This paper describes the urban design of the digital city called AlphaWorld. AlphaWorld is a digital community created in 1995 and accessed daily through the internet by thousands of users. Unlike other digital communities, AlphaWorld’s users may also settle land and construct objects within the world. The design and content of these constructions are determined autonomously, and the cumulative...

Anthropogenic activity interacts with urban form and inner metabolic processes, ultimately impacting urban sustainability. China’s cities have experienced many environmental issues and metabolic disturbances since the nation-wide market-oriented “reform and opening-up” policy was adopted in the 1980s. To analyze urban reform policy impacts and metabolism sustainability at a settlement scale, th...

Rural settlement in previously sparsely occupied areas of the Brazilian Amazon has been associated with high levels of forest loss and unclear long-term social outcomes. We focus here on the micro-level processes in one settlement area to answer the question of how settler and farm endowments affect household poverty. We analyze the extent to which poverty is sensitive to changes in natural cap...

In the Monte desert, increasing population density, changing land rights and infrastructure may encourage livestock activity, with unknown consequences on ecosystems. Factors that influence livestock settlement distribution may affect ecosystem degradation. We hypothesize that surface and groundwater availability influence livestock settlements distribution. We evaluated this hypothesis with a ...

Projects to secure land rights for the urban poor have been implemented in Sub-Saharan Africa for over 30 years. A recurrent issue in such projects is the provision of sustainable land tenure for beneficiaries. Commonly, individual titles with restrictions on resale have been used. Despite these, recipients often sell their land rights to more affluent city dwellers exacerbating the growth of s...

EuroAmerican land use and its legacies have transformed forest structure and composition across the United States (US). More accurate reconstructions of historical states are critical to understanding the processes governing past, current, and future forest dynamics. Gridded (8x8km) estimates of pre-settlement (1800s) forests from the upper Midwestern US (Minnesota, Wisconsin, and most of Michi...

This study analyzed the spatiotemporal pattern of settlement expansion in Abuja, Nigeria, one of West Africa’s fastest developing cities, using geoinformation and ancillary datasets. Three epochs of Land-use Land-cover (LULC) maps for 1986, 2001 and 2014 were derived from Landsat images using support vector machines (SVM). Accuracy assessment (AA) of the LULC maps based on the pixel count resul...

The spatial patterns of rural settlements are important for understanding the drivers of land use change and the relationship between human activity and environmental processes. It has been suggested that the clustering of houses decreases the negative effects on the environment and promotes the development of the countryside, but few empirical studies have quantified the spatial distribution p...

Aim The aim of this study was to document changes in forest composition, structure and distribution across Massachusetts, USA, from the time of European settlement (seventeenth century) to the present, and to investigate environmental and historical influences on regional patterns of variation. Location The study area encompasses the State of Massachusetts (69.9–73.5 E, 41.3– 42.9 N), a 21,000-...

Project developer in the domain of land settlement project are involved with many stakeholders and are usually overflown by data relative to technical, economic and social issues. This paper contributes to the necessary multi-scale approach challenge and we propose a holistic framework that enables to describe the development process of land settlement project and assess its sustainability. Itw...