Urban Science  

Francesco Cappai, Daniel Forgues and Mathias Glaus

The use of tools to measure the degree of sustainability of cities is the approach that receives the most attention in developed countries. However, studies of evaluation tools at the neighborhood level reveal that there are many weaknesses in the most wi... see more

Chryssanthi (Christy) Petropoulou

This study refers to urban social movements, creative social resistances, and the collectives that are emerging today in “self-constructed popular neighborhoods” (“barrios de auto-construcción popular” in Latin-American, Spanish bibliography; “quartiers d... see more

Tammy E. Parece and James B. Campbell

The urban heat island effect is commonly defined as the thermal differences between cooler rural and warmer urban areas, but it also refers to microclimatic differences within an urban area that arises from varied combinations of land cover related to dif... see more

Stella Capoccia, Michael Masters and Scott Risser

This research investigates the relationships between human knowledge, behavior and risk as they relate to urban chicken husbandry in the United States. Concern over zoonotic diseases has been on the rise, especially with increasing contact between birds a... see more

Veronique Theriault, Ryan Vroegindewey, Amidou Assima and Naman Keita

As in many sub-Saharan African countries, Mali is experiencing an unprecedented rate of urbanization and, with it, changes to its agri-food system. As more people live in urban areas, the demand for processed foods has been increasing rapidly. These chang... see more

Maria Gernert, Hamid El Bilali and Carola Strassner

This review explores the current evidence on the role and success factors of grassroots initiatives in sustainability transitions, with special attention given to social innovations and the transformation of urban food systems, a field that is still rathe... see more

Amy Richmond, Ian Myers and Hafisa Namuli

Urbanization increasingly means that the poorest, most vulnerable people move into large, highly distressed informal areas. These areas exhibit high levels of poverty and inequality. This paper uses Kampala, Uganda to identify drivers of vulnerability in ... see more

Anne Caroline Krefis, Matthias Augustin, Katharina Heinke Schlünzen, Jürgen Oßenbrügge and Jobst Augustin

In times of rapid urbanization, health and well-being of citizens is increasingly recognized as a challenge. A remarkable amount of research on relations between urban environments and health or well-being has been conducted. To get an insight about the e... see more

Malte Von Szombathely, Myriam Albrecht, Jobst Augustin, Benjamin Bechtel, Isabel Dwinger, Philine Gaffron, Anne Caroline Krefis, Jürgen Oßenbrügge and Anke Strüver

Living in cities offers many benefits and thus more and more people are living in urban areas. However, the concentration of human activities also creates environmental stressors with severe influence on people’s health and well-being. Noise is an environ... see more

Joerg Koenigstorfer

The study aims to assess whether, and how, provision of information about air quality along inner-city roads influences individuals’ intentions to walk further away from traffic-dense roads. In an experiment, German residents (n = 597) were either exposed... see more

Serena Falasca and Gabriele Curci

The Urban Heat Island (UHI) is a well-known phenomenon concerning an increasing percentage of the world’s population due to the growth rates of metropolitan areas. Given the health and economic implications of UHIs, several mitigation techniques are being... see more

Alexandros Ph. Lagopoulos

Land-use planning is currently characterised by three weaknesses: a relative lack of systematic analysis of the theoretical and technical aspects of planning, a neglect of methodology and a lack of interest in clarifying key concepts. The present paper at... see more

Anastasios Polydoros, Thaleia Mavrakou and Constantinos Cartalis

Land Surface Temperature (LST) is a key parameter for the estimation of urban fluxes as well as for the assessment of the presence and strength of the surface urban heat island (SUHI). In an urban environment, LST depends on the way the city has been plan... see more

Sarita Maharjan, Naoki Tsurusaki and Prasanna Divigalpitiya

The increasing threat of transportation energy insecurity, environmental issues and public health issues have led to a growing body of research that looks at the potential contribution of urban planning in reducing travel energy consumption. The sustainab... see more

Julie Bulteau, Thierry Feuillet and Rémy Le Boennec

Innovative solutions have been implemented to promote sustainable mobility in urban areas. In the Nantes area (northwestern part of France), alternatives to single-occupant car use have increased in the past few years. In the urban area, there is an effic... see more

Donagh Horgan and Branka Dimitrijevic

Social innovation—while not a new practice in itself—has re-emerged since the global financial crisis in 2008 as an approach to solving our collective intractable global challenges. Despite its renewed popularity, there is no common definition for the phe... see more

Sarah Wiesner, Benjamin Bechtel, Jana Fischereit, Verena Gruetzun, Peter Hoffmann, Bernd Leitl, Diana Rechid, K. Heinke Schlünzen and Simon Thomsen

The local climate in cities differs from the one in rural areas, most prominently characterized by increased surface and air temperatures, known as the “(surface) urban heat island”. As climate has changed and continues to change in all areas of the world... see more

John J. Lagrosa IV, Wayne C. Zipperer and Michael G. Andreu

Urban landscapes are heterogeneous mosaics that develop via significant land-use and land cover (LULC) change. Current LULC models project future landscape patterns, but generally avoid urban landscapes due to heterogeneity. To project LULC change for an ... see more

Caitlin Cunningham and Mohammad Gharipour

Wastewater treatment systems in urban areas of the United States have reached a critical replacement age. From century-old, deteriorating systems raw sewage overflows into basements, streets and surface waters. In economically depressed cities, sewage ove... see more

Peter Hoffmann, Jana Fischereit, Stefan Heitmann, K. Heinke Schlünzen and Ingenuin Gasser

As a first step in modeling health-related urban well-being (UrbWellth), a mathematical model is constructed that dynamically simulates heat stress exposure of commuters in an idealized city. This is done by coupling the Simple Urban Radiation Model (SURM... see more

Ron Mahabir, Arie Croitoru, Andrew T. Crooks, Peggy Agouris and Anthony Stefanidis

Slums are a global urban challenge, with less developed countries being particularly impacted. To adequately detect and map them, data is needed on their location, spatial extent and evolution. High- and very high-resolution remote sensing imagery has eme... see more

Urban Science Editorial Office

David A. King and Lauren Ames Fischer

In recent decades, U.S. cities have invested in rail transit for reasons beyond supplying alternatives to driving. Increasingly, rail investments are specifically promoted to reshape the built environment for property-led economic development. In these ca... see more

Enrica Papa and António Ferreira

Qunshan Zhao, Jiachuan Yang, Zhi-Hua Wang and Elizabeth A. Wentz

Urban green infrastructure, especially shade trees, offers benefits to the urban residential environment by mitigating direct incoming solar radiation on building facades, particularly in hot settings. Understanding the impact of different tree locations ... see more

Kai Liu

The metropolitan area can be regarded as a multi-functional structure consisting of plural coordinated urban nucleuses. This study aims to clarify the characteristics of urban nucleuses and a spatiotemporal pattern of human mobility in the Manila metropol... see more

Chunzhu Wei and Thomas Blaschke

Impervious surface areas (ISA) are heavily influenced by urban structure and related structural features. We examined the effects of object-based impervious surface spatial pattern analysis on land surface temperature and population density in Guangzhou, ... see more

Darrel Ramsey-Musolf

For more than 20 years, scholars have assessed a plan’s content to determine the plan’s quality, with quality serving as a proxy for planning efficacy. However, scholars rarely examine the relationship between a plan’s quality and the plan’s intended outc... see more