“When public spaces are successful [...] they will increase opportunities to participate in communal activit y”,(Carr, Francis, Rivlin, & Stone, 1993). The city of Cairo has an enormous number of liveable streets that welcomes cultural events; however, many of such streets lack the design principles that sustain and enhance the occurrence of those events. Trials to investigate and upgrade the u...

A successful urban planning and design solution ought to present a comfortable setting for its pedestrians inside urban canyons, because it is fundamental to encourage a good quality urban life and promote health and wellbeing of humans. Recent findings have demonstrated that microclimate inside urban canyons has substantial influence upon the outdoor thermal comfort at the street level .This s...

Among possibilities of remote sensing for urban uses, extraction of street networks is an important topic. A good knowledge of the street network is necessary for urban planning, map updating or estimation of atmospheric pollution. Moreover, an assisted street extraction from remotely sensed data can highly help cities which do not have a cartography of their road network. However, if road extr...

The presence of vast numbers of unsupervised and unprotected children is a phenomenon that is common throughout Latin America, and in few places are the street children more visible, and reviled, than in Brazil. Estimates of their numbers in Brazil have ranged from 7 to 17 million, but more informed assessments suggest that between 7 and 8 million children, ages 5 to 18, live and/or work on the...

Mental representations of spatial knowledge are organized hierarchically. Among people familiar with an urban environment, common spatial knowledge from these spatial mental representations enables successful communication of place and route descriptions, consisting of hierarchically-ordered references to prominent spatial features, such as streets. The more prominent a street is, the more like...

The Global Positioning System (GPS) is unreliable in dense urban areas, known as urban canyons, which have tall buildings or narrow streets. This is because the buildings block the signals from many of the satellites. Combining GPS with other Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) significantly increases the availability of direct line-of-sight signals. Modelling is used to demonstrate that...

Many complex networks erase parts of their geometry as they develop, so that their evolution is difficult to quantify and trace. Here we introduce entropy measures for quantifying the complexity of street orientations and length variations within planar networks and apply them to the street networks of 41 British cities, whose geometric evolution over centuries can be explored. The results show...

While two-dimensional maps exist for most urban areas, the descriptions may be incomplete or out of date, or of insufficient resolution for the given application and features such a roads are not described as 3-D objects. Most of the past work on road detection has concentrated on either low resolution, primarily rural roads (usually producing “spaghetti” roads with no notion of intersections),...

■ Abstract This review discusses research on the urban street gang after the 1960s, the period in which social scientists began to conceptualize the gang outside of the social-problems framework. Street-gang research has changed dramatically in the past three decades in accordance with general shifts in sociological research, including developments in gender studies, economic sociology, and rac...