quality of urban areas and improvement of it have always been considered as one of the main issues in the process of urbanization. it might be possible to consider this importance as the result of fundamental changes in intellectual patterns during the past two decades in one side and its proposal in all aspects of human life on the other side though this is one of the main influential concepts...

Contemporary cities are thick with infrastructure. In recognition of this fact a great deal of recent work within urban studies and urban geography has focused on transformations in the governance and ownership of infrastructural elements within cities. Less attention has been paid to the practices through which urban infrastructures are inhabited by urban dwellers. Yet in all sorts of ways inf...

This article addresses the problem of urban street mapping from new high resolution satellite images. The proposed algorithm is divided in two sequential modules: a topologically correct graph of the street network is first extracted, and streets are then extracted as surface elements. The graph of the network is extracted by a following algorithm which minimizes a cost function. The surface ex...

Urban street patterns form planar networks whose empirical properties cannot be accounted for by simple models such as regular grids or Voronoi tesselations. Striking statistical regularities across different cities have been recently empirically found, suggesting that a general and detail-independent mechanism may be in action. We propose a simple model based on a local optimization process co...

Drivers in urban neighborhoods who patrol streets, seeking inexpensive on-street parking create a significant fraction of measured traffic congestion. The pool of drivers patrolling at any time can be modeled as a queue, where ‘queue service’ is the act of parking in a recently vacated parking space and queue discipline is SIRO – Service In Random Order. We develop a queueing model of such driv...

Quality of urban areas and improvement of it have always been considered as one of the main issues in the process of urbanization. It might be possible to consider this importance as the result of fundamental changes in intellectual patterns during the past two decades in one side and its proposal in all aspects of human life on the other side though this is one of the main influential concepts...

BACKGROUND The urban soundscape, which represents the totality of noise in the urban setting, is formed from a wide range of sources. One of the most ubiquitous and least studied of these is street-level (i.e., sidewalk) noise. Mainly associated with vehicular traffic, street level noise is hard to ignore and hard to escape. It is also potentially dangerous, as excessive noise from any source i...

BACKGROUND Street-scale urban design policies are recommended to increase physical activity in communities. Our purpose was to examine U.S. public support for local street-scale urban design features and policies. METHODS Analysis is based on a cross-sectional national sample of adults (n = 4682) participating in the 2006 HealthStyles mail survey. RESULTS About 57% of adults rated local str...