Maya and Aztec cities exhibited a distinctive kind of low-density urbanism common in ancient Mesoamerica. The non-monumental components of these cities differed from the high-density ancient and historical cities in the Old World that are often considered the norm for pre-modern urbanism. Distinctive features include the practice of intensive agricultural cultivation within urban settlements, r...

This paper takes for granted the structural urbanisation trend in our world. It argues that there is a global competition among world cities in different parts of our planet. It aims to map out the relative disparities among a preselected set of major global cities by offering a benchmark analysis of these cities on the basis of a recently completed comparative study on their socioeconomic ‘pow...

Cities are home to more than half of the world population. Cities have been the centers of economic and social developments, as well as sources of many major environmental problems. Cities are created and maintained by the most intense form of human-nature interactions. Cities are spatially extended, complex adaptive systems—which we call landscapes. The future of humanity will increasingly rel...

Cities are perhaps the larger and most complex artefacts created by human activity. The characterisation of an object or system as an artefact assumes the existence of some form of intentionality behind its creation. Complexity science has been used to understand the formation of cities as products of self-organization and evolution, but it has paid little attention to the role of intentionalit...

Can you imagine a city that feels, understands, and cares about your wellbeing? Future cities will reshape human behavior in countless ways. New strategies and models of urban spaces are required for creating future cities to properly respond to human activity, environmental conditions, and market dynamics. Persuasive urban systems will play an important role in making cities more livable and r...

In the early 1990s, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (U.S. EPA) started a grant program to assist communities redevelop brownfields, which are abandoned or underutilized sites that have real or perceived contamination. In addition to determining if the communities receiving the grants were the most distressed cities in the United States, we also evaluate the U.S. EPA program in terms of...

There is much enthusiasm currently about the possibilities created by new and more extensive sources of data to better understand and manage cities. Here, I explore how big data can be useful in urban planning by formalizing the planning process as a general computational problem. I show that, under general conditions, new sources of data coordinated with urban policy can be applied following f...

Cities the world over are highly fragmented. The fragmentation of the built-up area cities by the open spaces interpenetrating them is a key attribute of urban-sprawl, and sprawl as fragmentation, as distinct from sprawl as lower-density development, is now a universal feature of cities. Using satellite images and census data for 1990 and 2000 for a global sample of 120 cities, we find that cit...

Medieval European urbanization presents a line of continuity between earlier cities and modern European urban systems. Yet, many of the spatial, political and economic features of medieval European cities were particular to the Middle Ages, and subsequently changed over the Early Modern Period and Industrial Revolution. There is a long tradition of demographic studies estimating the population ...

Can you imagine a city that feels, understands, and cares about your wellbeing? Future cities will reshape human behavior in countless ways. New strategies and models are required for future urban spaces to properly respond to human activity, environmental conditions, and market dynamics. Persuasive urban systems will play an important role in making cities more livable and resource-efficient b...