BACKGROUND In almost every major urban city, thousands of people live in overcrowded slums, streets, or other public places without any health services. Bangladesh has experienced one of the highest rates of urban population growth in the last three decades compared to the national population growth rate. The numbers of the urban poor and street-dwellers are likely to increase at least in propo...

Study of urban form is an important area of research in urban planning/design that contributes to our understanding of how cities function and evolve. However, classical approaches are based on very limited observations and inconsistent methods. As an alternative, availability of massive urban data collections such as Open Street Map from the one hand and the recent advancements in machine lear...

The traffic in urban areas is mainly regularized by traffic lights, which may contribute to the unnecessary long waiting times for vehicles if not efficiently configured. This inefficient configuration is unfortunately still the case in a lot of urban areas, where most of the traffic lights are based on a 'fixed cycle' protocol. To improve the traffic light configuration, this paper proposed mo...

Urban heat island (UHI) effects can strengthen heat waves and air pollution episodes. In this study, the dampening impact of urban trees on the UHI during an extreme heat wave in the Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, Maryland, metropolitan area is examined by incorporating trees, soil, and grass into the coupled Weather Research and Forecasting model and an urban canopy model (WRF-UCM). By param...

BACKGROUND Although a number of environmental and policy interventions to promote physical activity are being widely used, there is sparse systematic information on the most effective approaches to guide population-wide interventions. METHODS We reviewed studies that addressed the following environmental and policy strategies to promote physical activity: community-scale urban design and land...

The main contribution of our work is in combining the methods for parametric urban design of highly specialized software such as CityEngine and general-purpose parametric modeling platform such as Grasshopper. Our work facilitates and prompts the use of parametric tools by architects and planners for urban design. In this paper we present a custom grasshopper component for street network genera...