Strategies for China's Historic Districts Regeneration in Responding to Public Health Emergencies

Most of China's historic districts are located in urban centers with excessive building density and possess rich historical, cultural, scientific and aesthetic value. However, historic districts lack infrastructure and specific plans for emergency response compared to modern residential areas in cities, creating a social inequity trap for the residents in both. In addition, as valuable material cultural heritage, the usual conservation of local culture and the ecological environment conflict with anti-epidemic requirements. This study proposes a system of strategies for responding to public health emergencies that can address the above issues. Through the methods of policy refinement and the application of the concept of normal and disaster time conversion, the strategic system was constructed, including five major aspects: emergency preparedness programs at the planning level, installation of modulized variable devices, environmentally friendly health protection, disaster prevention preparation at the spatial level, and plant configuration. It is beneficial to improve the disaster prevention system for special urban communities and provide a reference for emergency planning in the future regeneration process of historic districts.

An Interannual Transfer Learning Approach for Crop Classification in the Hetao Irrigation District, China

Crop type classification is critical for crop production estimation and optimal water allocation. Crop type data are challenging to generate if crop reference data are lacking, especially for target years with reference data missed in collection. Is it possible to transfer a trained crop type classification model to retrace the historical spatial distribution of crop types? Taking the Hetao Irrigation District (HID) in China as the study area, this study first designed a 10 m crop type classification framework based on the Google Earth Engine (GEE) for crop type mapping in the current season. Then, its interannual transferability to accurately retrace historical crop distributions was tested. The framework used Sentinel-1/2 data as the satellite data source, combined percentile, and monthly composite approaches to generate classification metrics and employed a random forest classifier with 300 trees for crop classification. Based on the proposed framework, this study first developed a 10 m crop type map of the HID for 2020 with an overall accuracy (OA) of 0.89 and then obtained a 10 m crop type map of the HID for 2019 with an OA of 0.92 by transferring the trained model for 2020 without crop reference samples. The results indicated that the designed framework could effectively identify HID crop types and have good transferability to obtain historical crop type data with acceptable accuracy. Our results found that SWIR1, Green, and Red Edge2 were the top three reflectance bands for crop classification. The land surface water index (LSWI), normalized difference water index (NDWI), and enhanced vegetation index (EVI) were the top three vegetation indices for crop classification. April to August was the most suitable time window for crop type classification in the HID. Sentinel-1 information played a positive role in the interannual transfer of the trained model, increasing the OA from 90.73% with Sentinel 2 alone to 91.58% with Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 together.

Rome’s GRAB—Great Bicycle Ring Route—As Complex Landscape Infrastructure

This paper aims to describe the design strategy adopted in Rome to support and enhance sustainable mobility. It is a strategy aimed at promoting new green infrastructures for urban accessibility, daily sports practice and social inclusion in a historic city, stratified and not very inclined to change. Therefore, the dissemination of this experience is useful for planning a sustainable future for heritage cities that ensures an appropriate and equitable balance between conservation and development. Sustainable mobility is now considered one of the most important challenges for metropolitan areas and large conurbations. In these terms, Rome is a weak city. The city’s great bicycle ring route (GRAB), an integral part of the Extraordinary Tourism Mobility Plan 2017-22, is a key infrastructure for increasing more sustainable and healthier modes of travel, even on a local scale. The GRAB project, whose complex infrastructure provides multiple services, differs from a simple cycle path network. Its complexity refers to an ability to attract different types of users in different types of urban contexts—historical settings, monuments, newer neighborhoods and areas of contemporary urbanization. The project results can be measured first in relation to its progress (already funded, in the executive planning phase, with the approval of the first construction sites expected by 2022). A second important result is the participation of institutional bodies and citizens’ associations, which will oversee the construction and maintenance work as well as infuse into the project a constant vitality, in a true civic ecology perspective. Third, the results are important for enhancing metropolitan area accessibility and the environmental and social re-activation of the areas crossed, achieved directly and through the project’s realization. The GRAB strategy belongs to the new generation of landscape projects that have radically changed the priorities and hierarchies of intervention in the contexts of contemporary urbanization. These projects are based on the ecological analysis of the context but are located close to the fluctuating dynamics of contemporary metropolises and the problems of exclusion and marginality—both spatial and social—linked to the very rapid ecological, economic and demographic transformations.