Development of urbanization and rise of cities and urbanism during the last decade have added new dimensions to urban issues and have led to increasing importance of monitoring, conduction of urban development and organization of towns and their surrounding regions. In the meantime, the procedures of favorable life management play the most important role in improvement of human habitats and sus...

The understanding and assessement of urban complexity from the approach of Urban Quality of Life is essential in order to achieve more sustainable cities, as the perception of citizens is incorporated in urban analysis. This new form of urban study must rely on ICT and GIT technologies, since they enable the gathering and managing of a considerable amount of data that will help characterize urb...

Robot navigation in urban environments requires situational reasoning. Given the complexity of the environment and the behavior specified by traffic rules, it is necessary to recognize the current situation to impose the correct traffic rules. In an attempt to manage the complexity of the situational reasoning subsystem, this paper describes a finite state machine model to govern the situationa...

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...

Sensing systems for urban deployments are still in their infancy. An interesting unresolved issue is the precise role assumed by people within such systems. This issue has significant implications on where the complexity and main challenges in building urban sensing system reside. We discuss the two endpoints of the spectrum of conscious human involvement, namely participatory sensing and oppor...

A working group held at the Santa Fe Institute May 28-30, 2013, produced a set of consensus answers to questions about Cahokia, an urban place dating to the 12 and 13 centuries and located in what is today the greater Saint Louis region of Missouri and Illinois. Cahokia is an important urban place for theories of social complexity, as it appears to have emerged in the absence of a supporting re...

(Originally and inspirationally entitled, 'A hybrid geocomputation model for operational land-use and transport simulation.) ABSTRACT There are indications that the current generation of simulation models in practical, operational uses has reached the limits of its usefulness under existing specifications. The relative stasis in operational urban modeling contrasts with simulation efforts in ot...

Urban dynamics deal with spatial organizations where a great complexity of interactions appears. Social and economic aspects interact and environmental objectives are nowadays a major purpose for sustainable urban development. We propose some generic modelling processes able to face with this complexity, in order to simulate the evolution of the city centers. These organizational centers need a...

Urban renewal and sustainable development are two popular issues in both policy agenda and academia. Although their importance has been increasingly recognized, an integrated review covering sustainability, planning, and urban renewal has yet to be produced. Based on 81 journal papers, this paper presents a critical review of recent studies on sustainable urban renewal over the period 1990 to 2...