• Most of the urban poor in developing countries spend their lives in insecure, poorly paid jobs • They participate in economic growth, and adjust to economic change, through urban labour markets • Pro-poor urbanisation requires labour intensive growth, supported by labour protection, flexible land use regulation and investments in basic services U rbanisation is taking place on a massive scale...

• Most of the urban poor in developing countries spend their lives in insecure, poorly paid jobs • They participate in economic growth, and adjust to economic change, through urban labour markets • Pro-poor urbanisation requires labour intensive growth, supported by labour protection, flexible land use regulation and investments in basic services U rbanisation is taking place on a massive scale...

We present a method for interactive procedural generation of parcels within the urban modeling pipeline. Our approach performs a partitioning of the interior of city blocks using user-specified subdivision attributes and style parameters. Moreover, our method is both robust and persistent in the sense of being able to map individual parcels from before an edit operation to after an edit operati...

The conversion of Earth's land surface to urban uses is one of the most irreversible human impacts on the global biosphere. It drives the loss of farmland, affects local climate, fragments habitats, and threatens biodiversity. Here we present a meta-analysis of 326 studies that have used remotely sensed images to map urban land conversion. We report a worldwide observed increase in urban land a...

Regional planners and decision makers are teaming up with data providers and urban growth modelers in the ongoing effort to map historic extents of urbanization, forecast future extents, and predict impacts on the local environment. Spatial data layers that are nationally consistent across space and time are valuable input variables for some predictive models, but can be of limited use because ...

The urban environment characterized by various stresses poses challenges to trees. In particular, water deficits and high temperatures can cause immense drought stress to urban trees, resulting in reduced growth and die-off. Drought-tolerant species are expected to be resilient to these conditions and are therefore advantageous over other, more susceptible species. However, the drought toleranc...

This paper explores the development of an integrated urban-ecological simulation framework by linking two lines of urban and ecological simulation modeling. We propose a framework for linking the UrbanSim Model and the Urban Ecosystem Model, and describe the structure of the proposed approach. The model is object-oriented and links urban actors to ecological processes through a disaggregate spa...

The dynamic variability of weather conditions and complex geometry and semantics of urban domain impose significant constraints on the empirical study of urban microclimate. Thus, numerical modeling is being increasingly deployed to capture the very dynamics of urban microclimate. In this context, the present paper illustrates the basic processes of calibrating and preparing a numerical model f...

Cities are complex systems that arise through a complex interaction of many factors. As a result, the mechanism of urban growth and its interaction with social, economic and environmental systems are still poorly understood. Policy makers and planners often face tremendous difficulties in decision making with a lack of vision into the future of urban growth. Due to the complexity nature, cities...