The character of the residential development occurring at the periphery of a metropolitan area has extensive and diverse economic and social implications. The kinds and prices of housing produced, the population groups served, and the cost and problems of providing public services are all determined by the workings of the development process. An understanding of this process requires an examina...

Promoting settlement compactness and controlling fragmentation are often discussed as important goals towards sustainability. The article deals with the exploration of 111 urban municipalities in Germany. All cities are compared by characteristics of the urban form and typical statistical facts about cities such as population, employees or buildings. Spatial metrics (e.g. contagion index, core-...

Brent D. Ryan first visited Detroit in 1993. Describing this experience, he says: ‘‘The sense of emptiness was overpowering. ... I felt as if I was walking into the ruin of America.’’ In his book ‘‘Design after decline—how America rebuilds shrinking cities,’’ Ryan tries to understand why so many American cities have been losing population, what was and is done to change the fortune of these cit...

A precipitation pattern scheme was combined with Koppen climate classes to form a five-class Global Climate Scheme for Urban Climate Studies (GCS/UCS) that explains observed diurnal variations of urban heat island (UHI) magnitude in different climatic zones. The validity of this scheme was demonstrated using urban/rural micrometeorological field measurements obtained during summer and winter in...

In this article, I examine some of the marketing and sales strategies at Gardenview, a newly established eldercare company that ran few residential facilities in Nanjing, China. There, like elsewhere urban China, projected aging demography was mobilized to push for an industrialization (chanyehua)—marketization professionalization—of eldercare, transforming ideas experience by putting forward n...