urban-studies

IntroductionUnder the double pressure of climate change and rapid urbanization, the degradation of the urban thermal environment has become a major obstacle to regional sustainable development. As a manufacturing-leading metropolis, Dongguan has undergone a drastic land use transformation and ecological space compression since 2000, potentially undermining its urban cooling system.MethodsIn this …

This traditional neighbourhood ‘across the river’ is where the city’s creatives are heading as the centre heats up Madrid’s current boomtown dynamics are driving the city centre way upmarket, pushing the average punter to outer barrios in search of cheaper rent. As seen in New York and elsewhere, the creative class is moving too – crossing the River Manzanares to open studios in the former factor…

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, Published online: 04 May 2026; doi:10.1057/s41599-026-07357-y From evaluation to planning: integrating quantity–quality in the spatial equity assessment and optimization of urban green spaces

After decades in the shadows, the residents of this historic quarter came together to launch local businesses and make the area an attractive proposition once more My favourite way to enter Rione Sanità is by elevator: descending from a bridge into cobblestoned streets buzzing with mopeds and flanked by opulent but decaying 18th-century palazzi. Through the grand doorways of these once noble pala…

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, Published online: 02 May 2026; doi:10.1057/s41599-026-07402-w Does China’s new-type urbanization narrow the urban-rural human well-being gap? Evidence from the provincial analysis

As Covid-era funding dries up and bus services are cut, a food insecurity crisis is brewing from Tennessee to Rhode Island Zen’Yari Winters’ job, at a pet shop in East Memphis, Tennessee , should be a 20-minute trip from her house. She leaves herself three hours to get there. “The bus is always, always late,” she said – if it shows up at all. It’s not just her work commute that’s affected by the …

Groups want to look at impact of World Cup on city Vancouver will host seven World Cup matches Sign up for the World Behind The Cup newsletter Community groups have planned “multiple events” across Vancouver on Thursday to coincide with the Fifa Congress being held in the city ahead of this summer’s World Cup. Multiple organizations will collaborate to “interrupt the narrative that the World Cup …

There are many ways you could measure the health of a city — its air quality index, its population growth, the number of jobs it added last year. My favorite is one not often high on the priority lists of city governments in the US: How safe is it to walk?  The US has the […]

U.S. traffic deaths have remained at about 40,000 a year since 2000, but pedestrian and bicyclist fatalities have risen 68%. Arterial road design - higher speeds and wider lanes - have long been blamed for this rise. But new research says this explanation is incomplete, offering new insight into why the U.S. has struggled to reduce traffic fatalities. Analyzing 222 miles of Florida arterials, fin…

Haris Doukas warns that with 700,000 residents and 8 million tourists, people are being pushed out of their neighbourhoods In the heart of ancient Athens, on narrow streets and around archaeological sites, visitor groups appear to be everywhere, snaking their way behind tour guides. Previously, officials would have welcomed such scenes. But for Haris Doukas, the socialist mayor who is determined …

If elevated networks reveal a city that increasingly walks above the street, the podium–tower is the typology that often makes that condition feel inevitable. Across Southeast Asia , podium–tower projects have become one of the dominant languages of metropolitan growth : a system that concentrates housing, jobs, retail, and transit connections into highly legible and managed parcels. From an urba…

Researchers analyzed hourly ridership at 10 major subway stations between 2023 and 2025. Using a statistical technique called vine copula modeling, they examined how stations' ridership moves together under different weather conditions rather than treating each station as an isolated case.

Caresets and the Experimental Public Co-Design of Tomorrow Aydemir, Deniz Participatory planning can help cities make better policy and planning decisions. An effective participatory planning framework must represent complex urban systems (compositional), compute Pareto-optimal solutions (computational), and incorporate residents into the decision-making process (collaborative). We build a mathe…

Shared Autonomous Micro-Mobility: Evaluating Fleet Performance, Operational Strategies, and Sustainability Coretti Sánchez, Naroa Autonomous vehicles (AVs) have long been anticipated to revolutionize transportation, offering promises of effortless, safe, and congestion-free travel. Yet, concerns remain that AVs may exacerbate the car-dependency that has dominated the transportation landscape for …

Bridging the Logics of Technocracy and Communitarianism: Translational Micropractices in Housing and Urban Development Gade, Anisha Our current, entrenched housing crisis requires attending to frictions and conflicting agendas between resident groups and developers of many stripes. Each of these sets of actors maintains distinctive aims, knowledge-creation methods, measures of success and relatio…

Turning free-to-use data into a hypothesis-ready dataset The post Using Causal Inference to Estimate the Impact of Tube Strikes on Cycling Usage in London appeared first on Towards Data Science .

Honduras is the second-largest country in Central America , both in territory and population. Today, its urban fabric remains heavily influenced by modernist principles from the 1970s that prioritised high-speed arterial corridors and automobile-dependent "point-to-point" mobility. In addition, the country faced many challenges regarding public safety during the 2010s, which contributed to creati…

Explore the concept of smart city data spaces and their role in enhancing urban living through data integration. The post Trends in 2026 for smart cities – from technology led to insights driven appeared first on Capgemini .

Female mayors have had notable successes in making transport in urban areas benefit everyone, not just a wealthy few According to the UN 68% of the global population will be urban dwellers by mid-century. Urbanisation at this rate, unprecedented in modern times, means cities are facing an equally unprecedented convergence of crises, from a shortage of affordable housing to increased traffic conge…

Cities today are at a crossroads. Rapid urbanisation, changing consumption patterns, and rising populations have led to an unprecedented surge in solid waste generation. What was once considered a local municipal issue has now evolved into a global sustainability challenge.