Growing populations and rapid worldwide urbanization are recognized as constituting one of the most complex processes in the world and have raised concerns about the sustainability of cities. Sustainable development, a widely accepted strategic framework in city planning, singles out urban green spaces as a primary solution for addressing these issues. Growing empirical evidences indicate that ...

How were cities distributed globally in the past? How many people lived in these cities? How did cities influence their local and regional environments? In order to understand the current era of urbanization, we must understand long-term historical urbanization trends and patterns. However, to date there is no comprehensive record of spatially explicit, historic, city-level population data at t...

Understanding the economic effects of long-term and gradual climate change, when people have time to adapt, is a central question in the current debate on climate change. Empirical evidence, however, is scarce. I study the economic effects of climate change over a period of 250 years during the Little Ice Age, a historical episode of climate change, between 1500 and 1750. Historians have argued...

During the last decade, many European digital cities applied ICT to improve the local public sphere, reinforce local democracy, support local communities and increase social participation. Different policies of a variety of stakeholders led to a wide variation of designs and functionality, content, main actors, aims and philosophy, organization, and use and users. To build a useful and sustaina...

The spatial division of cities into residential zones is a universal feature of urban life from the earliest cities to the present. I propose a two-level classification of such zones that archaeologists can use to analyze preindustrial cities. Neighborhoods are small areas of intensive face-to-face social interaction, whereas districts are larger areas that serve as administrative units within ...

Drawing from three phases of a social research programme between 2002 and 2008, this paper proposes a framework for underpinning the development of urban water transitions policy and city-scale benchmarking at the macro scale. Through detailed historical, contemporary and futures research involving Australian cities, a transitions framework is proposed, presenting a typology of six city states,...