Neighbourhood Unions and Vertex pancyclicity *

Let G be a 2 connected simple graph of order n ( n ≥5) and minimum degree δ . In this paper, we show that if for any two nonadjacent vertices u , v of G there holds | N(u)∪N(v)|≥n-δ , then G is {3,4} - vertex pancyclic unless G≌K n2,n2 .

Inner-City Neighbourhood Changes Predicted from House Prices in Windsor, Ontario, since the Early- or Mid-1980s

Changes in prices of homes are hypothesized as correlated with the times of their sale and resale and the attributes of their dwelling unit and neighbourhood and those of neighbouring homes. They may also be correlated with the occurrences of events inside the neighbourhoods caused by the activities of individuals and organizations outside the neighbourhoods, such as whether the local economy is in a recession or has a high unemployment rate. Calibrated hybrid housing price models predict precipitous decreases in house prices of approximately 2900 sold and resold homes in two inner-city neighbourhoods in Windsor, Ontario, during those events since 1981 or 1986. Overall modest predicted percentage increases in houses’ prices during more than 30 years therefore subsumed periods of inner-city neighbourhood deterioration in dispersed locations of unimproved and disimproved homes. Compensatory predictions however are of increasing prices for minorities of homes with improvements to several attributes of the dwelling unit and neighbourhood.

Neighbourhood Conditions and Hamiltonian Properties

This paper gives new sufficient conditions for a connected graph to be Hamiltonian and Hamiltonian connected by independence number and neighbourhood intersections of three independent vertices with distance 2.

Dynamicity of Land Use/Land Cover(LULC):An analysis from peri-urban and rural neighbourhoods of Durgapur Municipal Corporation(DMC)in India

The availability of better economic possibilities and well-connected transportation networks has attracted people to migrate to peri-urban and rural neighbourhoods,changing the landscape of regions outside the city and fostering the growth of physical infrastructure.Using multi-temporal satellite images,the dynamics of Land Use/Land Cover(LULC)changes,the impact of urban growth on LULC changes,and regional environmental implications were investigated in the peri-urban and rural neighbourhoods of Durgapur Municipal Corporation in India.The study used different case studies to highlight the study area’s heterogeneity,as the phenomenon of change is not consistent.Landsat TM and OLI-TIRS satellite images in 1991,2001,2011,and 2021 were used to analyse the changes in LULC types.We used the relative deviation(RD),annual change intensity(ACI),uniform intensity(UI)to show the dynamicity of LULC types(agriculture land;built-up land;fallow land;vegetated land;mining area;and water bodies)during 1991-2021.This study also applied the Decision-Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory(DEMATEL)to measure environmental sensitivity zones and find out the causes of LULC changes.According to LULC statistics,agriculture land,built-up land,and mining area increased by 51.7,95.46,and 24.79 km^(2),respectively,from 1991 to 2021.The results also suggested that built-up land and mining area had the greatest land surface temperature(LST),whereas water bodies and vegetated land showed the lowest LST.Moreover,this study looked at the relationships among LST,spectral indices(Normalized Differenced Built-up Index(NDBI),Normalized Difference Vegetation Index(NDVI),and Normalized Difference Water Index(NDWI)),and environmental sensitivity.The results showed that all of the spectral indices have the strongest association with LST,indicating that built-up land had a far stronger influence on the LST.The spectral indices indicated that the decreasing trends of vegetated land and water bodies were 4.26 and 0.43 km^(2)/a,respectively,during 1991-2021.In summary,this study can help the policy-makers to predict the increasing rate of temperature and the causes for the temperature increase with the rapid expansion of built-up land,thus making effective peri-urban planning decisions.

Necessary and Sufficient Conditions for Feasible Neighbourhood Solutions in the Local Search of the Job-Shop Scheduling Problem

The meta-heuristic algorithm with local search is an excellent choice for the job-shop scheduling problem(JSP).However,due to the unique nature of the JSP,local search may generate infeasible neighbourhood solutions.In the existing literature,although some domain knowledge of the JSP can be used to avoid infeasible solutions,the constraint conditions in this domain knowledge are sufficient but not necessary.It may lose many feasible solutions and make the local search inadequate.By analysing the causes of infeasible neighbourhood solutions,this paper further explores the domain knowledge contained in the JSP and proposes the sufficient and necessary constraint conditions to find all feasible neighbourhood solutions,allowing the local search to be carried out thoroughly.With the proposed conditions,a new neighbourhood structure is designed in this paper.Then,a fast calculation method for all feasible neighbourhood solutions is provided,significantly reducing the calculation time compared with ordinary methods.A set of standard benchmark instances is used to evaluate the performance of the proposed neighbourhood structure and calculation method.The experimental results show that the calculation method is effective,and the new neighbourhood structure has more reliability and superiority than the other famous and influential neighbourhood structures,where 90%of the results are the best compared with three other well-known neighbourhood structures.Finally,the result from a tabu search algorithm with the new neighbourhood structure is compared with the current best results,demonstrating the superiority of the proposed neighbourhood structure.

Neighbourhood differences in objectively measured physical activity, sedentary time and body mass index

Background: There is limited Canadian research examining whether directly measured physical activity (PA) and body mass index (BMI) differ between neighbourhoods with different objectively measured socioeconomic (SES) and recreation (REC) environments. Purpose: To determine whether mean adult PA levels, sedentary time and BMIs were different across four neighbourhoods with contrasting SES and REC environments in Ottawa, Canada. Methods: This study employed a cross-sectional design to collect pilot data of objectively measured height, weight and PA (using accelerometry) and self-reported covariates in 113 adults (≥18 years). Four contrasting neighbourhoods (high REC/high SES, high REC/low SES, low REC/high SES, and low REC/low SES) were selected based on data collected as part of the Ottawa Neighbourhood Study. Analysis of covariance and logistic regression were used to perform neighbourhood comparisons for PA, sedentary time and BMI, adjusting for age, sex and household income and possible interactions. Post-hoc comparisons using Tukey’s test were performed. Results: Significant neighbourhood-group effects were observed for light intensity PA and sedentary time. Post-hoc tests identified that the low REC/high SES neighbourhood had significantly more minutes of light PA than the low REC/low SES (Mdiff = 56.05 minutes·day, Tukey p = 0.01). Unadjusted BMI differed between the four neighbourhoods, but the differences were not significant after controlling for age, sex and household income. Conclusions: This study demonstrates that light PA and sedentary time differ between neighbourhoods of varying REC and SES environments after controlling for differences in age, sex and household income. Findings also suggest that other area-level factors may explain these neighbourhood differences.

Measuring Exterior Safety of Canadian Residential Neighbourhoods

A safety audit measures the safety of 36 exterior attributes of properties and streets in a low-density residential neighbourhood in terms of four principles of modern crime prevention through environmental design, namely, territoriality, natural surveillance, activity support and access control. Eighty-three residents have walked around each of their small neighbourhoods, and audited the safeties of its area, individual private properties, and adjacent area in daylight;and the safeties of its area, properties, and exterior lighting in darkness. Findings are that older-urban neighbourhoods’ overall safety percentages and attribute safeties in daylight and darkness were consistently lower than those in newer suburban, rural or small-town ones;and frequently lower than those in newer-urban neighbourhoods, or older suburban, rural or small-town ones. Recommendations are about improving 12 less safe or unsafe attributes by means of physical planning and environmental design. Also having identified those attributes, we speculate about replicating the safety audit via online Street Views of existing Canadian neighbourhoods.

Erasmus Student or EU Ambassador? People-to-People Contact in the European Neighbourhood Policy: The Cases of Georgia, Ukraine, and Tunisia

This paper investigates to what extent and why the key Action 1 of the Erasmus+ programme, namely learning mobility of individuals, can be considered a soft power’s instrument on European neighbourhood countries. The core assumption is that due to people-to-people contact, Erasmus participants are most likely to become EU informal ambassadors, in the sense that they become carriers of EU soft power leading to changes in cultural and social perceptions. However, what will the place of Erasmus+ be in the ongoing debate on international cultural relations’ strategy? Erasmus+ can play a major role in this new strategy considering the huge growth of mobility flows between EU and ENP countries, since the new programme was launched. Moreover, EU institutions are looking for new strategic tools of public diplomacy. Have they realised that the external dimension of Erasmus+ lends itself to being one of these? Therefore, the topic of this work is of high interest because it is closely related to the debate about both the means and the ends of the EU external policy. For the sake of this research, three case studies, from different geographical regions neighbouring the EU, have been chosen: Tunisia, Ukraine, and Georgia. A comparison among these three countries will reveal under which conditions Erasmus+ can be considered a soft power’s instrument. Hence, the identification of conditions applicable to all EU partner countries in order to evaluate whether the EU can spread its soft power through Erasmus+, represents the paper’s added value which opens new avenues for further research on the topic.

A Realistic ICT Network Design and Implementation in the Neighbourhood Area of the Smart Grid

The Smart Grid has three main characteristics, which are to some degree antagonistic. These characteristics are: provision of good power quality, energy cost reduction and improvement in the reliability of the grid. The need to ensure that they can be accomplished together demands a much richer ICT monitoring and control network than the current system. In this paper we particularly investigate the design and deployment of the ICT system in the urban environment, specifically in a university campus that is embedded in a city, thus it represents the Neighbourhood Area Network (NAN) level of the Smart Grid. In order to design an ICT infrastructure, we have introduced two related architectures: namely communications network architecture and a software architecture. Having access to the characteristics of a real NAN guides us to choose appropriate communication technologies and identify the actual requirements of the system. To implement these architectures at this level we need to gather and process information from environmental sensors (monitoring e.g. temperature, movement of people and vehicles) that can provide useful information about changes in the loading of the NAN, with information from instrumentation of the Power Grid itself. Energy constraints are one of the major limitations of the communication network in the Smart Grid, especially where wireless networking is proposed. Thus we analyse the most energy efficient method of collecting and sending data. The main contribution of this research is that we propose and implement an energy efficient ICT network and describe our software architecture at the NAN level, currently very underdeveloped. We also discuss our experimental results. To our knowledge, no such architectures have yet been implemented for collecting data which can provide the basis of Decision Support Tools (DSTs).

Measuring Exterior Housing Quality in Four Older-Urban Neighbourhoods in Windsor, Ontario

Four theoretically-deduced hypotheses about geographical and temporal variations in exterior housing quality within a neighbourhood are summarized as a renovation- or deterioration-of-self effect, a contagion-down-the-street effect, a distance-from-riverbank effect, and a distance-from core effect. These hypotheses are tested with data for the exterior conditions of hundreds of single- detached (-like) houses that have been individually surveyed twice with the same instrument in four older-urban neighbourhoods in Windsor, Ontario, Canada. Each surveyed house’s rated conditions of 12 exterior attributes are in particular utilized to calculate its overall exterior quality as a percentage above or below normal. Findings are that houses’ exteriors had average “normal” weathered conditions for Canada. Even so, overall exterior housing qualities in three neighbourhoods exemplified a hypothesized deterioration-of-self effect and proximity-to-core effect, as they had especially declined from their original survey to their resurvey for houses located near to a core such as downtown or a casino. In addition, the hypothesized distance-from-riverbank effect was observed in one neighbourhood where overall exterior housing quality linearly deteriorated with farther distance from a riverbank. Finally, overall exterior housing qualities had no observable contagion-down-the-street effect, and so, residents were not reacting positively or negatively to their neighbours’ maintenance and improvement of their homes’ exteriors. The practical implications of the study’s findings are discussed in the conclusion.

The Thai GoodWalk Index and the Thai Walkability Index:their application to urban regeneration exemplified by a historic riverside neighbourhood in Bangkok,Thailand

The urban heritage regeneration strategy through walkability is widely accepted.However,in the context of a developing country,the tools to measure walkability,which are crucial for urban planning and development,still need to be improved.This article investigates ways to revitalise a run-down historic riverside area in Bangkok.It develops two indices,the Thai GoodWalk Index(TGWI)and the Thai Walkability Index(TWI).A hybrid of both indices is based on geospatial techniques and technology to optimise problem analysis processes,create problem-solving options,enhance spatial site selection decision capabilities,and assist urban planners in carrying out spatial scenario planning processes.It demonstrates how the GoodWalk Index has been employed to plan and prioritise urban development projects.This is exemplified by the Master Plan for the Regeneration of Kadeejeen-Klongsan,a historic riverside neighbourhood in Bangkok with limitations in density,functional mix of spaces,and access networks,especially in riverfront areas.The TGWI and TWI can be applied to the regeneration of other historic districts throughout Thailand.

The Second Neighbourhood for Quasi-transitive Oriented Graphs

In 2006, Sullivan stated the conjectures： （1） every oriented graph has a vertex x such that d＋＋ （x） ≥ d- （x）; （2） every oriented graph has a vertex x such that d＋＋ （x） ＋ d＋ （x） ≥ 2d- （x）; （3） every oriented graph has a vertex x such that d＋＋（x） ＋ d＋（x） ≥ 2·min{d＋（x）,d-（x）}. A vertex x in D satisfying Conjecture （i） is called a Sullivan-/vertex, i = 1, 2, 3. A digraph D is called quasi-transitive if for every pair xy, yz of arcs between distinct vertices x, y, z, xz or zx （＂or＂ is inclusive here） is in D. In this paper, we prove that the conjectures hold for quasi-transitive oriented graphs, which is a superclass of tournaments and transitive acyclic digraphs. Furthermore, we show that a quasi-transitive oriented graph with no vertex of in-degree zero has at least three Sullivan-1 vertices and a quasi-transitive oriented graph has at least three Sullivan-3 vertices unless it belongs to an exceptional class of quasi- transitive oriented graphs. For Sullivan-2 vertices, we show that an extended tournament, a subclass of quasi-transitive oriented graphs and a superclass of tournaments, has at least two Sullivan-2 vertices unless it belongs to an exceptional class of extended tournaments.

Empowering the community through participation and action in historic neighbourhood conservation planning

This paper presents an attempt to initiate community empowerment within the participatory neighbourhood upgrading context of the Sengul Hammam Neighbourhood(istiklal).We adopted the Participatory Action Research methodology,which aims to generate knowledge meaningful for the community towards upgrading and revitalizing the neighbourhood.Respectively,a series of workshops,focus groups,and community activities were implemented in parallel processes with different neighbourhood groups.In order to change the situation in the neighbourhood,the inquiry began by mobilizing neighbourhood stakeholders and planning the future with primary school children.Later,this gained the active support of parents,women,the municipality,local leaders,and civil associations,and led them to take collective action over garbage collection,cleaning up the neighbourhood and building a playground-park.The mayor at the time of the research showed interest in istiklal but did not or could not give any financial or political support to upgrade the physical setting as a whole.The lack of support from the municipality in that regard and the neighbourhood being left to its own destiny caused a gradual dilapidation and loss of historic and cultural values.

The Hutong neighbourhood grammar:A procedural modelling approach to unravel the rationale of historical Beijing urban structure

Hutong neighbourhoods,composed of Chinese courtyard dwellings(Siheyuan),are historically and socially significant urban spaces that embody the traditional Chinese way of life and philosophy.As part of the national heritage,there is an increasing research interest in Hutong neighbourhoods,many of which are facing oblivion.This study presents a formal grammar for Hutong neighbourhood generation.This research investigates traditional principles of urban planning of ancient Beijing,based on examples on the historical map Qianlong Jingcheng Quantu,to derive the lost design rules.These rules are used to build up a procedural modelling framework,which reveals the development of Beijing’s urban structure from the Yuan(1271–1368)to the Qing(1644–1911)dynasty.Our findings present a grammar incorporated into the procedural modelling framework to parametrically generate Hutong neighbourhoods,which replicates the morphological characteristics of historic cases.It contributes to the understanding of the generation of Hutong neighbourhoods.In support of heritage sustainability,this grammar can be implemented in a computational environment by visual scripting that enables the generation of new instances of Hutong neighbourhoods,both real and virtual.

Multi-dimensional Evaluation of Recent Neighbourhood Renewal Projects in Beijing: Case Studies on Shichahai and Jinyuchi Neighbourhoods

Most of Chinese cities have experienced a great wave of large-scale neighbourhood renewal in recent years. However, only a few research works have been done in giving assessment after the completion of renewal projects. Aimed at such a circumstance, this paper, by referencing the experience of European countries, establishes a multi-dimensional evaluation framework to analyze the primary data drawn from recent household surveys of Shichahai and Jinyuchi neighbourhoods in Beijing, and puts forward some suggestions based on the conclusions drawn from the surveys.