Ultrafine particles (UFPs; diameter less than 100 nm) are ubiquitous in urban air, and an acknowledged risk to human health. Globally, the major source for urban outdoor UFP concentrations is motor traffic. Ongoing trends towards urbanisation and expansion of road traffic are anticipated to further increase population exposure to UFPs. Numerous experimental studies have characterised UFPs in in...

We propose a new paradigm for public participation in urban planning, a field which presents significant challenges for public understanding and participation. Our approach is based on leveraging the rich diversity of meaning associated with cultural gestures, traditions, folklore, and rituals, and using them in augmented reality systems, in order for citizens’ to explore, understand, and commu...

Along with the rise in research on globalization, the concept of globalization has become a subject to a more critical scrutiny. While majority agree that it represents a serious challenge to the state-centrist assumptions of most previous social science, doubts about its newness, inevitability and epoch-making qualities are also being raised. Others argue that the globalization literature neg...

Two years ago, the distribution of the world’s people reached the point at which over half now live in cities. Some social scientists and urban planners (but few political leaders other than those of large municipalities) had seen this change coming. With one group of exceptions, philosophers have paid less attention to the subject. I would like to advance some ideas about how to think philosop...

In order to populate virtual cities, it is necessary to specify the behaviour of dynamic entities such as pedestrians or car drivers. Since a complete mental model based on vision and image processing cannot be constructed in real time using purely geometrical information, higher levels of information are needed in a model of the virtual environment. For example, the autonomous actors of a virt...

Most cities enjoy some autonomy over how they tax their residents, and that autonomy is typically exercised by multiple municipal governments within a given city. In this chapter, we document patterns of city-level taxation across countries, and we review the literature on a number of salient features affecting local tax setting in an urban context. Urban local governments on average raise some...

An empirical regularity designated as the Number-Average Size (NAS) Rule was first identified for the case of Japan by Mori, Nishikimi and Smith [13], and has since been extended to the US by Hsu [6]. This rule asserts a negative log-linear relation between the number and average population size of cities where a given industry is present, i.e., of industry-choice cities. Hence one of its key f...

If rural-urban relationship is treated as an open and unregulated process, cities serve as a sink for rural population, meaning that higher proportions of rural people migrate from rural areas to stay permanently in the cities. This process, which is commonly referred to as rural urban migration can be more evident if the urban system is maintained as an open system. This holds key to interpret...

In this paper, a comparative study was conducted between complex networks representing origin and destination survey data. Similarities were found between the characteristics of the networks of Brazilian cities with networks of foreign cities. Power laws were found in the distributions of edge weights and this scale free behavior can occur due to the economic characteristics of the cities.

Present work is based on the concept of integral safety management of system of systems and it gives the proposal of set of measures into the simultaneously modern concept of communities called “smart cities”. The target is to ensure the safe smart city, i.e. the human community that will ensure the security and the development of their citizens under the conditions of normal, abnormal and crit...