Modern Urban Governance Research Articles

The Role of Urban Disaster Risk Management in Major Catastrophic Events: A Case Study of Resilience in Chinese Cities During the COVID-19 Pandemic

The emergence of infectious diseases has historically influenced urban development, necessitating the evolution of urban planning toward greater disaster resilience. The COVID-19 pandemic, in particular, has revealed weaknesses in modern urban planning and governance, emphasizing the need for enhanced urban resilience and disaster risk management. For China, as urban populations continue to grow, urban resilience and disaster risk management have become focal points for urban planners and policymakers, ensuring that cities can rapidly adapt and effectively respond to various challenges. This study summarizes a series of emergency measures adopted by the Chinese government during the COVID-19 pandemic and analyzes their effectiveness. China's response, characterized by early intervention, social distancing, extensive testing, and advanced tracking technologies, effectively curtailed the virus's spread, especially in Hubei province and its capital, Wuhan. Despite these successes, the paper identifies areas where China's urban resilience could be improved, including coordination of emergency plans, information dissemination, and social cohesion, among other aspects, to better confront future challenges.

FinTech in City Management

This study examines how FinTech is influencing modern urban governance and how these technologies are helping to address global urban challenges.It was found that in the modern city, FinTech is used to optimize the provision of public services, and mobile applications and online platforms allow city residents to easily pay bills for these services and monitor costs. FinTech is also an important catalyst for reforms in the field of urban transport systems, through mobile applications today you can order a taxi, monitor the movement of urban transport, pay for fares, manage traffic flows, which makes public transport more accessible and convenient for city dwellers. All this allows you to avoid traffic jams and improve public safety.The functional determinacy between modern financial technologies and city management is established, the opportunities provided by FinTech for optimizing city infrastructure management processes are revealed. Cases of how cities can use financial technologies to solve their problems and improve the quality of communal services are analyzed. The problem of implementing FinTech solutions for effective management decision-making with an analysis of public opinion is revealed. The importance of taking into account the financial stability of cities when using innovative financial solutions for the development of modern cities is emphasized. Attention is focused on the development of innovations and new financial opportunities for cities and their residents when using technologies to improve the quality of life of citizens and the development of the local economy.

Urban governance systems in autonomous territories of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy: The cases of Croatia-Slavonia and Austrian Galicia (1867-1918)

There is still no consensus on the definition of urban governance, which can be attributed to gaps in its empirical foundation across both time and space. The Austro-Hungarian Monarchy (1867-1918), with its complex state structure, serves as an ideal historical and geographical subject for unveiling aspects related to the birth of modern urban governance within a Central European context. To conduct comparative research, this study examines selected cities from two territorial autonomies of the empire: Zagreb, Osijek, Varaždin, and Zemun from Croatia-Slavonia, and Lviv and Cracow (Krakow) from Galicia. Urban governance within territorial autonomy, particularly from a historical standpoint, is a unique subject that lacks a substantial presence int he literature of urban studies and territorial autonomy. In this paper, an analytical framework was developed based on the key components of the transformation thesis of urban governance and metagovernance theory. The findings of the study indicate that the process of designating territorial autonomies and the various political factors behind them significantly shaped the formation of urban governance systems.

DISCUSSION OF PUBLIC MENTAL HEALTH PROBLEMS BASED ON INTELLIGENT DATA ANALYSIS TECHNOLOGY UNDER THE BACKGROUND OF THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC.

In the past few years since the outbreak of the novel coronavirus, the public has been under tremendous pressure. Family, career, emotions, and other aspects are constantly pressing people's psychological defense of life. Modern urban governance is a centralized reflection of the urban space carrier and resource platform. Strengthening the public's guidance on mental health problems is conducive to promoting the modernization of urban governance system and governance capacity, improving the level of urban governance and the ability of grassroots to resolve conflicts. To study people's psychological changes and endurance in this situation, relieve the psychological pressure caused by the novel coronavirus outbreak, and ensure people's mental health, we propose an assessment method for psychological health based on data intelligent analysis, which is used to solve public mental health problems in modern urban governance. First, we extract information on sleep quality and physical exercise of people in pandemic areas through an online questionnaire survey. Then, we can achieve an overall picture of the public's mental state in the COVID-19 pandemic by analyzing the psychological changes of public and the aggregated information. To evaluate the performance of the public mental state management method proposed in this study, we invited 1000 people to complete a comparative experiment of a questionnaire survey on the Internet. The questionnaire included information about physical activity at home and sleep quality. Home exercise information mainly includes exercise duration and exercise mode, while sleep quality information includes sleep score, sleep duration, and proportion of deep sleep. Through experiments, we find that the method we propose can realize the accurate identification and analysis of the changes of people's psychological conditions in modern cities. Moreover, it can provide data support and technical support for people's psychological counseling under the background of the novel coronavirus pandemic.

Exploration and Improvement of Modernization of Municipal Governance Driven by Digital Reform

Digital reform is an important part of the modernization of urban governance. We need to fully utilize modern information technology tools such as big data, the Internet, 5G, and artificial intelligence, innovate data-driven governance models, build a new platform for multi-party joint governance, and comprehensively enhance urban governance capabilities and modernization levels. This study analyzes the problems encountered in the process of modernization of urban governance in the context of digital reform: weak urban digital infrastructure, insufficient digital security guarantee, lack of data governance means, few applications of digital reform and lack of digital talents. To build a modern urban governance, we must strengthen the construction of digital infrastructure, data governance and application, data security guarantee mechanism, e-government construction Cultivate and introduce digital talents, promote the process of digital reform, improve the level of industrial digitization, building digitization, and government digitization, and achieve digital management, personalized services, and precise operation of urban governance.

Lightweight and Bilateral Controllable Data Sharing for Secure Autonomous Vehicles Platooning Service

Autonomous vehicle platoons are emerging as a promising solution to modern urban governance challenges, such as traffic congestion, air pollution, and fuel waste. As a data-driven paradigm, ensuring secure data sharing is a key challenge for autonomous vehicle platoon applications. However, existing research on secure data sharing of autonomous vehicles platoon suffers from practical weaknesses such as privacy leakage, lack of flexible data source identification, and inefficiency. Motivated by that, this paper first proposes the LFBA scheme, which is the first fine-grained data sharing framework that supports bilateral access control and access policy hiding with lightweight and almost constant computational and storage resources consumption, this can be owed to the sophisticated algorithm structure we designed. We then construct an edge-assisted deployment model over LFBA (EA-LFBA) to further improve efficiency and security against common attacks. We then provide the security proof for LFBA, and security analysis for EA-LFBA. Simulation tests and comparative experiments demonstrate the practicality and superiority of our solution compared to state-of-the-art representative works.

Return to spatial differentiation and respect life diversity–Two core supporting points to avoid the deviation of urban fine governance

<p>Modern urban governance emphasizes the precise governance of the “short board” of urban governance, forming a mechanism of fine governance. In view of the historical basis and realistic structure of the differentiation of physical space at the block level and the diversity of life at the community level in modern cities, the short board of urban governance should be confirmed and solved through democratic participation based on the context of spatial differentiation and diversity of life, rather than through simple administrative urban planning, so as to form a corresponding structure consistent with rigid urban management. The vitality of a city lies in the construction of differentiated block space and diversified community autonomy. Therefore, the urban path of fine governance is fine governance based on public recognition. It should include the establishment of the concept of spatial differentiation and diversity of life, the construction of democratic relations among modern urban governance subjects, the transformation of urban planning to community planning, and the avoidance of destructive renewal and one-way material construction, go beyond the sports regulation of urban issues and apply the big data technology in modern urban governance.</p>

A hybrid decision-making approach for locating rescue materials storage points under public emergencies

PurposeIn modern urban governance, rescue materials storage points (RMSP) are a vital role to be considered in responding to public emergencies and improving a city's emergency management. This study analyzes the siting of community-centered relief supply facilities.Design/methodology/approachCombining grey relational analysis, complex network and relative entropy, a new multi criteria method is proposed. It pays more attention to the needs of the community, taking into account the use of community hospitals, fire centers and neighborhood offices to establish small RMSP.FindingsThe research results firstly found suitable areas for RMSP site selection, including Hanyang, Qiaokou, Jiangan and Wuchang. The top 10 nodes in each region are found as the location of emergency facilities, and the network parameters are higher than ordinary nodes in traffic networks. The proposed method was applied in Wuhan, China and the method was verified by us-ing a complex network model combined with multi-criteria decision-making for emergency facility location.Practical implicationsThis method solves the problem of how to choose the optimal solution and reduces the difficulty for decision makers. This method will help emergency managers to locate and plan RMSP more simply, especially in improving emergency siting modeling techniques and additionally in providing a reference for future research.Originality/valueThe method proposed in this study is beneficial to improve the decision-making ability of urban emergency departments. Using complex networks and comprehensive evaluation techniques, RMSP is incorporated into the urban community emergency network as a critical rescue force. More importantly, the findings highlight a new direction for further research on urban emergency facilities site selection based on a combination of sound theoretical basis as well as empirical evidence gained from real life case-based analysis.Highlights:Material reserve points are incorporated into the emergency supply network to maintain the advantage of quantity.Build emergency site selection facilities centered on urban communities.Use a complex network model to select the location of emergency supplies storage sites.

Biopolitical Aspect of Contemporary Urban Media Architecture

This article is devoted to the study of problems that may occur within the framework of biopolitical approach implementation in the context of contemporary urban management. Considerable emphasis is made upon the study of the media phenomenon development, formation of media architecture infrastructure as an approach of the biopolitics of emotions. The aim of the study is to form a consistent comprehensive understanding of the current trends in the practical implementation of the biopolitical approach methodology while analyzing the specifics of the mediatized space in contemporary city.
 The article analyzes particularities of nowaday communication in a virtual environment, its impact on the psyche of a moden person, and also raises the problems of contemporary media which has not only acquired the character of abstract information transmitted in distribution, but is embodied in the certain structural specifics of buildings, that has given rise to the development of such a phenomenon as media architecture. The result of the study is an analysis of the problems and prospects of the tendencies of the development of a modern city from the point of a biopolitical approach to urban management in the context of the (trans)formation of the media architectural infrastructure. The main problems, as the study shows, are caused by the lack of proper regulation of urban planning policy implementations from the standpoint of providing a comfortable environment for the life of the urban population.
 This article is intended for specialists in political science, as well as for researchers whose studies are devoted to the digital biopolitical aspect of modern urban governance.

Research on the Nonlinear Random Matrix Model for Urban Information Model and Modern Urban Governance

In this paper, a nonlinear stochastic matrix approach is used to conduct an in-depth study and analysis of modern urban governance, and an urban information model is designed for practical application based on it. Random matrix theory can calculate and give the average result of all interactions contained in a complex system. By comparing the different characteristics of statistical properties of real systems and random matrices, the special nonrandom properties of real systems are deduced. The dissipative structure theory of open complex systems, the evolution of network entropy describing the robustness of complex networks, can explain the empirical results of random matrix theory from the point of view of system evolution; through the open development of fair data and prevention tools to achieve algorithm correction, promote the design optimization of intelligent models, intelligent platforms, and intelligent programs; and commit to the benign development of technology. At the institutional level, it is necessary to keep the smart city construction synchronized with the rule of law construction, with a two-pronged approach of policy incentives and legal constraints, in addition to the overall promotion of government transformation and pluralistic governance patterns. It exceeds the carrying capacity and adaptability of social systems and institutions. In fact, the productive forces with science and technology as the core are the most active forces in social change and development. The urban information model is a technical and conceptual change triggered by the wave of information in the field of urban planning and construction and urban management, which takes the 3D model as a carrier to realize digital information application and unification in the whole life cycle of territorial spatial planning, urban design, and engineering and construction projects through the simulation of spatial planning and urban design spatial elements as well as the entry, management, and application of engineering and construction project information. Digital technology is applied in the whole life cycle of land spatial planning, urban design, and engineering projects to achieve fine governance and efficient management of urban planning.

Research on the Experience of Urban Epidemic Prevention and Governance in Chang'an City in Tang Dynasty Based on the Analysis of Historical Data

Chinese cities have a history of at least five thousand years, and the city of Chang'an in the Tang Dynasty is a milestone. The planning and design of Chang'an City represented the most advanced level in the world at that time and laid the foundation for the design of China's capital city. With the global outbreak of the new crown virus COVID-19, it is even more necessary to enter the "post-epidemic era" for urban epidemic prevention and governance measures. In the history of the Tang Dynasty, there were 49 plague outbreaks, but they still created prosperous situations such as the "Excellent Governance during the Zhenguan Times" and " Flourishment Age of Kaiyuan Era". Based on the historical data and documentary interviews and analysis of the textual research, this article summarizes the urban epidemic prevention and management of the Tang Chang’an city from six aspects, including the site selection, water supply and drainage system, medical isolation facilities, lifang management system, landscaping and mainstream medical ideological guidance system, and summarize the advanced experience of typical capitals in ancient China to provide a reference for modern urban epidemic prevention and governance.

Modernisation of urban governance: An approach of ‘Blockchain + Big Data’

Abstract Mathematics is a prerequisite for the development of blockchain technology. The deeply penetrated mathematical ideas support the establishment of the trust mechanism of the whole blockchain system, which makes the blockchain technology autonomous, decentralised, not so easy to tamper, open, anonymous and also possesses other characteristics. Due to these characteristics, the introduction of blockchain will greatly solve a series of problems faced by the quality and acquisition of big data in cities, and release more data vitality. Based on the perspective of chain blocks and big data fusion, this paper puts forward that data are the foundation of modern urban governance. Data management has become the key to modern urban governance. It puts forward that the building of a big data management system based on blockchain will strengthen the construction of the intelligent city and modernisation of urban governance capabilities.

Evaluation method of medical service system based on DEMATEL and the information entropy: A case study of hypertension diagnosis and treatment in China.

Precise and reasonable evaluation of the multi-attribute value of medical system is the basis for hospitals to implement total quality management. Excellent medical system is necessary as a part of modern urban governance. However, most of medical value evaluation work relies on scale and artificial scoring at present, lacking in objectivity. Therefore, a scientific and comprehensive medical value evaluation system is needed urgently to give full play to the guiding role of value evaluation and promote the improvement of the medical service system. In this study, DEMATEL and information entropy are used to quantify the degree of mutual influence between system indicators and the differences in medical market performance respectively, so as to obtain the objective index weight. Hypertension has the highest incidence in the whole chronic disease system, which seriously affects people's daily life. Based on the existing hypertension diagnosis and treatment index system, a comprehensive and objective evaluation model is established to evaluate the hypertension diagnosis and treatment behaviors of different medical institutions, which achieves good result. This method has effectively improved the relative deficiency of one-sided subjective evaluation and has a great guiding significance for the comparison of treatment in departments and the economical use of medical resources.

Digital Information Tools for Urban Regeneration: Capital’s Approach in Theory and Practice

Urban regeneration, which includes renovation of decaying urban structures as well as renovation of dilapidated buildings, is an important economic, aesthetic and cultural factor for sustainable development planning worldwide. The revitalization of urban structures is a complex challenge, influenced by various interdisciplinary aspects, like urban socio-economic development, integrated transport and mobility solutions and others. And it requires involvement of different stakeholders at different levels in identifying and finding solutions. Technological innovations offer a variety of digital tools to address modern urban governance and modelling issues, identifying problem areas with public involvement and participation that allow relevant services to respond quickly, thus improving the urban environment and the quality of life of people. With the help of digital tools, it is also possible to promote the availability of public services, model and forecast environmental risks, as well as perform other functions integral to the organization and management of modern society. However, the wide range of these tools and their mutually asynchronous use often make it difficult to choose the right tool, thus creating the risk of fragmented implementation. The aim of this paper is to propose theoretical approach for modelling of complex interactions affecting urban regeneration as well as summarize and systematize the existing digital information tools which might empower the process of regeneration. The analysis of the use and impact of digital and smart tools allows to identify urban problems, as well as to outline ways to solve them. The results of the research will form the basis for further research stages.

‘Embodiments of the invention’: Patents and urban diagrammatics in the smart city

How do technology firms compete to colonize the urban future? This article theorizes technology patents as a medium of urban futuring. Patents secure legal exclusion by disclosing an idea or invention. However, the incentive structures behind patents are ambiguous. Patent holders must articulate inventions with enough technical specificity to warrant a property claim while remaining strategically imprecise enough to capture unanticipated future uses. I build on the Foucaultian theory of the diagram to discuss patents' interplay of disclosure and secrecy as a strategic anticipatory practice for colonizing urban futures. Whereas modern urban governance operated on spatial form to discipline citizens, smart city technology patents reflect a splintering of technical capacity and control. In the empirical section, I analyze three patent-diagrams: the first for a Wi-Fi-enabled advertising system, the second for a notification system for autonomous vehicles, and the third for an algorithmic predictive policing platform. These examples show that at a fundamental level, smart city technologies are less discrete inventions than claims to the capacity to influence human–machinic interactions. The article concludes with a reflection on how critical urbanists can learn from technology patents to advance more democratic and publicly oriented visions for the city.

High-quality topological structures selection for smart city land spatial understanding and governance

Due to the acceleration of urbanization process in modern society, there are many metropolises throughout the world, such as New York, Tokyo, and Shanghai. Such large cities typically have a carefully designed space planning. For example, the residential area should be distant from the industrial area due to the potential environmental pollution issue. In order to cope with public health emergencies, the infrastructure needed for modern urban governance needs to be improved. Notably, establishing a quality visual model to exploit such sophisticated spatial configurations is an important but challenging task. Such a model can facilitate many applications such as urban planning, environmental evaluation, smart transportation, and urban governance. However, the flexible spatial interactions among multiple regions make it difficult to apply a traditional visual model to encode them. In this work, a quality-guided feature selection framework is proposed to obtain a set of high-quality topologies to model the discriminative structures from different land spatial city regions. Given a city region from a metropolitan area, the well-known super pixel algorithm SLIC is used to decompose each land spatial city region image into multiple atomic regions. Based on this, a binary graph is used to model the spatial interactions among these regions. Each binary graph is then decomposed into multiple subgraphs and a topology selection algorithm is proposed to discover subgraphs with highly discriminative topologies. By leveraging these high-quality subgraphs, the image kernel machine is used to convert the high quality subgraphs from each city region’s image into a feature vector. Afterward, a multi-category support vector machine (SVM) is learned to classify each city region’s image into one particular category. Comprehensive experimental results by comparing with many state-of-the-art have shown the competitiveness of this method. Furthermore, the selected high-quality topologies have demonstrated that highly representative spatial interactions are nicely encoded. The results are of great significance to the establishment of the land spatial database management system.

Urban resilience as critique: Problematizing infrastructure in post-Sandy New York City

Drawing on Foucaultian work on problematization, this paper explores the urban resilience paradigm which emerged in the wake of 2012's Hurricane Sandy, which dramatically disrupted New York City. Using discourse and media analysis, examination of government commissions and proposals, and site observation at panels and conferences, it argues that, rather than an ahistorical “thing,” urban resilience was the name given to techniques resulting from a three-part process of problematization drawn together by media and government in the storm's aftermath. This process, I argue, was itself political, and included the identification of new problems to govern in the form of environmental and technical risks; the critique of modern urban governance techniques based on a city/nature separation and ideas of mastery and control as impediments to responding to these problems; and finally the overcoming of impediments via creative recalibration of government by redefining the social and ecological as interconnected infrastructure. The recalibrations produced within this three-part problematization, I show, were promoted by city government and local institutions as “urban resilience,” which was presented as the unquestionable answer to Sandy's problems as they had been posed. I conclude by discussing what this problem-based case study helps us see about urban resilience, but also how it advances our understanding of the growing interest in problematization within geography, as well as implications it suggests for thinking the political in the Anthropocene.

What’s Critical about Critical Infrastructure?

Critical infrastructure (CI) has received much attention in research, policy and political discussions in recent years, following concern over exposure of infrastructure to terrorist attack, disruption through disasters, rising awareness of the interdependent nature of infrastructure in modern urban systems, and changes in the ownership of and responsibility for infrastructure assets. In this paper, we explore the implications of different framings of both “critical” and “infrastructure”, through two questions: critical how and for whom; critical when and at what scale? Framings of CI, and their increasingly important manifestations in policy and law, have deep but too-often unexposed implications: the lines drawn between what is defined as critical and that which is not concerns not only the physical or informational assets, but the inclusion/exclusion of communities and their places and values as important aspects of modern urban governance. We argue that a better understanding of what is critical about urban infrastructure is not just recognition of their vulnerability and interconnectedness, but also of the key linkages between critical infrastructure and human and environmental system integrity and equity within the context of capitalist urbanisation.

Place-based leadership: A new perspective on urban regeneration

The role of inspirational leadership in bringing about successful urban regeneration has been neglected. This paper attempts to provide a corrective by exploring the role of place-based leadership in modern urban governance. It outlines arguments that are set out at greater length in the author’s new book, ‘Leading the inclusive city’ (2015). The forces that now shape the power of place in the modern world are discussed. These forces limit the scope for place-based leadership but they do not disable it. A new framework for understanding civic leadership — new civic leadership (NCL) — is presented. In any given locality there are various realms of place-based leadership reflecting different sources of legitimacy. The concept of engaged scholarship is introduced, and the idea of an Innovation Story is presented as a creative way of unearthing new knowledge about civic leadership. Two inspiring examples of effective place-based leadership are then outlined: Melbourne, Australia and Freiburg, Germany. Emerging themes for regeneration theory and practice are discussed and pointers for further research are suggested.

The Birth of Modern Urban Governance

Although there is little dispute that modern urban governance was born in the nineteenth century in Britain and the United States, several questions have been left unanswered by past and current inquiries into the formation of modern urban governing institutions. For example, what specifically in the historical context of the early nineteenth century convinced political leaders that new forms of urban governance were warranted? How did the first efforts at urban political modernization proceed? Finally, did the early nineteenth-century formation and development of urban governing institutions follow similar paths cross-nationally, or did patterns of modernization diverge sharply across nations? In this article, the author attempts to answer these questions about the birth of modern forms of governance in Boston, Massachusetts, and Bristol, England.