Assessing parallel urban dynamics through local-scale morphological and activity indicators in German and Spanish cities

Bangladesh has a population density of about 1350 people per square kilometre and ranks eighth among the most populous countries, with a population of 175.7–176.4 million. Despite being one of the fastest-developing countries, Bangladesh struggles to meet energy demand due to its heavy reliance on imported fossil fuels, leading to higher costs during the summer. In contrast, both developed and developing countries in the present day are shifting towards renewable energy sources. This study aimed to assess the potential energy generation from waste streams in major cities of Bangladesh. Currently, the major cities in Bangladesh generate over 16,672 tons of waste daily, of which 87.7% consists of Municipal Solid Waste. The Dhaka City Corporation generates more than 44% of the country's total waste. The results showed that 39 MW and 83 MW of electrical power could be generated, respectively, using incineration and anaerobic digestion. The levelized cost of energy (LCOE) assessment displays that the cost of electricity generated from incineration and anaerobic power plants is 0.0851 USD/kWh (10.30 Tk/kWh) and 0.02874 USD/kWh (3.45 Tk/kWh), respectively, which still have a substantial difference compared to existing fossil fuel-based generated and imported power plants. In 2026, Bangladesh's total electricity consumption is expected to reach approximately 20,000 MW. A portion of this enormous demand may be met by waste-to-energy-based power plants that utilize waste as their primary fuel. • Major cities in Bangladesh generate approximately 16,672 tons of waste per day. • Municipal solid waste constitutes 87.7% of the total waste. • The Dhaka City Corporation generates approximately 44% of the country's total waste. • Using incineration and anaerobic digestion methods, respectively, 39 MW and 83 MW of electrical power could be generated. • The major cities in Bangladesh might generate over 212,925 tons of waste per day in 2050.

Measuring urban bilateral job-housing balance based on big data: A case study of multiple cities in China

Novel smart grids applications for energy management and traceability in heritage cities: Case study for city of Cuenca, Ecuador

Aircraft technology evolved steadily in the last half century and increased the route length between origin and destination, as well as the number of passengers carried. The early technical focus on large aircraft, especially the Boeing 747, had a geographic impact, as hub-hub services grew and smaller markets were by-passed. Concern with fuel costs, along with an acknowledgment of the demand for direct services to smaller cities, led aircraft design to favour twin-engine wide-body aircraft. This began with the Airbus 300 and Boeing 767, was refined in the Boeing 777 and Airbus 330 and developed further in the Boeing 787 and Airbus 350. Global-scale analysis suggested these mid-sized aircraft would shift the geography of air services away from hubs to point-to-point services between a wider range of cities. This paper sharpens the focus on this observation by exploring the services available at a case study city over the period 2000–2024. Results show that a simple pattern of connections to a few hubs in 2000 expanded to a large number of destinations, many at very long distances. Over the same period, the initial hubs cities still stand out with large seat availability and the highest frequencies. These results show that hub services and direct inter-city connections coexist as the demand for air connections is spread across a wide array of destinations. This study acknowledges some unique circumstances surrounding the case study city and suggests a global-scale analysis of the impact of twin-engine wide-body aircraft is needed.

ABSTRACT This article presents LTS-BikePlan, a data-driven tool based on the Level of Traffic Stress (LTS) methodology, which we developed to improve the planning of bicycle infrastructure and assess the comfort and safety of cyclists. This application provides essential insights into the cyclability of cities (particularly in Italy, where it was developed) by integrating data from public administration sources and GIS resources, including OpenStreetMap (OSM) and the Digital Elevation Model. We showcase LTS-BikePlan use in a range of cycling situations with case studies in the Italian cities of Trento and Bolzano. This study addresses the limited integration of stress-level mapping and safety analysis in current planning tools and demonstrates that many routes and intersections have intermediate traffic stress levels (LTS 3), making it difficult for beginning cyclists to navigate dense traffic and diverse topography. In contrast, urban and residential environments tend to have lower stress levels. However, the findings show that low-stress situations are not always associated with fewer collisions, emphasizing the need of high-quality infrastructure in improving the safety of urban cycling safety. They take a novel approach to identifying critical high-risk areas with high collision potential in low-stress zones, employing predictive models for infrastructure improvement and collision risk assessment to advance urban cycling research and assist policymakers in improving cycling safety and sustainability.

Rising global temperatures and urbanization have intensified the demand for sustainable cooling solutions, particularly in hot and arid climates such as Iraq, where conventional air conditioning exacerbates energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. Evaporative cooling provides an energy-efficient method to reduce ambient temperatures through water evaporation. However, their effectiveness is highly dependent on local climatic conditions. The study objectives were to provide practical insights into the application and limitations of direct evaporative cooling in real-world Iraqi circumstances, beyond technical modeling. A climate-responsive assessment framework for evaporative cooling systems by combining the Köppen climate classification with localized thermal comfort analysis was developed. The effectiveness of evaporative cooling for sustainable thermal comfort was assessed through case studies in major Iraqi cities (Baghdad, Basrah, and Mosul) from 1st May to 30th September under two scenarios: (i) air cooled via direct evaporative processes; and (ii) unconditioned outdoor air delivered through mechanical ventilation. Various modules of the simulation software were used to model hourly air conditions under these scenarios. The results demonstrated that Basrah had the lowest thermal comfort under mechanical ventilation circumstances, with only 6% of summer hours falling into the comfort zone which made it the most vulnerable city in Iraq. Evaporative cooling substantially enhanced the number of thermally comfortable hours during peak summer conditions in Baghdad, Basrah, and Mosul by 41.28%, 54.48%, and 30.55%, respectively, in comparison to scenarios utilizing mechanical ventilation. Integrating climate responsive design and thermal comfort indices through evaporative cooling enhanced energy efficiency and sustainable building performance.

Spatial estimation of on-road mobile emissions during morning hours using machine learning: A case study in Panama city

Estimating health cost savings of EV adoption in India: a tier-II city case study

ABSTRACT Formal national policy documents are key instruments for enhancing state governance capacity. Differential textual adjustments made by local governments at different administrative tiers to central documents – i.e. policy content reproduction – can lead to heterogeneous implementation and thereby affect policy outcomes. Using China’s Role Model City for Safe Development policy, initiated in 2010, as a case, this paper employs an LDA-based weighted approach to compare the extent and driving factors of content updating and elaboration by prefectural and provincial governments, thus contributing to the existing literature. The study finds a structurally differentiated pattern in the drivers of policy content reproduction – ‘similarity in form, divergence in substance’ – between the two tiers. Both are jointly pulled by pressure from production accidents and signals in central policy documents, yet they diverge markedly with respect to factors such as per capita GDP and fiscal self-sufficiency. The study further confirms a U-shaped relationship between prefectural policy adoption speed and the level of policy content reproduction, with a turning point at 0.81 years. This study proposes a conceptual analytical framework for understanding central – local differences in policy texts and their operating mechanisms, and provides empirical evidence to inform the formulation of context-appropriate strategies for enhancing urban safety and resilience. Highlights A weighted latent Dirichlet allocation topic-model captures the policy content reproduction. Policy content reproduction differs between provincial and prefectural governments. Central signals and accident pressure shape urban safety policy texts. Prefectural adoption speed shows a U-shaped pattern in policy content reproduction. Provincial fiscal autonomy supports stronger adaptation of central texts.

High-density urban areas face a critical trade-off between limited land resources and intensifying flood risks. This study develops a grey-green infrastructure (GGI) optimization framework that integrates hazard–exposure–vulnerability (H-E-V) risk assessment, surrogate modelling, and NSGA-III to simultaneously minimize cost, maximize flood control, and enhance water environmental benefits. The Suqian City case study reveals: (1) Grey-green coupling significantly outperforms single green infrastructure (GI), providing an additional 7.07–23.34 percentage points in flood risk control rate (FRCR). While GI reaches a performance bottleneck at 78.59% FRCR under extreme events, the GGI configuration maintains a high efficiency of >92.74%. (2) Risk-informed spatial targeting effectively reclassifies urban vulnerability. Under a 20-year return period, high-risk and medium-high risk areas are reduced by 80.99% and 52.15%, respectively. The validated surrogate models ensure high optimization efficiency with R2 values exceeding 0.85. This framework provides a methodologically transferable decision-support tool for sponge city construction, demonstrating that strategic spatial allocation is as vital as infrastructure capacity for urban flood risk management.

This paper presents a comprehensive framework for the context of integrating urban digital twins with the high-performance computing (HPC) to model, analyse, as well as accelerate pathways to city-wide carbon neutrality. Urban abstract simulations consist of digital twins of cities integrating heterogenous streams of data, physical models, and machine learning surrogates to simulate the behaviour and conditions of cities both spatially and temporally. HPC provides computational envelope capable of executing detailed building energy modelling, transport systems modelling, renewable generation modelling and coupled atmosphere-urban microclimate modelling both at city scale and at a temporal scale suitable to do sound policy analysis. The modular digital twin system comprises a system of interaction between building energy simulation and urban mobility models and distributed energy resource (DER) models and an urban carbon scoring engine. Its structure experiences HPC in order to compute a great number of scenarios in order to measure uncertainty and apply multi-objective analysis with the aim of minimizing emissions, costs and resilience. To explain the approach, a case study of synthetic city is conducted, and sensitivity experiments of electrification, deep retrofit, distributed photovoltaics, storage, and demand response portfolios is carried. Results quantify trade-offs between decarbonization rate, cost of energy, and stressors resilience and show that HPC-based digital twin’s communities can be used to discover near-Paretooptimal trade-offs in the presence of epistemic and aleatory uncertainty. The last point is on the implementation problems, data handlings and research plans to operationalize the city digital twins as a decision support system to simplify into carbon neutral city.

In hot and arid desert climates, the thermal performance of passive buildings is strongly influenced by external climatic factors such as solar radiation, air temperature, humidity, and wind speed. However, these challenges can be mitigated through a judicious selection of construction materials and the optimization of their properties to ensure occupant thermal comfort. This study aims to identify the optimal combinations of insulation and wall thickness in straw-reinforced adobe structures to enhance the energy performance of buildings in a Moroccan desert context, specifically in the city of Errachidia. To achieve this aim, the study employs a validated energy model to investigate two key parameters: (1) the addition of natural fiber insulation (0.10 m) and (2) the variation of wall thickness (0.3 m to 0.5 m). The thermal simulation results indicate that adding 0.10 m of insulation significantly enhances thermal performance compared to non-insulated walls. Without insulation, wall thicknesses ranging from 0.4 m to 0.5 m reduce thermal fluctuations by 2°C. However, with insulation, a 0.3 m thick wall achieves a reduction of 3.7°C in summer indoor temperature peaks and maintains winter indoor temperatures as high as 12.1°C, even under extreme outdoor conditions. The integration of eco-friendly insulation panels also leads to a 23.18% reduction in cooling energy demand and a 40% decrease in heating needs compared to uninsulated walls.

Comparative assessment of potential for plus-energy buildings: A case study of cities in North Dakota, United States

Simulation the effects of water resource regulation from the perspective of the water-energy-food-ecology nexus: A case study of Yulin city

Framework for unified municipal solid waste management using centralized and decentralized facilities: Case study of Nashik city in India

Impact Effects of Transport Structure Changes on Urban Traffic Congestion: A Case Study of Core Cities in China

Spatial-temporal comparative analysis of free-floating and electric free-floating bikeshare in Chinese medium-sized cities: A case study of Yancheng city

Examining quality of DGNSS derived positioning in data in urban city: a case study of an urban city in India

Najaf is a preeminent historical sacred city, hosting millions of secular visitors annually. However, it suffers from chronic heritage management inefficiencies due to the lack of context-sensitive integrated systems. This study innovatively synthesizes the Historic Urban Landscape (HUL) approach with Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to redefine urban heritage in Old Najaf as a liveable, adjustable landscape rather than mere historical remnants. By focusing on the historic center, the research presents a framework for landscape-based planning tailored to sacred sites with deep religious and political resonance. Specifically, the study aligns urban interventions with SDG 11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities) to establish a measurable route for integrated heritage plans. Drawing on expert consensus, three sustainable development models were identified, integrating UN Principles, SDG 11 indicators, and UNESCO’s HUL aspects. These models provide a strategic balance between modern social infrastructure needs and the preservation of sacred historical identity, offering a replicable blueprint for similar global sacred contexts.