Automating land parcel classification for neighborhood-scale urban analysis

Homeowners’Associations(HOAs)dictate landscape structure and management through legally enforceable land covenants at the neighborhood scale in the USA.Determining the location and spatial extent of HOAs is critical for examining its influence.However,such analysis is confounded by the lack of spatial data at the appropriate unit for such analysis.The purpose of this paper is to develop and realize an open source implementation to automate land parcel classification,which is an initial step towards the goal of determining the impact of HOAs on urban land management.Using Maricopa County,Arizona as a testbed,we found that parcel merging processes reduce the number of subdivisions from 26,042 to 17,269,such that boundaries better align with neighborhood units to which rule sets like land covenants apply.Moreover,after an initial training period,this process was completed in just over 7 hours.This research is an important first step in enabling a number of analysis including determining the location and spatial extent of HOAs regionally and,eventually,nationally and determining proposed links between HOAs and land management outcomes.

Predicting urbanization level by main element analysis and multiple linear regression---taking Xiantao district in Hubei Province as an example

In this paper we firstly select main factors relating to urbanization level of Xiantao District in Hubei Province by main element, then, make model of urbanization level by analysis of multiple liner regression, and lastly predict its urbanization level

Planetary health risks in urban agriculture

Urban agriculture is gaining recognition for its potential contributions to environmental resilience and climate change adaptation,providing advantages such as urban greening,reduced heat island effects,and decreased air pollution.Moreover,it indirectly supports communities during weather events and natural disasters,ensuring food security and fostering community cohesion.However,concerns about planetary health risks persist in highly urbanized and climate-affected areas.Employing electronic databases such as Web of Science and PubMed and adhering to Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses guidelines,we identified 55 relevant papers to comprehend the planetary health risks associated with urban agriculture,The literature review identified five distinct health risks related to urban agriculture:(1)trace metal risks in urban farms;(2)health risks associated with wastewater irrigation;(3)zoonotic risks;(4)other health risks;and(5)social and economic risks.The study highlights that urban agriculture,while emphasizing environmental benefits,particularly raises concerns about trace metal bioaccumulation in soil and vegetables,posing health risks for populations.Other well studied risks included wastewater irrigation and backyard livestock farming.The main limitations in the available literature were in studying infectious diseases and antibiotic resistance associated with urban agriculture.

Using Impervious Surfaces to Detect Urban Expansion in Beijing of China in 2000s

The change of impervious surface area(ISA) can effectively reveal the gradual process of urbanization and act as a key index for monitoring urban expansion. Experiencing rapid growth of the built environment in the 2000 s, urban expansion of Beijing has not been fully characterized through ISA. In this study, Landsat TM images of Beijing in 2001 and 2009 were obtained, and the eight-year urban expansion process in Beijing was analyzed using the ISA extracted by means of the vegetation-imperious surface-soil(V-I-S) model. From the spatial variation in ISA, the ring structure of urban expansion in Beijing was significant during the study period, with decreasing urban density from the city center to the periphery. In the ring road analysis, the most dramatic changes of ISA were found between the fifth ring and the sixth ring. This area has experienced the most new residential development, and is currently the main source of urban expansion. The typical profile lines revealed the directional characteristics of urban expansion. The east-west profile was the most urbanized axes in Beijing, while ISA change in the east-north profile was more significant than in the other five profiles. Moreover, the transition matrix of ISA levels revealed an increase in urban density in the low density built areas; the Moran′s I index showed a clear expansion of the central urban area, which spread contiguously; and the standard deviational ellipse indicated the northeast was the dominant direction of urban expansion. These findings can provide important spatial control guidelines in the next round of national economic and social development planning, overall urban and rural planning, and land use planning.

Model and algorithm of optimizing alternate traffic restriction scheme in urban traffic network

An optimization model and its solution algorithm for alternate traffic restriction(ATR) schemes were introduced in terms of both the restriction districts and the proportion of restricted automobiles. A bi-level programming model was proposed to model the ATR scheme optimization problem by aiming at consumer surplus maximization and overload flow minimization at the upper-level model. At the lower-level model, elastic demand, mode choice and multi-class user equilibrium assignment were synthetically optimized. A genetic algorithm involving prolonging codes was constructed, demonstrating high computing efficiency in that it dynamically includes newly-appearing overload links in the codes so as to reduce the subsequent searching range. Moreover,practical processing approaches were suggested, which may improve the operability of the model-based solutions.

Developing web-based urban energy environmental database

Unbalanced energy consumption distribution caused by the concentration of facilities and population topples the natural energy equilibrium of a city and causes environmental problems such as urban tropical night,heat island phenomenon,global warming deterioration.Therefore,to secure eco-friendliness and sustainability of a city,it is necessary to introduce measures to alleviate the unequal distribution phenomenon of urban energy consumption from the city planning stage.For this purpose,the first step is to understand the current energy environment.The urban energy environment is affected by many factors in addition to gathering of buildings.Therefore,there is a limit to fully understanding advanced urban energy environment with only simple statistical urban information management technique.Research on methods of analyzing urban energy environment through simulation of recent urban scale is underway.There is not enough discussion about basic informaion databases for environmental analysis simulation of urban energy.This study presents a method using GIS(geographic information system) and web-based environmental information database as a way to improve the simulation accuracy.First,environmental information factors used for urban simulation were derived,and a web-based environmental information database targeting Daegu metropolitan city of Korea was built.Then,the urban energy environment was analyzed on a trial basis by linking the database with GIS.

统筹城乡的评价指标体系与实证分析

以统筹城乡经济社会发展的指标选择的提出为背景,对统筹城乡的评价体系进行了构建,利用层次分析法确定了各个指标的权重,并且应用1999—2007年度的数据对我国的统筹城乡发展程度进行了实证分析。

Threshold Analysis of Urban Development─ A Case Study of Guangzhou

The method of threshold analysis byUGIS is introduced into the master planning inGuangzhou. Based on this analysis, the developmentthreshold of Guangzhou is discussed and the development strategy in future proposed.

A Brief Analysis of the Current Situation in Urban Renewal

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Measuring the built environment of green transit-oriented development:A factorcluster analysis of rail station areas in Singapore

Green transit-oriented development(TOD)is an evolution of the TOD theory,influenced by sustainable development and green urbanism.This advancement expands the environmental and ecological dimensions of conventional TOD.However,relevant research has only just started,particularly in combination with high-density cities in Asia.This study measures the built environment of Green TOD and identifies the key factors and characteristics of the Green TOD built environment.An evaluation method for the Green TOD built environment is developed on the basis of the 5D(density,diversity,design,destination,and distance)built environment framework and combined with green urbanism theories.Data from 23 rail station areas in Singapore were collected and analyzed using factor and cluster analysis.Five factors,namely,neighborhood spatial form factor,facility completeness factor,open space factor,high-density mixed land-use factor,and walking amenity factor,are extracted.Twentythree station areas are classified into five clusters.The characteristics and optimization strategies of each cluster are analyzed on the basis of the statistical and graphical analyses.This research displays the characteristics and typology of the Green TOD built environment in an empirical way and offers a foundation for further research in diverse urban contexts.

Evaluation of urban redevelopment impact on non-motorized traffic

As an important component of city evolution, urban land redevelopment has an impact on transportation system. The current traffic impact analysis （TIA） is lack of a comprehensive component for non-motorized transportation under redevelopment. For a better guidance of land redevelopment and non-motorized transportation planning, it is necessary to evaluate the negative impact of redevelopment on non-motorized traffic in the TIA. In this paper, an evaluation framework for the impact analysis is built up. We organized the pro- cedures and components of impact evaluation, and proposed the corresponding qualitative and quantitative evaluation indicators for non-motorized traffic under redevelopment. Level of service （LOS） and its criterion are employed for external impact evaluation, and level of safety, convenience, independence, and comfort which are four aspects of quality of service （QOS） are proposed to analyze the internal impact. The framework is applied to a redevelopment study in Shanghai, China. The case study results indicate that the rede- velopment from a residential area to a mixed commercial area has a significant impact on non-motorized traffic. The potential negative impact from both external and internal traffic can be minimized by reasonable improvements in the internal land use design.

Temporal-spatial risk assessment of COVID-19 under the influence of urban spatial environmental parameters:The case of Shenyang city

Respiratory infection is the main route for the transmission of coronavirus pneumonia,and the results have shown that the urban spatial environment significantly influences the risk of infection.Based on the Wells-Riley model of respiratory infection probability,the study determined the human respiratory-related parameters and the effective influence range;extracted urban morphological parameters,assessed the ventilation effects of different spatial environments,and,combined with population flow monitoring data,constructed a method for assessing the risk of Covid-19 respiratory infection in urban-scale grid cells.In the empirical study in Shenyang city,a severe cold region,urban morphological parameters,population size,background wind speed,and individual behavior patterns were used to calculate the distribution characteristics of temporal and spatial concomitant risks in urban areas grids under different scenarios.The results showed that the correlation between the risk of respiratory infection in urban public spaces and the above variables was significant.The exposure time had the greatest degree of influence on the probability of respiratory infection risk among the variables.At the same time,the change in human body spacing beyond 1 m had a minor influence on the risk of infection.Among the urban morphological parameters,building height had the highest correlation with the risk of infection,while building density had the lowest correlation.The actual point distribution of the epidemic in Shenyang from March to April 2022 was used to verify the evaluation results.The overlap rate between medium or higher risk areas and actual cases was 78.55%.The planning strategies for epidemic prevention and control were proposed for the spatial differentiation characteristics of different risk elements.The research results can accurately classify the risk level of urban space and provide a scientific basis for the planning response of epidemic prevention and control and the safety of public activities.

Can floor-area-ratio incentive promote low impact development in a highly urbanized area？ A case study in Changzhou City, China

As an environmental friendly measure Jbr surface runoff reduction, low impact development （LID） has been applied successfully in urban areas. However, due to high price of land and additional expense for LID construction in highly urbanized areas, the developers of real estate would not like to proceed LID exploitation. Floor area ratio （FAR） refers to ＂the ratio ofa building＇s total floor area to the size of the piece of land upon which it is built.＇＂ Increasing FAR indicates that the developers can construct higher buildings and earn more money. By means of awarding FAR, the developers may be willing to practice LID construction. In this study, a new residential district is selected as a case study to analyze the trade- offbetween the runoffreduction goal achieving by LID practices and the incentive of awarding FAR to promote LID construction. The System for Urban Stormwater Treatment and Analysis IntegratioN （SUSTAIN） model is applied to simulate the runoff reduction under various LID designs and then derive the Pareto-optimal solutions to achieve urban runoff reduction goals based on cost efficiency. The results indicates that the maximum surface runoff reduction is 20.5%. Under the extremity scenarios, the government has options to award FAR of 0.028, 0.038 and 0.047 and the net benefits developers gain are 0 CNY, one million CNY and two million CNY, respectively. The results provide a LID construction guideline related to awarding FAR, which supports incentive policy making for promoting LID practices in the highly urbanized areas.

Strategies in training deep learning models to extract building from multisource images with small training sample sizes

Building extraction from remote sensing data is an important topic in urban studies and the deep learning methods have an increasing role due to their minimal requirements in training data to reach outstanding performance.We aimed to investigate the original U-Net architecture’s efficiency in building segmentation with different number of training images and the role of data augmentation based on multisource remote sensing data with varying spatial and spectral resolutions(WorldView-2[WV2],WorldView-3[WV3]images and an aerial orthophoto[ORTHO]).When the trainings and predictions were conducted on the same image,U-Net provided good results with very few training images(validation accuracies:94-97%;192 images).Combining the ORTHO’s and WV2’s training data for prediction on WV3 provided poor results with low F1-score(0.184).However,the inclusion of only 48 WV3 training images significantly improved the F1-score(0.693),thus,most buildings were correctly identified.Accordingly,using only independent reference data(other than the target image)is not enough to train an accurate model.In our case,the reference from WW2 and ORTHO images did not provide an acceptable basis to train a good model,but a minimal number of training images from the targeted WV3 improved the accuracy(F1-score:69%).