A primary impact of urbanization on the local climate is evident in the phenomenon recognized as the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect. This urban thermal anomaly can increase the health risks of vulnerable populations to heat waves. The surface UHI results from emittance in the longer wavelengths of the thermal infrared; however, there are also urban anomalies that are detectable from radiance in...

The Consumer Price Index (CPI) measures the average change over time in the prices paid by urban consumers for a representative market basket of consumer goods and services. The CPI for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) represents the spending habits of about 87 percent of the population of the United States. The CPI for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers (CPI-W), a subset of the CPI-U populatio...

The aim of this study was to quantify the error associated with different accessibility methods commonly used by public health researchers. Network distances were calculated from each household to the nearest GP our study area in the UK. Household level network distances were assigned as the gold standard and compared to alternate widely used accessibility methods. Four spatial aggregation unit...

Urban agriculture (UA) has been drawing a lot of attention recently for several reasons: the majority of the world population has shifted from living in rural to urban areas; the environmental impact of agriculture is a matter of rising concern; and food insecurity, especially the accessibility of food, remains a major challenge. UA has often been proposed as a solution to some of these issues,...

The populations of the Middle East and Africa are increasing rapidly, contributing to rapid urban growth. This paper describes a two-year action research process involving diverse public, private, and community stakeholders. The actions aimed to develop and strengthen the capabilities of three Mediterranean cities (Marrakech, Morocco; Sin el Fil, Lebanon; and Bodrum, Turkey) in managing and pro...

Patterns of urban development across the United States are changing natural landscapes and their dynamics. Although scholars in landscape ecology are increasingly studying the relationship between urban development and ecological conditions, few have directly addressed the question of how patterns of urban development affect landscape dynamics. In this paper we first propose that landscape patt...

The chapter presents a spatial interaction entropy model that addresses the dynamics of urban growth using sites from the Late Uruk period in southern Mesopotamia as examples. The model addresses to what extent geography, transportation, and factors that make locations attractive for trade and settlement affect why some settlements grow while others stabilize or diminish in size through time. T...

If rural-urban relationship is treated as an open and unregulated process, cities serve as a sink for rural population, meaning that higher proportions of rural people migrate from rural areas to stay permanently in the cities. This process, which is commonly referred to as rural urban migration can be more evident if the urban system is maintained as an open system. This holds key to interpret...

In the early 1980s, suburbanization and periurbanization processes became widespread in major cities within Spain. An interesting stage of returning to city centers commenced that materialized in the start of rehabilitation policies within historic centers. These processes coincided with weak population growth, an acute industrial economic crisis, and new democratic policies in municipal counci...

Regional and Sub-Regional Population Dynamic Population Process in Urban Areas European Population Conference 21-24 June, 2006 Urbanization is an index of transformation from traditional rural economies to modern industrial one. It is a long term process. This paper endeavors to illuminate on the process of urbanization in India over a century with emphasis on level, tempo of urbanization and u...