The efficiencies and their changes of China＇s resources-based cities employing DEA and Malmquist Index Models

Employing DEA model and Malmquist productivity index, this paper probes into the urban efficiencies of 24 typical resources-based cities in China and their changes from 2000 to 2008. The research finds that the overall efficiencies of the resources-based cities are just at a general level, and only a few of them reach the optimal level. The scale efficiency is the major determining factor of the achievement of overall efficiency, the effect of which, nevertheless, is reducing. From the perspective of classification characteristics, the resources-based cities in northeastern region have been in the front rank in terms of overall efficiency, pure technical efficiency and scale efficiency. There is a certain positive correlation between urban population scale and urban efficiency. The analysis of urban efficiency changes shows that the changes in overall efficiency of resources-based cities from 2000 to 2008 had a weak improving tendency. Both the technical change index and productivity change index decreased, indicating that the urban efficiency did not improve during this period, and the tendency of technical recession and productivity decline was obvious. In terms of the classification of urban efficiency changes, the urban overall efficiency improved in each of the four regions from 2000 to 2008, among which western region witnessed the greatest increase. Cities with different resource types have improved their urban overall efficiencies except steel-based cities. The urban overall efficiency increased in resources-based cities of different scales, with greater improvement in small and medium-sized cities than in big cities.

Understanding the Relationship Between Shrinking Cities and Land Prices:Spatial Pattern,Effectiveness,and Policy Implications

Urban shrinkage has emerged as a widespread phenomenon globally and has a significant impact on land,particularly in terms of land use and price.This study focuses on 2851 county-level cities in China in 2005–2018(excluding Hong Kong,Macao,Taiwan,and‘no data’areas in Qinhai-Tibet Plateau)as the fundamental units of analysis.By employing nighttime light(NTL)data to identify shrinking cities,the propensity score matching(PSM)model was used to quantitatively examine the impact of shrinking cities on land prices,and evaluate the magnitude of this influence.The findings demonstrate the following:1)there were 613 shrinking cities in China,with moderate shrinkage being the most prevalent and severe shrinkage being the least.2)Regional disparities are evident in the spatial distribution of shrinking cities,especially in areas with diverse terrain.3)The spatial pattern of land price exhibits a significant correlated to the economic and administrative levels.4)Shrinking cities significantly negatively impact on the overall land price(ATT=–0.1241,P<0.05).However,the extent of the effect varies significantly among different spatial regions.This study contributes novel insights into the investigation of land prices and shrinking cities,ultimately serving as a foundation for government efforts to promote the sustainable development of urban areas.

Do companies influenced by smart cities pay more attention to green governance?Mechanism and optimal spatial correlation

Smart cities are a way for China to construct an innovative and environmentally conscious nation.The paper examines the impact of smart cities on corporate green governance and provides a theoretical foundation for formulating and executing smart city policy in China.Based on panel data from Chinese A-share listed companies in Shanghai and Shenzhen from 2008 to 2020,this study constructs a multiperiod double-difference model to examine the influence of smart cities on corporate green governance.Additionally,it uses a spatial double-difference model to investigate the spatial spillover effect of smart cities on neighboring areas.The findings indicate that smart cities effectively enhance corporate green governance.Analyzing the influencing mechanisms reveals that resource allocation efficiency,technological innovation,management environmental awareness,and regional environmental enforcement efforts act as mediators.Furthermore,the study reveals that the impact of smart cities on promoting corporate green governance is more pronounced in regions with lower levels of marketization and resource-based cities.Moreover,the research explores the spatial spillover effects of smart cities,with an effective radius of approximately 350 km.The optimal spatial correlation zone for green governance of businesses in neighboring areas in relation to smart cities is within a range of 250-350 km.This is manifested by the significant promotion of green governance in neighboring area businesses facilitated by smart cities.

Factors Influencing the Spatial Variability of Air Temperature Urban Heat Island Intensity in Chinese Cities

Few studies have investigated the spatial patterns of the air temperature urban heat island(AUHI)and its controlling factors.In this study,the data generated by an urban climate model were used to investigate the spatial variations of the AUHI across China and the underlying climate and ecological drivers.A total of 355 urban clusters were used.We performed an attribution analysis of the AUHI to elucidate the mechanisms underlying its formation.The results show that the midday AUHI is negatively correlated with climate wetness(humid:0.34 K;semi-humid:0.50 K;semi-arid:0.73 K).The annual mean midnight AUHI does not show discernible spatial patterns,but is generally stronger than the midday AUHI.The urban–rural difference in convection efficiency is the largest contributor to the midday AUHI in the humid(0.32±0.09 K)and the semi-arid(0.36±0.11 K)climate zones.The release of anthropogenic heat from urban land is the dominant contributor to the midnight AUHI in all three climate zones.The rural vegetation density is the most important driver of the daytime and nighttime AUHI spatial variations.A spatial covariance analysis revealed that this vegetation influence is manifested mainly through its regulation of heat storage in rural land.

Defining Cities by Water: Addressing Capital Misallocation in a Race to Conserve Resources

As part of its efforts to promote a sustainable and high-quality development,China has pledged to reduce water consumption and create a water-efficient society.On the basis of identifying the institutional root causes of excessive capital allocation and excessive water consumption in China’s water-intensive industrial sectors,this study elaborates how the national water-efficient cities assessment contributes to optimized capital allocation.Our research shows that national water-efficient cities assessment has motivated local governments to compete for water efficiency.To conserve water,local governments regulated the entry and exit of water-intensive enterprises,discouraged excessive investments in water-intensive sectors,and phased out obsolete water-intensive capacities within their jurisdictions.This approach has resulted in mutually beneficial outcomes,including improved allocation of capital,enhanced water efficiency,and reduced emissions.This paper offers policy recommendations for establishing a water-efficient society throughout the 14^(th) Five-Year Plan(2021-2025)period by presenting empirical evidence on the policy effects of resource efficiency evaluation.

Impact of coupling coordination development of port and city environments on urban economic competitiveness:Evidence from the coastal port cities in eastern China

Promoting the coupling coordination development of port and its hinterland city environments is an important way to improve urban economic competitiveness.Based on relevant data of 13 coastal port cities in eastern China from 2000 to 2018,this study explores the coupling coordination development of port and city environments and its impact on urban economic competitiveness by constructing the coupling coordination degree model and the panel threshold model.The research results show that:(1)In terms of the coupling coordination development of port and city environments,most coastal ports and their hinterland cities are in a state of moderate or serious disorder.Overall,the degree of coupling coordination of port and city environments needs to be further improved;(2)The coupling coordination degree of port and city environments has a significant impact on urban economic competitiveness,and this effect gradually increases with the development of the ports and the urban economy.Among the variables that impact the urban economic competitiveness,fixed assets investment and foreign trade are significant factors that can enhance urban economic competitiveness.(3)At present,there is a“U-shaped”relationship between the coupling coordination degree of port-city environments and the urban economic competitiveness.This relationship lies on the right side of the inflection point of the“U-shaped”curve.Therefore,following the concept of assigning priority to ecological development,expanding fixed assets investment and actively developing foreign trade can further enhance the urban economic competitiveness.

Commuting Space of Primary and Secondary Schools in the Context of Child Friendly Cities:A Case Study of Bajiao Street of Shijingshan District

With the continuous promotion of the construction of child friendly cities,the school commuting space is an important component of the construction of child friendly roads.Based on the background of child friendly cities,the commuting space of 11 primary and secondary schools in Bajiao Street is analyzed through literature analysis and field research methods.Firstly,the relevant literature on school commuting space is sorted out,and the characteristics of school commuting space are summarized,including transportation,landscape,culture,leisure,and security.Secondly,the characteristics of commuting space of primary and secondary schools in Bajiao Street are analyzed from three aspects:in front of the school gate,path space,and node space.This paper aims to provide reference and guidance for the future construction of children’s walking school commuting and promote the construction of a child friendly city.

Deep Learning Method to Detect the Road Cracks and Potholes for Smart Cities

The increasing global population at a rapid pace makes road trafficdense;managing such massive traffic is challenging. In developing countrieslike Pakistan, road traffic accidents (RTA) have the highest mortality percentageamong other Asian countries. The main reasons for RTAs are roadcracks and potholes. Understanding the need for an automated system forthe detection of cracks and potholes, this study proposes a decision supportsystem (DSS) for an autonomous road information system for smart citydevelopment with the use of deep learning. The proposed DSS works in layerswhere initially the image of roads is captured and coordinates attached to theimage with the help of global positioning system (GPS), communicated tothe decision layer to find about the cracks and potholes in the roads, andeventually, that information is passed to the road management informationsystem, which gives information to drivers and the maintenance department.For the decision layer, we projected a CNN-based model for pothole crackdetection (PCD). Aimed at training, a K-fold cross-validation strategy wasused where the value of K was set to 10. The training of PCD was completedwith a self-collected dataset consisting of 6000 images from Pakistani roads.The proposed PCD achieved 98% of precision, 97% recall, and accuracy whiletesting on unseen images. The results produced by our model are higher thanthe existing model in terms of performance and computational cost, whichproves its significance.

An Optimized Offloaded Task Execution for Smart Cities Applications

Wireless nodes are one of the main components in different applications that are offered in a smart city.These wireless nodes are responsible to execute multiple tasks with different priority levels.As the wireless nodes have limited processing capacity,they offload their tasks to cloud servers if the number of tasks exceeds their task processing capacity.Executing these tasks from remotely placed cloud servers causes a significant delay which is not required in sensitive task applications.This execution delay is reduced by placing fog computing nodes near these application nodes.A fog node has limited processing capacity and is sometimes unable to execute all the requested tasks.In this work,an optimal task offloading scheme that comprises two algorithms is proposed for the fog nodes to optimally execute the time-sensitive offloaded tasks.The first algorithm describes the task processing criteria for local computation of tasks at the fog nodes and remote computation at the cloud server.The second algorithm allows fog nodes to optimally scrutinize the most sensitive tasks within their task capacity.The results show that the proposed task execution scheme significantly reduces the execution time and most of the time-sensitive tasks are executed.

Smart cities from low cost to expensive solutions under an optimal analysis

This scientific approach mainly aims to develop a smart city/smart community concept to objectively evaluate the progress of these organizational forms in relation to other classical/traditional forms of city organizations.The elaborated model allowed the construction of the dashboard of access actions in the smart city/smart community category on two levels of financial effort correlated with the effect on the sustainable development of smart cities.The validity of the proposed model and our approach was supported by the complex statistical analysis performed in this study.The research concluded that low-cost solutions are the most effective in supporting smart urban development.They should be followed by the other category of solutions,which implies more significant financial and managerial efforts as well as a higher rate of welfare growth for urban citizens.The main outcomes of this research include modelling solutions related to smart city development at a low-cost level and identifying the sensitivity elements that maximize the growth function.The implications of this research are to provide viable alternatives based on smart city development opportunities with medium and long-term effects on urban communities,economic sustainability,and translation into urban development rates.This study’s results are useful for all administrations ready for change that want the rapid implementation of the measures with beneficial effects on the community or which,through a strategic vision,aim to connect to the European objectives of sustainable growth and social welfare for citizens.Practically,this study is a tool for defining and implementing smart public policies at the urban level.

Comprehensive Review on Air Pollution Control Measures for Non-Attainment Cities of Uttar Pradesh, India

Introduction: The Indian state of Uttar Pradesh (UP) for the past many years has been reported to have many cities with highly polluted air quality. The state has been taking meticulous steps in combating air pollution in the form of action plans, introduced especially in its 17 non-attainment cities (NAC). To assess the progress and development of these action plans in UP, the present study has done an in-depth analysis and review of the state’s action plans and city micro action plans. Materials and Methods: In this research study, the analysis of the latest action plan reports, micro action plan reports as well as the recommendations for combating air pollution-related issues in the 17 NAC of the UP state has been well documented. Uttar Pradesh Pollution Control Board (UPPCB) has prepared these reports to highlight the progress of the plans in response to the growing air pollution in these cities. The information present in the reports has been used to further study sector-specific, category-specific action plans, institutional responsibility, and the present status of the action plans. Results: On average, the highest weightage in action plans was given to sector-specific categories such as Road dust and construction activities (24%). It was also observed that Urban local bodies (~50%) were majorly responsible to implement the action points and 56% of the action points were jointly implemented by multiple agencies.

Deep Consensus Network for Recycling Waste Detection in Smart Cities

Recently,urbanization becomes a major concern for developing as well as developed countries.Owing to the increased urbanization,one of the important challenging issues in smart cities is waste management.So,automated waste detection and classification model becomes necessary for the smart city and to accomplish better recyclable waste management.Effective recycling of waste offers the chance of reducing the quantity of waste disposed to the land fill by minimizing the requirement of collecting raw materials.This study develops a novel Deep Consensus Network with Whale Optimization Algorithm for Recycling Waste Object Detection(DCNWORWOD)in Smart Cities.The goal of the DCNWO-RWOD technique intends to properly identify and classify the objects into recyclable and non-recyclable ones.The proposed DCNWO-RWOD technique involves the design of deep consensus network(DCN)to detect waste objects in the input image.For improving the overall object detection performance of the DCN model,the whale optimization algorithm(WOA)is exploited.Finally,Na飗e Bayes(NB)classifier is used for the classification of detected waste objects into recyclable and non-recyclable ones.The performance validation of theDCNWO-RWOD technique takes place using the open access dataset.The extensive comparative study reported the enhanced performance of the DCNWO-RWOD technique interms of several measures.

Deep Learning Enabled Intelligent Healthcare Management System in Smart Cities Environment

In recent times,cities are getting smart and can be managed effectively through diverse architectures and services.Smart cities have the ability to support smart medical systems that can infiltrate distinct events(i.e.,smart hospitals,smart homes,and community health centres)and scenarios(e.g.,rehabilitation,abnormal behavior monitoring,clinical decision-making,disease prevention and diagnosis postmarking surveillance and prescription recommendation).The integration of Artificial Intelligence(AI)with recent technologies,for instance medical screening gadgets,are significant enough to deliver maximum performance and improved management services to handle chronic diseases.With latest developments in digital data collection,AI techniques can be employed for clinical decision making process.On the other hand,Cardiovascular Disease(CVD)is one of the major illnesses that increase the mortality rate across the globe.Generally,wearables can be employed in healthcare systems that instigate the development of CVD detection and classification.With this motivation,the current study develops an Artificial Intelligence Enabled Decision Support System for CVD Disease Detection and Classification in e-healthcare environment,abbreviated as AIDSS-CDDC technique.The proposed AIDSS-CDDC model enables the Internet of Things(IoT)devices for healthcare data collection.Then,the collected data is saved in cloud server for examination.Followed by,training 4484 CMC,2023,vol.74,no.2 and testing processes are executed to determine the patient’s health condition.To accomplish this,the presented AIDSS-CDDC model employs data preprocessing and Improved Sine Cosine Optimization based Feature Selection(ISCO-FS)technique.In addition,Adam optimizer with Autoencoder Gated RecurrentUnit(AE-GRU)model is employed for detection and classification of CVD.The experimental results highlight that the proposed AIDSS-CDDC model is a promising performer compared to other existing models.

Construction land expansion and influencing factors of typical river valley cities in Northeast China: Taking Jilin City as an example

Jilin City is a typical river valley city in Northeast China.In this paper,the authors studied the spatial and temporal expansion characteristics of the built-up areas in Jilin City from 1990 to 2020 using the analysis of expansion speed and strength,fractal dimension,barycenter coordinate transfer index and sector analysis.The ultimate-goal is to analyze the driving and restrictive factors that affect the spatial expansion of river valley cities.The results indicate that(1)the expansion speed of urban land in Jilin City has been re-latively slow in the past 30 years,while only slightly faster in 2010–2020;(2)in the spatial dimension,Jilin City mainly expanded to the south,then to the west,and extensive expansion has resulted in complex mor-phology with little stability and compactness;(3)the expansion is affected by multiple factors,of which the positive factor is industrial development,while the restrictive factors include natural factors,population loss,etc.This study provides a case for the formulation of land use policies and land space planning in river valley cities.

Security and Privacy Concerns over IoT Devices Attacks in Smart Cities (2022)

Due to the long-term goal of bringing about significant changes in the quality of services supplied to smart city residents and urban environments and life, the development and deployment of ICT in city infrastructure has spurred interest in smart cities. Applications for smart cities can gather private data in a variety of fields. Different sectors such as healthcare, smart parking, transportation, traffic systems, public safety, smart agriculture, and other sectors can control real-life physical objects and deliver intelligent and smart information to citizens who are the users. However, this smart ICT integration brings about numerous concerns and issues with security and privacy for both smart city citizens and the environments they are built in. The main uses of smart cities are examined in this journal article, along with the security needs for IoT systems supporting them and the identified important privacy and security issues in the smart city application architecture. Following the identification of several security flaws and privacy concerns in the context of smart cities, it then highlights some security and privacy solutions for developing secure smart city systems and presents research opportunities that still need to be considered for performance improvement in the future.

Spatiotemporal Differences and Classification Regulation of Urbanization Impact on Agricultural Development in Shrinking Areas:A Case Study of 15 Shrinking Cities in Three Provinces of Northeast China

Studying the impact of urbanization on agricultural development in shrinking areas is important for maintaining food security and promoted agricultural development in China.Based on the measurement results of the shrinking cities in the three provinces of Northeast China,this paper selects 15 shrinking cities as the research object,and constructs a multi-dimensional index system to explore the impact of the urbanization level of the shrinking areas on the agricultural development in the region since 2007–2019,analyzes the influencing factors and their differences by using the geographically-weighted regression model and Geodetector,and proposes a targeted regulation strategy.The results show that:1)overall,there is a negative correlation between the urbanization level and the agricultural development level in the contracted areas of the three northeastern provinces.The urbanization level in these areas has a certain negative impact on the overall level of agricultural development;2)regarding the time dimension,the impact of urbanization level on the agricultural development level in the contracted areas of the three northeastern provinces gradually increases over time;3)regarding the spatial pattern,the overall impact of shrinking urbanization levels in the three provinces of Northeast China on the agricultural development shows a significant distribution pattern of high in the east and low in the west;4)the total population and natural population growth rate at the end of the year were the main factors influencing a certain level of urbanization on agricultural development in the shrinking cities while population density and the urban fixed asset investment rate were the secondary factors;and 5)the main reasons why the level of agricultural development in different cities was affected by the level of urbanization were different.However,they can be categorized into areas of population loss and spatial construction,which can be further divided into area of population loss in the northeast,areas of negative population growth in the west,and areas of urban spatial change in the south.According to the causes of the impact,this paper adopted targeted regulation strategies and formulated relevant policies and solutions that cater to local conditions.

Multi-Layer Fog-Cloud Architecture for Optimizing the Placement of IoT Applications in Smart Cities

In the smart city paradigm, the deployment of Internet of Things(IoT) services and solutions requires extensive communication and computingresources to place and process IoT applications in real time, which consumesa lot of energy and increases operational costs. Usually, IoT applications areplaced in the cloud to provide high-quality services and scalable resources.However, the existing cloud-based approach should consider the above constraintsto efficiently place and process IoT applications. In this paper, anefficient optimization approach for placing IoT applications in a multi-layerfog-cloud environment is proposed using a mathematical model (Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP)). This approach takes into accountIoT application requirements, available resource capacities, and geographicallocations of servers, which would help optimize IoT application placementdecisions, considering multiple objectives such as data transmission, powerconsumption, and cost. Simulation experiments were conducted with variousIoT applications (e.g., augmented reality, infotainment, healthcare, andcompute-intensive) to simulate realistic scenarios. The results showed thatthe proposed approach outperformed the existing cloud-based approach interms of reducing data transmission by 64% and the associated processingand networking power consumption costs by up to 78%. Finally, a heuristicapproach was developed to validate and imitate the presented approach. Itshowed comparable outcomes to the proposed model, with the gap betweenthem reach to a maximum of 5.4% of the total power consumption.

Analysis of BrainMRI: AI-Assisted Healthcare Framework for the Smart Cities

The use of intelligent machines to work and react like humans is vital in emerging smart cities.Computer-aided analysis of complex and huge MRI(Mag-netic Resonance Imaging)scans is very important in healthcare applications.Among AI(Artificial Intelligence)driven healthcare applications,tumor detection is one of the contemporary researchfields that have become attractive to research-ers.There are several modalities of imaging performed on the brain for the pur-pose of tumor detection.This paper offers a deep learning approach for detecting brain tumors from MR(Magnetic Resonance)images based on changes in the division of the training and testing data and the structure of the CNN(Convolu-tional Neural Network)layers.The proposed approach is carried out on a brain tumor dataset from the National Centre of Image-Guided Therapy,including about 4700 MRI images of ten brain tumor cases with both normal and abnormal states.The dataset is divided into test,and train subsets with a ratio of the training set to the validation set of 70:30.The main contribution of this paper is introdu-cing an optimum deep learning structure of CNN layers.The simulation results are obtained for 50 epochs in the training phase.The simulation results reveal that the optimum CNN architecture consists of four layers.

An evaluation model for smart grids in support of smart cities based on the Hierarchy of Needs Theory

Smart cities depend highly on an intelligent electrical networks to provide a reliable,safe,and clean power supplies.A smart grid achieves such aforementioned power supply by ensuring resilient energy delivery,which presents opportunities to improve the cost-effectiveness of power supply and minimize environmental impacts.A systematic evaluation of the comprehensive benefits brought by smart grid to smart cities can provide necessary theoretical fundamentals for urban planning and construction towards a sustainable energy future.However,most of the present methods of assessing smart cities do not fully take into account the benefits expected from the smart grid.To comprehensively evaluate the development levels of smart cities while revealing the supporting roles of smart grids,this article proposes a model of smart city development needs from the perspective of residents’needs based on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs theory,which serves the primary purpose of building a smart city.By classifying and reintegrating the needs,an evaluation index system of smart grids supporting smart cities was further constructed.A case analysis concluded that smart grids,as an essential foundation and objective requirement for smart cities,are important in promoting scientific urban management,intelligent infrastructure,refined public services,efficient energy utilization,and industrial development and modernization.Further optimization suggestions were given to the city analyzed in the case include strengthening urban management and infrastructure constructions,such as electric vehicle charging facilities and wireless coverage.

Practical Teaching Design of Ecotourism Course under the Construction of Park Cities:A Case Study of Qinglong Lake Ecological Wetland Park

The construction of park cities makes it possible for the popularization of ecotourism,and lays resource conditions and product foundation for the practical teaching of ecotourism course.In this paper,natural ecological resources and ecological leisure and recreation in Qinglong Lake Ecological Wetland Park were analyzed,and a series of practical teaching projects can be designed based on ecological cognition education,ecological responsibility,ecological experience,ecological environmental protection publicity and ecological tourism scenic spot management,as well as the teaching requirements of ecotourism course.