More than half of the global population lives in urban areas. This will increase to 70% by 2050. Urban growth is most rapid in the developing world, where cities gain an average of five million residents every month. As cities grow in size and population, harmony among the spatial, social and environmental aspects of a city and between their inhabitants becomes of paramount importance. This har...

Taxis play an important role as a transportation alternative in many cities. In developed countries, taxis tend to be used as a substitute for private vehicles by passengers who use the service for convenience reasons or because they do not want to own a car. In developing countries, taxis are often used to supplement inadequate public transport systems based on buses or trains. But the role pl...

This paper aims to provide a new methodological and empirical contribution to the rising literature on the relative performance and benchmarking of large cities in a competitive world. On the basis of a recent detailed database on many achievement criteria of 35 major cities in the world, it seeks to arrive at a relative performance ranking of these cities by using Data Envelopment Analysis (DE...

This paper analyses the current trends in sustainability assessment. After about 15 years from the launch of sustainability assessment tools, focused on buildings evaluation, the paradigm of sustainability assessment tools is changing from the building scale to the built environment scale. Currently European cities and cities around the world are concerned with sustainable development, as well ...

S ince the 1990s, China has undergone astonishing economic growth, and its extensive urbanization has become one of the most striking development signatures anywhere in the world. With the world's largest urban population, China's urbanization experience provides meaningful insights on future urban development in other countries. 1 Because China has an extremely low per-capita land area, constr...

Tuberculosis is one of the infectious diseases with great impact in the world. It affects mainly to young adults in the productive stage of the life and most of the deaths due to this disease occur in developing countries. All the cities are affected, but 85% of the cases occur in Africa (30%) and Asia (55%). In 2009, the WHO reported 9.4 million new cases, 14 million prevalent cases and 1.7 mi...

Historically, urban growth required enough development to grow and transport significant agricultural surpluses or a government effective enough to build an empire. But there has been an explosion of poor mega-cities over the last thirty years. A simple urban model illustrates that in closed economies, agricultural prosperity leads to more urbanization but that in an open economy, urbanization ...

BACKGROUND Future population growth will take place predominantly in cities of the developing world. The impact of urbanization on health is discussed controversially. We review recent research on urban-rural and intra-urban health differences in developing countries and investigate whether a health advantage was found for urban areas. METHODS We systematically searched the databases JSTOR, P...

Many city governments choose to supply more developable land and transportation infrastructure with the hope of attracting people and businesses to their cities. However, like those in Taiwan, major cities worldwide suffer from traffic congestion. This study applies the system thinking logic of the causal loops diagram (CLD) model in the System Dynamics (SD) approach to analyze the issue of tra...