Today, smart cities offer many significant benefits. As a result, the city is usually described in highly benign terms, and it often uncritically assumed that its implementation must lead to widescale improvements, at all levels of society. Yet, while undoubtedly advantages, they also carry associated risks dangers which could outweigh This raises important question extent ordinary citizen awar...

Ulsan, South Korea is home to the world’s largest auto production complex and shipyard, and its second biggest petrochemicals combine. Drawing upon Jacobs’ Contextualized Model of Urban-Regional Development, this article shows how Ulsan’s growth path towards becoming one of the world’s Great Industrial Cities was decisively shaped by both global and nested factors. While the weights of the vari...

Urban futures that are more resilient and sustainable require an integrated social-ecological system approach to urban policymaking, planning, management, and governance. In this article, we introduce the Urban Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (URBES) and the Cities and Biodiversity Outlook (CBO) Projects as new social-ecological contributions to research and practice on emerging urban resil...

Cities have developed into the hotspots of human economic activity. From the appearance of the first cities in the Neolithic to 21st century metropolis their impact on the environment has always been apparent. With more people living in cities than in rural environments now it becomes crucial to understand these environmental impacts. With the immergence of megacities in the 20th century and th...

In this paper we explore the relationship between the size of a country, the size of its cities, and the economic performance of the country. In order to do this we integrate three different literature, namely the literature on optimal country size, literature on historical processes of urbanisation and the performance of cities, and literature on the role of multinational firms in the global e...

A lthough urban areas comprise a very small fraction of Earth’s land cover (Schneider et al. 2009), over half of global population live in urban agglomerations. Therefore, it is important to monitor, understand, and predict the modifications occurring in local weather and climate due to urbanization, particularly for the perspective of accurate high-resolution weather and air-quality forecastin...

We use a modern climate model and new estimates of smoke generated by fires in contemporary cities to calculate the response of the climate system to a regional nuclear war between emerging third world nuclear powers using 100 Hiroshima-size bombs (less than 0.03% of the explosive yield of the current global nuclear arsenal) on cities in the subtropics. We find significant cooling and reduction...

Smart devices in combination with other digital tools have occupied the cities transforming citizens’ urban experience. People are connected any time and anywhere with their global identities changing their relation to the local. People live in glocalities, where the local and the global co-exists. Glocalities are unique and constantly changing in a lifelong-learning process in which the citize...