Topic Review Peer Reviewed
Social Aspects of Smart Urban Mobility
There is a growing interest in sustainable urban transport solutions in cities around the world. These changes, known as “smart urban mobility”, aim to reduce the negative effects of transport on the natural environment and enhance the standard of living for urban dwellers. It should be noted that in addition to this transformation’s technological aspects, modifying the city’s structure and architecture also has a social dimension. The transformation of urban mobility has a significant impact on social relations. Introducing new modes of transport, such as city bikes and electric scooters, creates new ways of moving around the city and can impact social interactions. This can increase social integration and a community’s sense of belonging. At the same time, it is necessary to consider the differences between social groups to ensure equal access to the benefits of these changes in addition to deeper social elements, such as changing the habits and expectations of residents and adapting solutions to the specific needs of each city. This paper aims to look at the social aspects of smart urban mobility, including the impact of these changes on the lives and relationships of city residents.
  • 474
  • 22 May 2024
Topic Review
Urban Agriculture in Today’s Sustainable Cities
Urban agriculture (UA) has become a commonly discussed topic in recent years with respect to sustainable development. Therefore, the combination of urban fabric and local food production is crucial for ecological reasons. The key issues are the reduction of food miles and the demand for processed food, the production of which strains the natural environment.
  • 465
  • 02 Feb 2023
Topic Review
Housing Resources and Mismatched Housing Needs in China
In today's China, almost 90% of households own their own home. At the same time, more than 20% of Chinese households own several properties, which is higher than in many developed countries. Only fifty years ago, China was recognized for its communist welfare-oriented housing system, which distributed public rental homes to urban residents centred around their work unit, which was the mechanism through which citizens accessed not only housing, but also education, care for preschool children, and eldercare, thus giving women, in particular, the opportunity to engage more fully in waged work. In 1998, the government proclaimed the end of state involvement in allocating housing and, in the short period since, China has shifted from a society dominated by public renters to one of the countries with the greatest rate of homeownership.
  • 451
  • 01 Dec 2021
Topic Review
Designing Collaborative Energy Communities
Renewable energy has a crucial role in facing climate change. One promising strategy is the creation of energy communities that require active involvement from a bottom-up perspective. Their implementation is difficult, as they currently rely on local policies, community readiness, and technological availability. 
  • 443
  • 19 Jan 2022
Topic Review
Urban Community Resilience Amidst the Spreading of COVID-19
Based on 90% of all reported COVID-19 in the world, urban areas become the pandemic’s epicenter due to population size and high-level global connectivity, rather than rural areas. Urban research related to pandemics focuses on marginal groups who have difficulty accessing health facilities, particularly in informal settlements. Amid a pandemic, insufficient isolation for COVID-19 patients may be related to the rapid increase of COVID-19 cases. Lockdown has worsened economic conditions for informal workers in urban areas, the lack of labor market opportunities, livelihood advancement, and occupational mobility for informal workers make it difficult to survive in the city. Loss of income due to the lockdown has made marginal communities in urban areas more vulnerable because they have to bear the changing needs of life during the pandemic.
  • 441
  • 16 Sep 2022
Topic Review
Neighborhood Wellbeing of Townships in South Africa
Townships in South Africa are characterized by underdeveloped urban neighborhoods on the periphery of cities, where their inhabitants suffer from a poor quality of life. 
  • 433
  • 07 Jun 2023
Topic Review
Heterogeneous Driver Behaviour and Energy Consumption 
By 2020, over 100 countries had expanded electric and plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (EV/PHEV) technologies, with global sales surpassing 7 million units. Governments are adopting cleaner vehicle technologies due to the proven environmental and health implications of internal combustion engine vehicles (ICEVs), as evidenced by the recent COP26 meeting. 
  • 432
  • 28 Jun 2022
Topic Review
Sustainability in City-Regionalism
Sustainability concerns transgress jurisdictional boundaries compelling multi-scalar and inter-jurisdictional responses. The city-region is one of the scales at which governance actors may mobilise for sustainability and this is now recognised in literatures on integrated food systems, for example. However, within the mainstream debates on city-regions, sustainability as a motivation for inter-jurisdictional governance is still given scant attention. In practice also the connections between city-regionalism and sustainability are often limited and fractious. However, there are emergent practices which offer the potential for a stronger relationship, especially where there are growing pressures for addressing environmental threats and spillovers at the regional scale. 
  • 423
  • 10 May 2021
Topic Review Peer Reviewed
The Lost Shantytowns of Barcelona
Shantytowns still existed in many of Southern Europe’s major cities in the second half of the 20th century, although many have now been demolished. The purpose of this article is to highlight the history and evolution of some of the main shantytowns that remained in Barcelona in the mid-1970s, track their subsequent demolition, and reflect on the fate of the shanty dwellers. This form of self-build housing, usually lacking in basic services, played a vital role in providing shelter for immigrant families and the urban poor. A strong neighbourhood identity existed in many of these shantytowns, and national and local policies that aimed at their demolition and the re-housing of residents, often in low-quality housing blocks, proved problematic. The shantytowns studied here are La Perona, the Tres Turons, Campo de la Bota, and Ramon Casellas, which together comprised over 2000 shanty dwellings in the 1970s. Drawing on photographs taken at the time and existing literature, and using recent images from Google Earth, the demise of these shantytowns is examined, and the policies and plans that determined their fate are discussed. This article finds that the shanty dwellers experienced mixed fortunes, some being forcibly removed and re-housed in tower blocks with associated social-economic problems, whilst others played an active part in the design of replacement housing, implemented in situ where the shanty dwellings once existed. This article contributes to existing studies on shantytowns in Barcelona, which received scant attention from academics at the time, and which only now are being recognised as an important aspect of Barcelona’s urban history.
  • 387
  • 08 Mar 2024
Topic Review
Walking Behavior in Temuco, Chile
Chile is known as a semi-developed country or a country in transition towards being a developed country. Temuco, the capital of the Araucania region, is one of the medium-sized southern cities with a population of almost 300 thousand people according to the 2017 Census. The rate of walking decreased (5%), while the rate of using private cars increased (7%) in daily transport trips from 2003 to 2013 in this city. However, walking has still remained the most common transport mode up until today among lower-middle income groups in Chile. This is confirmed by the analysis of walking trips in Temuco, which shows that 24% of the total trips in Temuco are dedicated to walking trips
  • 385
  • 20 May 2022
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