A name cannot change the city and our relationship with places. However, new terms for now-nameless spaces will help to change people’s perception and their capability of seeing what they have never seen before. The geographer’s taxonomic effort to re-designate urban places and typologies involves a political and ideological content. Most urban spaces are unmanageable because they fit neither w...

Urban areas are a complex combination of various land-cover types, and show a variety of land-use structures and spatial layouts. Furthermore, the spectral similarity between built-up areas and bare land is a great challenge when using high spatial resolution remote sensing images to map urban areas, especially for images obtained in dry and cold seasons or high-latitude regions. In this study,...

For some time, individuals in multiple contexts have been moving from rural to urban areas for economic reasons. In recent years, however, young people in Japan have been increasingly turning to rural areas to embrace a slower, lesshectic lifestyle. Despite this interesting development, researchers have thus far failed to identify determinants of residents’ well-being in rural and urban areas i...

Owing to the increasing number of elderly "baby boomers" in Japan, the number of cancer patients is also expected to increase. Approximately 2 million baby boomers from nearby local areas are residing in metropolitan areas; hence, the geographical distribution of cancer patients will probably markedly change. We assessed the expected number of breast cancer (BC) patients in different regions (u...

Urban and rural areas differ in economic, social and environmental terms. Due to the diverging dynamics in urban and rural areas, the social and economic distance between them might increase in the future even more. Rural entrepreneurs with linkages to urban areas are able to bridge the rural–urban divide by accessing some of the urban features, such as knowledge and markets, while at the same ...

To further evaluate the factors influencing public heat and air-quality health, a characterization of how urban areas affect the thermal environment, particularly in terms of the air temperature, is necessary. To assist public health agencies in ranking urban areas in terms of heat stress and developing mitigation plans or allocating various resources, this study characterized urban heat in Cal...

Increasing load of air pollution in urban environment emphasises the need for detailed evaluation of wind characteristics that significantly affect the air quality of urban areas, especially, in large agglomerations. This paper includes analysis of urban wind cli-matology and estimation of wind profiles based on measurements of the new urban 5 climate station located at the E ¨ otvös University...