective measures to control the pandemic and its impact. One way of achieving this object is to measure the urban mobility perturbation caused by the pandemic. In this study, we built mobility-based networks for seven major metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) across the United States in the years of 2019 and 2020, respectively. We quantified the disruptions of urban mobility by computing and comparing a set of network-based metrics before and during the pandemic. The proposed approach is able to uncover the impact of COVID-19 in cities and provides new insights into the resilience of cities when facing large-scale disasters. © 2021 Computing in Civil Engineering 2021 - Selected Papers from the ASCE International Conference on Computing in Civil Engineering 2021. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
The tall building, the city, and by extension, urban life, are all facing unprecedented challenges, in multiple aspects—carbon, climate, and societal. The planet’s rapid urbanization and climate crisis are on a collision course, requiring huge corrections in the way we build and the resources we use. There are many ways forward for sustainable vertical urbanism, as seen through dozens of optimal examples. But as we have learned from the resilience of cities through other calamities, such as 9/11, weather events, and the COVID-19 pandemic, within these challenges lie tremendous opportunities. The great question is, do we as a planet have the collective political will to implement the best practices we identify?. © 2021, Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 outbreak that appeared in China in December 2019 spread to the entire world within a short period of time. Together with the COVID-19 outbreak, social lives in cities are being suspended, travels within and outside the countries are being restricted, movements of certain age groups and individuals with chronic diseases are being restricted, partial or complete curfews are being imposed, education in schools are being interrupted, working hours are being made flexible, or the model of working from home is preferred. Culture, art and sports activities are being suspended and production in factories is interrupted. All these negative occurrences are deeply affecting cities. In the frame of this study, the effects of the COVID-19 outbreak will be examined under four headlines, namely, the cultural and psychosocial, economic, architectural, and design, and technology. Staying at home for long periods of time and being unable to socialize in urban locations can have permanent effects on human psychology. The uncertainty caused by the outbreak, death anxiety, and losing loved ones are not psychological problems that can be coped with easily. The measures taken and bans brought are forcing cities to “suspend the urban life.” As regards the economy, the COVID-19 outbreak has created damages that are more permanent than those created by the 2nd World War. The outbreak is making the operation of economic functions that cities have throughout the history. The COVID-19 outbreak will result in some changes in city planning and home designs. While working from home has become important, the question of how suitable are houses for working from home still waiting to be answered. The obligation of social distance and the instantaneous data flow required by the outbreak gives way to new techno-solutions in the urban space. © Peter Lang GmbH Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften Berlin 2021.
ABSTRACT
Big data on the urban scale can enable many applications for improving city life and provide a more holistic understanding of urban life to researchers. While there are approaches to sense and model urban occupant behaviors using sound, radio frequency, and vision, how such behaviors are altered due to city governance and policies in response to emergencies such as a natural disaster or a public health crisis has been less explored. In this paper, we present a computer vision-based approach to capture patterns and interference in the urban life of New York City dwellers from March 2020 to August 2020. Using ∼1 million images gathered with cameras mounted on ride-sharing vehicles throughout the city, we approximated the social proximity of pedestrians to understand policy compliance on the street. Our analysis reveals a correlation between policy violation and virus transmission. We believe that such big data-driven city-scale citizen modeling can inform policy design and crisis management schemes for urban scale smart infrastructure. © 2021 ACM.