Cities In England Research Articles

"What influences how well householders living in previously flooded communities feel they are protected or could recover from future flooding?: Results of a survey".

In England, the Environment Agency (EA) estimates that over 3 million properties in England are at risk of surface water flooding. Heavy and prolonged rainfall that drives surface water flooding is projected to increase in the future due to climate change. This paper presents a quantitative secondary analysis of a cross-sectional household flood survey in a disadvantaged city in England heavily impacted by surface water flooding in 2007 and at severe risk of flooding in the future. The aim of this study was to examine how previous experience of flooding, demographic factors, and behaviours impact on feelings of protection against flooding and perceived ability to recover from flooding. Survey data were collected from residents in Hull in northern England in 2018, in areas impacted by major floods in 2007 when over 8,600 households were flooded. Valid responses were received from 453 households, of whom 37.3% were flooded or flooding damaged their house (n = 169), 14.6% had been disrupted by flooding (n = 66), 9.3% had been exposed to flooding (n = 42) and 176 (38.9%) had not experienced flooding. Over 22% felt they had very low protection against flooding, and over 25% would make a very slow recovery if they were flooded. Associations were found between gender and both low levels of protection against flooding. Females were less likely to feel confident in their recovery from flooding than males (OR 0.551). The findings support a need to focus on women's perceptions of flood vulnerability and capacity to cope and recover from flooding in flood and disaster management policy and practice, including providing effective support before, during and after flooding.

Quantifying local mobility patterns in urban human mobility data

Understanding fine-scale dynamics of human mobility patterns is pivotal for effective urban planning, public health strategies, and retail analysis. This study introduces a novel mobility measure – the Local Mobility Index (LMI) – combining geometry-based mobility metrics and accessibility measures. The LMI can be considered a measure of ‘relative localness’ by integrating preferences into the assessment of local mobility patterns, offering a novel measure for understanding mobility behavior in urban contexts. The LMI improves upon existing measures as it captures individual choice for local destinations through measuring whether individuals select nearby destinations; accounting for the unequal spatial distribution of urban amenities. Our contribution is mainly methodological, advancing the field by introducing a metric that captures different aspects of mobility compared to conventional mobility metrics. Leveraging mobile-phone-based GPS data, we examine the LMI using 759 individuals across three cities in England. We found that the LMI captures a new and distinct dimension of urban mobility, as evidenced by its weak correlation with established metrics. Therefore, LMI's capacity to highlight previously undetected aspects of mobility behavior, underscores its importance for advancing research and urban planning.

The challenge of devolved English governance and the rise of political spatial inequality

Abstract The UK is characterised by spatial inequality between and within regions, alongside an over-centralised asymmetric model of governance. In England especially, these features are stark, and throughout the last decade, politicians have responded by forging a distinctive programme of English devolution focused on city-regions. In this article, we analyse the core drivers of the English devolution agenda to understand its impact on the future trajectory of British politics. We identify the predominance of a narrow economic vision of devolution that systematically negates other agendas. The result is a failure to address the trade-offs inherent in the devolution process, alongside an inadequate engagement with the growing demand for democratic revitalisation. In the long-term, we argue that the empowerment of the largest cities in England and the relative neglect of non-urban areas will exacerbate power asymmetries within the UK political system in both centre-periphery and centre-local relations, a phenomenon we term ‘political spatial inequality’. There is a risk of resurgent ‘territorially based populism’ stemming from this uneven political geography which has the potential to exacerbate political instability and significantly reshape UK politics in the wake of Brexit. English devolution is a prescient example of how policy ‘solutions’ can in turn create new problems that pose major challenges for policymakers.

Who can influence healthy urban development?

ABSTRACT Built and green environments can influence population health and wellbeing. Creating healthy places involves multiple wider determinants of health considerations. It is complex, with many types of stakeholders who may have competing interests and priorities. This article presents learning from a regeneration project in a city in England by a practitioner and embedded researcher in local government. Based on learning from conducting a Health Impact Assessment for a regeneration project, structured around 11 wider determinants of health categories, we examine how health-related issues relevant to large scale urban development can be influenced by different stakeholders. This focuses on developers, local government, and members of the public. This experience may help inform how public health interventions can be developed and targeted to effectively influence creation of healthier places: using Health Impact Assessment approaches; understanding stakeholder influence; and benefiting from embedded researcher knowledge of complex systems.

Conceptualising the art of belonging for young refugees and asylum-seekers: reflections from England and Sweden

ABSTRACT The concept of belonging has grown in prominence in research and policy relating to new arrivals from refugee and asylum-seeking backgrounds. Arguably, belonging is replacing integration and inclusion as the panacea to perceived problems associated with places and societies where new arrivals settle. Belonging is also prominent in the literature about formal and informal educational contexts. This paper problematises the concept of belonging. It draws on findings from a research project which explored how young, forced migrants, newly arrived in Europe, could be supported through engagement with arts and culture to achieve a sense of belonging in their new place. Interview data and observational fieldnotes illustrate how belonging and unbelonging are experienced through an informal education programme of arts and culture in two cities in Sweden and England. The paper sheds light on the complexity and ambiguity of belonging for the participants, arguing that ‘to belong’ is not an unequivocally positive experience for new arrivals. In an era of increasing migration, the paper calls for a new language for belonging which recognises this complexity and acknowledges that the process of belonging is reciprocal involving those who have newly arrived and those in situ in the communities in which newcomers settle.

What Makes a Wasteland? A Contemporary Archaeology of Urban Waste Sites

In this article, I undertake an archaeology of urban “wastelands.” In doing so I ask how such places are materially and conceptually “made” and examine the effects that such labeling has on how postindustrial urban sites are used and valued. Taking examples from the capital cities of England and Scotland (London and Edinburgh), I show that the meaning of “waste” at such sites is temporally and socially contingent. Establishing certainty between which landscapes are “wasted” and which are not can prove difficult, and, in some cases, archaeologists themselves may be implicated in labeling and then “cleansing” wastelands, with archaeology operating as a form of waste management. While wastelands may appear as dissonant and associated with negativity or decay at first glance, I show that these places can also facilitate surprisingly generative and creative uses and provide new forms of heritage value.

The Mesolevel Economy in Nineteenth-Century England and Wales: Applying Input-Output Accounting and Spatial Interaction Modelling to the Historical Study

This paper is offered as a contribution to understanding historical trade. The method of input-output modelling is utilised to evaluate the evolution of cities (and their associated regions) in England and Wales between 1851 and 1911. The construction of input-output accounts for each city region is based on “heroic” data assumptions, which enable the construction of a demonstration model illustrating a new iterative approach to historical analysis. In its current application, the model enables estimates to be made of mesolevel trade between cities, which enhances our analysis of urban evolution in this period.

Города Англии середины XVI века в Relazioni венецианских послов

The article examines the data of the final reports of the Venetian ambassadors on English cities. The information of the Venetian ambassadors about the cities of England, unfortunately, is brief. The author of the article comes to the conclusion that they basically boil down to pointing out that London is the main city of the country, that other cities of England are simply listed by the Venetian ambassadors, that the testimonies of the Venetians, albeit indirectly, help to recreate the perception of the cities of the English kingdom by the Venetians.

Trend-attribute forecasting of hourly PM2.5 trends in fifteen cities of Central England applying optimized machine learning feature selection

Recorded particulate matter (PM2.5) hourly trends are compared for fifteen urban recording sites distributed across central England for the period 2018 to 2022. They include 10 urban-background and five urban-traffic (roadside) sites with some located within the same urban area. The sites all show consistent background and peak distributions with mean annual values and standard deviations higher for 2018 and 2019 than for 2020 to 2022. The objective of this study is to demonstrate that trend attributes extracted from hourly recorded univariate PM2.5 trends at these sites can be used to provide reliable short-term hourly predictions and provide valuable insight into the regional variations in the recorded trends. Fifteen trend attributes extracted from the prior 12 h (t-1 to t-12) of recorded PM2.5 data were compiled and used as input to four supervised machine learning models (SML) to forecast PM2.5 concentrations up to 13 h ahead (t0 to t+12). All recording sites delivered forecasts with similar ranges of error levels for specific hours ahead which are consistent with their PM2.5 recorded ranges. Forecasting results for four representative sites are presented in detail using models trained and cross-validated with 2020 and 2021 hourly data to forecast 2021 and 2022 hourly data, respectively. A novel optimized feature selection procedure using a suite of five optimizers is used to improve the efficiency of the forecasting models. The LASSO and support vector regression models generate the best and most generalizable hourly PM2.5 forecasts from trained and validated SML models with mean average error (MAE) of between ∼1 and ∼3 μg/m3 for t0 to t+3 h ahead. A novel overfitting indicator, exploiting the cross-validation mean values, demonstrates that these two models are not affected by overfitting. Forecasts for t+6 to t+12 h forward generate higher MAE values between ∼3 and ∼4 μg/m3 due to their tendency to underestimate some of the extreme PM2.5 peaks. These findings indicate that further model refinements are required to generate more reliable short-term predictions for the t+6 to t+24 h ahead.

Economic Depression and Recovering from the Trauma of the World War: The Social Reconstruction of Britain after World War II

The passage focuses on the reconstruction of Britain after World War II. The background of the research was the time period after WWII. In order to analyze the situation more precisely, the background information of the research had a time span from the 1920s to approximately the 1950s, starting from the Roaring Twenties to the publication of the Green Belt Policy. The passage focuses on the reorganization of cities and the reconstruction of the welfare system. The two examples listed in the following passage are the Green Belt Policy and the NHS, which represents the reconstruction of cities in England and the reconstruction of the welfare system of England. Other examples include data recorded in 1931 and several government documents by the British government. By answering the question of the advantages of Britain in the reconstruction of World War II, the passage hopes to provide some characteristics of the successful reconstruction of Britain to help reconstruction in other countries like Palestine.

“Hands across the sea”: Strikes, solidarity and diverging outcomes in port cities in Britain and Australia in the late nineteenth century

This article advances the historiography of port cities, waterfront trade unionism and imperial solidarity by comparing two distant places that, despite their colonial connections, are rarely juxtaposed: Britain and Australia. It investigates the relationship between the metropole and the periphery via the Great Dock Strike of 1889 in London (a 5-week dispute that ended in victory for the dockers) and the Australian Maritime Strike of 1890 (a 12-week strike that ended in defeat for the workers). This research shows how the responses to the strikes from the other side of the world reflected the characteristics of port cities and their waterfront workers. They were also largely determined by three neglected themes - the extent of colonial ties, the uses of the new telegraph network, and the impact of trade cycles - and how these themes influenced each other. The first theme develops and complicates Bernard Porter’s argument that Britons were indifferent towards imperial affairs. On the one hand, this article confirms his position by showing the asymmetry of imperial relations between the outward-looking Australians and the mainly inward-looking Britons. On the other, it demonstrates how imperial connections led to solidarity, and how Britain’s working-class leaders embodied an elitist imperial mindset. In doing so, this article draws new parallels between Britain’s working-class leaders and colonial administrators. Despite their different roles and educational backgrounds, both groups - imbued with a sense of imperial superiority - demonstrated a similarly paternalistic approach in their work overseas. Therefore, imperial solidarity in port cities is a prism through which the prevalence and impact of the British imperial ethos - a far wider subject - can be illuminated and assessed.

Trauma informed mental health support; qualitative evaluation findings from one voluntary and community sector programme for women experiencing DVA

In the context of on-going high rates of domestic abuse in England, the voluntary and community sector increasingly provides specialist domestic violence and abuse (DVA) services to support women in local community settings. This article discusses a qualitative evaluation of one programme, working to support females with mental health needs. A locally based support programme worked with women in one city in England over a two-year period; 34 service users, and eight professionals contributed to interviews and focus groups in support of the evaluation. Our framework analysis identified key themes using survivor voice in respect of the importance of trauma-informed support, adding to the evidence base about effective recovery work in the voluntary and community sector. The defining features of trauma-informed support, safety, trust, choice, collaboration and empowerment were evident in the service model, which led to positive outcomes for survivors who engaged with the programme. The model of provision discussed here is transferrable beyond the voluntary and community sector. Learning from the programme suggests that DVA services can focus on the mental health needs of survivors, using trauma-informed support to enhance recovery.

The Architecture of Politics and the Politics of Architecture: A Comparative Approach to Parish Church Building and Civic Government in Late-Medieval Europe

AbstractChurch construction was one of the most challenging, and most political, tasks undertaken by medieval cities. Comparing examples from across Europe reveals profound differences, however, in both the architecture of politics and the politics of architecture; that is, how building projects were administered and how their administration shaped their socio-political significance. Although ranging across the continent, this article is centered on construction in two representative cities: Vienna and London. While the former had a small number of churches, all under the direct control of the mayor and council, the latter had over a hundred, each overseen by locally appointed officers. In Vienna, church construction was, thus, an important field of activity for the city government, which oversaw the work and celebrated its own leadership of the project; in London, it lay outside civic control and offered local opportunities for domination by wealthy families. This difference can be found across the continent, separating the large, old cities of England, northern France, Spain, and the Low Countries, which could have numerous churches, from smaller towns and cities both in these places and across the rest of central, northern, and southern Europe, which typically had a single, major parish church and only a few subordinate ones. This article considers the implications of these two contrasting models—centralized and decentralized, civic and parochial, high government and local politics—on how architectural production functioned as a field of political activity and how church building shaped local distributions and articulations of power in medieval Europe.

Assessment of Dam Sediment and Grab Samples for Metal Contamination in a Historically Industrialized New England City

Assessment of Dam Sediment and Grab Samples for Metal Contamination in a Historically Industrialized New England City

Relationships and sex education for the postsecular classroom

ABSTRACT Schools in the UK and Europe, North America and Australia are introducing ambitious forms of relationships and sex education (RSE) or school-based sexuality education. For RSE to be effective it must be inclusive, recognising and respecting the needs and experiences of those who have not always been well served by sex/sexuality education. This paper considers one such group – students with faith backgrounds – and explores ways of delivering RSE in the ‘postsecular classroom’ in which religion is recognised and respected. We conducted consultative research – designed primarily to inform the development of teaching resources – among students and parents of faith, and RSE teachers. Focussing upon two religiously diverse cities in England, this research included systematic literature review, classroom observations and group discussions with students, and questionnaire surveys and interviews with parents and teaching staff. Informed by the findings of this research, we designed, piloted and now share evidence-based teaching resources. This illustrates one way in which RSE can be adapted for use in the postsecular classroom where faith is out in the open, but not necessarily explicitly engaged with in the lesson. Considering the perspectives of faith communities in this way can improve RSE for everyone in the classroom.

To Her Credit: Women, Finance, and the Law in Eighteenth-Century New England Cities by Sara T. Damiano (review)

To Her Credit: Women, Finance, and the Law in Eighteenth-Century New England Cities by Sara T. Damiano (review)

A Review of the Impacts of COVID-19 on Air Pollution in the World

Introduction: The COVID-19 epidemic has polluted millions of people and has caused millions of deaths worldwide. Therefore, this study aims to review the effects of COVID-19 on global air pollution.
 Materials and Methods: In this narrative review, articles related to the objectives of the study were selected in reliable scientific databases such as Web of Science, Ovid, Google Scholar, PubMed, and Scopus. A total of 294 browsing sources and ultimately 90 sources were selected.
 Results: In the COVID-19 pandemic, NO2 dropped from 53 to 11% in most countries, and PM2.5 and PM10 from 91 to 6% in some countries. CO dropped from 92 to 5% and SO2 had a decreasing trend from 77 to 7% in most countries, except for the largest cities in Britain, Poland, Taiwan, and Iran. Unlike other pollutants, O3 in most countries increased from 0.3 to 63%, but O3 decreased in some countries.
 Conclusion: In the lockdown period, the reduction of most air pollutants except O3 was observed in many countries. But after restarting, polluting activities have incresed again. Therefore, the rules implemented during lockdown time can be introduced as an appropriate option in emergencies to reduce air pollution.

Diverse Durham collection phages demonstrate complex BREX defense responses.

Bacteriophages (phages) outnumber bacteria ten-to-one and cause infections at a rate of 1025 per second. The ability of phages to reduce bacterial populations makes them attractive alternative antibacterials for use in combating the rise in antimicrobial resistance. This effort may be hindered due to bacterial defenses such as Bacteriophage Exclusion (BREX) that have arisen from the constant evolutionary battle between bacteria and phages. For phages to be widely accepted as therapeutics in Western medicine, more must be understood about bacteria-phage interactions and the outcomes of bacterial phage defense. Here, we present the annotated genomes of 12 novel bacteriophage species isolated from water sources in Durham, UK, during undergraduate practical classes. The collection includes diverse species from across known phylogenetic groups. Comparative analyses of two novel phages from the collection suggest they may be founding members of a new genus. Using this Durham phage collection, we determined that particular BREX defense systems were likely to confer a varied degree of resistance against an invading phage. We concluded that the number of BREX target motifs encoded in the phage genome was not proportional to the degree of susceptibility. IMPORTANCE Bacteriophages have long been the source of tools for biotechnology that are in everyday use in molecular biology research laboratories worldwide. Phages make attractive new targets for the development of novel antimicrobials. While the number of phage genome depositions has increased in recent years, the expected bacteriophage diversity remains underrepresented. Here we demonstrate how undergraduates can contribute to the identification of novel phages and that a single City in England can provide ample phage diversity and the opportunity to find novel technologies. Moreover, we demonstrate that the interactions and intricacies of the interplay between bacterial phage defense systems such as Bacteriophage Exclusion (BREX) and phages are more complex than originally thought. Further work will be required in the field before the dynamic interactions between phages and bacterial defense systems are fully understood and integrated with novel phage therapies.

Evaluating trace elements in urban forest soils across three contrasting New England USA towns and cities by pXRF and mass spectrometry

Urban forest soils perform important ecosystem services, such as the sequestration of potentially toxic elements, but some can serve as a source for human exposure if ingested or eroded by wind. Assessment of trace elements in urban soils through traditional methods is costly but portable X-ray fluorescence (pXRF) can allow for rapid screening for hazardous concentrations. Our objectives were (1) evaluate trace elements (As, Cd, Cr, Cu, Pb, and Zn) at 460 locations in and around urban forests across three town and cities in New England and across multiple land-uses, (2) evaluate accuracy and precision of pXRF compared with traditional digestion-inductively coupled plasma analyses, (3) determine if pXRF measurements are improved by processing the soil (oven drying, rock fragment removal, and organic matter (OM) removal). Our findings show that urban forest soils have extensive Pb accumulations (42 out of 460 with >200 mg/kg), while As and Zn exceeded regulatory limits in limited outlier samples. Urban forest soils adjacent to multi-family residences have higher Pb and Zn concentrations than recreational and open lots. Fortunately, Cd, Cr, and Cu were far below hazardous concentrations. Our comparisons suggest pXRF measurements of Cu, Pb, and Zn can be considered accurate while Cd and Cr may be screened by pXRF. However, As should not be considered qualitative nor quantitative due to 70% type 1 (false positive) error on samples. While the accuracy and precision were nominally improved through soil drying, removal of rock fragments, and removal of OM (<5% decrease in relative error), our results show processing soil samples is likely not needed.

Megalopolis bound?

Abstract Since ancient Greece’s “megalopolis,” the concept of vast cities has loomed in the urban discourse. A century ago, English planner Patrick Geddes warned about a growing imbalance between traditional society and ever-larger conurbations, an anxiety that Lewis Mumford later invoked to predict that urban hubris would inevitably collapse of its own weight. In 1961, by contrast, the geographer Jean Gottman surveyed the interconnected agglomeration stretching from Washington, D.C. up the east coast of the United States to the cities of southern New England, and more optimistically highlighted this new urban form’s governance potential. Today, the question is not whether urbanism will arrive at the scale that so concerned Geddes and Mumford yet engaged Gottman—it already has. Commentators and scholars increasingly recognize that vast polycentric urban regions are displacing cities and metropolitan areas as the locus of modern growth and development. Eleven distinct urban-centered megaregions, for example, concentrate the bulk of the population and economic activity in the United States, and similar clusters are coalescing globally, from Greater Tokyo, Beijing, and the Pearl River Delta, to the arc from São Paulo to Rio de Janeiro, to the European urban spine running from London to Milan. Grappling with the phenomenon’s legal-institutional dimensions—whether and how to formalize governance to match this scale—requires more than transposing the descriptive and normative discourse on metropolitanism. Crosscurrents around fragmentation, efficiency, inequality, and democratic legitimacy refract, but there are distinct arguments for fostering governance—and equally particular concerns to anticipate—with the rise of the megalopolis.