Municipal Scale Research Articles

Occupational Exposure to Endotoxin along a Municipal Scale Fecal Sludge Collection and Resource Recovery Process in Kigali, Rwanda.

Background: Little is known about occupational exposures that occur along fecal sludge collection and resource recovery processes. This study characterizes inhaled endotoxin exposure to workers of a municipal scale fecal sludge-to-fuel processes in Kigali, Rwanda. Methods: Forty-two task-based air samples were collected from workers in five tasks along the fecal sludge collection and resource recovery process. Samples were processed for endotoxin using the limulus amebocyte lysate (LAL) test. To account for exposure variability and compare measured concentrations to established exposure limits, we used Monte Carlo modeling methods to construct distributions representing full eight-hour (8-h) exposures to endotoxin across eight exposure scenarios. Results: Geometric mean (GM) endotoxin concentrations in task-based samples ranged from 11–3700 EU/m3 with exposure concentrations increasing as the dryness of the fecal sludge increased through processing. The thermal dryer task had the highest endotoxin concentrations (GM = 3700 EU/m3) and the inlet task had the lowest (GM = 11 EU/m3). The geometric means (GM) of modeled 8-h exposure concentrations were between 6.7–960 EU/m3 and highest for scenarios which included the thermal dryer task in the exposure scenario. Conclusions: Our data suggest the importance of including worker exposure considerations in the design of nascent fecal sludge management processes. The methods used in this study combine workplace sampling with stochastic modeling and are useful for exposure assessment in resource constrained contexts.

Dynamism of Local Governance on Former Municipal Scales after “Major Mergers during the Heisei Era”: Case Study of a Local Policy in Former Municipal Areas in Saiki, Oita Prefecture

Dynamism of Local Governance on Former Municipal Scales after “Major Mergers during the Heisei Era”: Case Study of a Local Policy in Former Municipal Areas in Saiki, Oita Prefecture

The territorial and sectoral dimensions of advocacy – The conflicts about pesticide use in Argentina

The massive increase of pesticide use in transgenic agriculture has sparked conflicts in the heartland of Argentinean agriculture. These political conflicts have led to an extension of pesticide regulation from the national and provincial to the municipal scale, and – simultaneously – to an extension from agrarian policy to environmental and health policy, and later to urban and regional planning. These intertwined territorial and sectoral changes to pesticide regulation cannot be explained by the existing literature about advocacy strategies which separates territorial and sectoral analyses. Based on the concepts of boundary control, politics of scale, and venue shopping, I elaborate three advocacy strategies: closing, opening, and change of territorial and sectoral decision arenas. I conducted a single case study of the conflict about pesticide use near the urban area of San Francisco (province of Córdoba) based on qualitative data collected during research trips to Argentina. The success and failure of the advocacy strategies applied by the pro-pesticide and the anti-pesticide coalitions explain the adoption of a strict municipal pesticide law in the town San Francisco dominated by agriculture, the subsequent failure of the implementation of a (unanimously adopted) law, and the later reform attempt to water down the municipal pesticide law. The empirical case shows that the advocacy strategies are not only selected based on the position of an advocacy group in the power relations, as stated in the literature, but that they are also based on the accordance of the beliefs and interests of an advocacy group to the valid policy definition.

Monitoring Portuguese living conditions at local scale: a case study based on sustainable development indicators

ABSTRACTSustainable development policies are the convergence point of plans and actions aiming to attain healthy, prosper and successful societies, while safeguarding natural resources and ecosystems. Progress on sustainable development must be measured on a regular basis to follow and to account for the defined political commitments. Sustainable development policies have impact on people’s life; thus, monitoring must occur at the local scale. Using the framework of the sustainable development goals indicators and the European Union correspondent targets, this work is a contribution to evaluate living conditions at the municipal scale, taking Portugal as the case study. Fifty-four variables were statistically analysed and combined in a composite index whose conception, methodological procedures and validation process were previously described. Composite indicators are recognized as useful tools to monitor and to compare countries’ evolution and this work focus on the results of an index that was tailored designed to be applied at a local level enabling to monitor SDGs. Results show that Portugal is struggling with the implementation of SDGs, namely: SDG 3, by the uneven distribution of health professionals alongside the increase of deaths by tumours and respiratory diseases; SDG 4, visible by the reduction of students enrolled in basic education; SDGs 7 and 12, by the increase of natural gas per capita consumption. Additionally, the aggravation of fires and the increasing number of incinerators and landfills affect many SDGs targets. At present, generally, living conditions are harsh than in 2009 during the financial crisis.

An Environmental Health Typology as a Contributor to Sustainable Regional Urban Planning: The Case of the Metropolitan Region of São Paulo (MRSP)

The recognition of metropolitan regions and their growth as a necessary scale of analysis for their integrated management has become a central characteristic of urban planning. The current metropolitan landscape warrants the use of instruments beyond the municipal scale, especially since the economic integration of cities and their development are accentuating urban problems that affect the sustainability of cities. The São Paulo Metropolitan Region (MRSP), one of the world’s megacities, is used as a case study to identify how typologies can contribute to integrated sustainable urban planning and management at the metropolitan level. It applies the territorial analytical typology based on the Driving-Force-Pressure-Situation-Exposure-Effect-Actions (DPSEEA) Environmental Health Matrix to identify the heterogeneity of conditions encountered in large metropolitan regions such as the MRSP. The results show a great variety of environmental and social conditions present in the municipalities of the MRSP that condition the sustainability and health of the urban environment. This typology constitutes a first step to characterize metropolitan regions in socioenvironmental terms using as a conceptual basis a matrix of environmental health indicators, being a precursor in the largest metropolitan region of Brazil.

Structural Transformations of the Municipal Space: Substantiation of Expediency and Evaluation of Efficiency

The article discusses a set of scientific and applied problems about the meaning and bases, content, and consequences of structural transformations of the municipal space. Interest in these problems is caused by the need to search for reasons for the increased variability of the structural organization of this space, which throughout the post-Soviet period has not only undergone individual situational changes, but has repeatedly been the object of intensive and ubiquitous targeted state (at federal and regional levels) transformations that have had a contradictory nature of the reciprocating pulsations according to the reform–counterreform scheme. A retrospective analysis of the mass transformations in the territorial organization of local self-government that consistently took place in the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s leads to such conclusions. The author clarifies the reasons for the three quantitative and structural transformations opposite in meaning and fundamental in their consequences over such a short period, the requisite criteria (economic, financial, legal, etc.) for which formed the basis for the choice of spatial configuration variants, which rapidly replaced one another and were the results of changes. Russian processes of spatial transformation of the system of local self-government are compared with similar foreign practice. The fundamental possibility and availability of theoretical bases for formulating and solving the problem of rational determination of the spatial scale of municipalities (configuration of the municipal space) are clarified, and a conceptual approach, criteria, and methodological bases for systemic assessment of the prerequisites and efficiency of structural transformations of the municipal space are discussed.

Municipal level water security indices in Mexico

As tends to be the case in other large, developing countries, Mexico is a nation of strong meteorological, hydrographic and social contrasts throughout its territory, which impact the various strata of the population in different ways. The current paper seeks to show how these contrasts create different water-security scenarios using pertinent indices. While some of the impact factors, such as precipitation, drought and floods, are of intrinsically probabilistic nature, others are related to population vulnerability. There have been a small number of studies on water security at global or regional scale that include Mexico, or at local level in Mexico, but none of them consider probabilistic aspects and population vulnerability, neither extend to municipal level. A probabilistic methodology was defined in this paper, and applied at municipal scale in Mexico, to obtain a water security index, which considers the concepts of risk, hazard and social vulnerability. Hazard comes in the form of water supply and drainage shortage, flooding, pollution, water quality, groundwater depletion and drought indicators. Vulnerability considers factors such as the educational level of the population, access to health services, illiteracy, housing conditions, unemployment and the proportion of indigenous language population. All these indicators are very heterogeneous throughout the Mexican territory. The proposed probabilistic methodology was applied in a geographic information system environment, and it was used to obtain water security indices for all municipalities in Mexico (2456 municipalities).

SMC-Flood database: a high-resolution press database on flood cases for the Spanish Mediterranean coast (1960–2015)

Abstract. Flood databases of high spatio-temporal resolution are a necessary tool for proper spatial planning, especially in areas with high levels of exposure and danger to floods. This study presents the preliminary results of the Spanish Mediterranean Coastal Flood (SMC-Flood) database covering the municipalities in this region. This database collects information on flood cases that occurred between 1960 and 2015 by systematically consulting the digital archives of the main newspapers in the study area. The search for flood information was conducted by means of using links between municipality names and seven keywords that correspond to the most common ways of referring to a situation that is likely to describe a flood in Spain. This methodology has enabled the reconstruction of 3008 flood cases at a municipal scale with daily resolution while gathering information on the types of damage, intensity, severity and area affected. The spatio-temporal analysis of the data reveals hotspots where flood cases are especially intense and damaging when compared to highly developed areas where the frequency of flood cases is very high. This situation is especially worrying insofar as we have detected a growing trend in the frequency and area affected by flood cases. However, one positive aspect is that the intensity and severity of flood cases follows a falling trend. The main novelty lies in the fact that the high-resolution spatial analysis has made it possible to detect a clear latitudinal gradient of growing intensity and severity in a north–south direction. This pattern calls for new actions by the coastal municipal authorities of southern Spain for adaptation to a more complex flood scenario.

Legal regulation of supplementary cervid feeding facing chronic wasting disease

ABSTRACTThe supplementary feeding of cervids is a widespread practice across the northern hemisphere. There are few studies, however, regarding the extent of feeding in space and time. There are adverse effects of supplementary feeding, of which the most severe are increased parasite and disease transmission. With the recent emergence of chronic wasting disease (CWD) among cervids in Norway, a legal regulation was issued that banned all supplementary cervid feeding. We quantified the spatial extent and intentions of feeding cervids across all of Norway using a questionnaire at the municipality scale. We also compared spatial extent of feeding before and after the feeding ban to shed light on the ability of regulations to control supplementary feeding. Supplementary feeding to increase winter survival and targeting roe deer (Capreolus capreolus) was more common (48.4% of the municipalities) than the feeding of red deer (Cervus elaphus; 20.5%) and moose (Alces alces; 7.4%). The main feeding period was January–March, but extensive feeding also occurred from November to December and in April. Reducing traffic accidents was also a motivation, particularly for the feeding of moose (14.5%), and this was the main motivation (86%) for public feeding. Among the 65.7% that responded, 53.3% reported they knew about supplemental feeding of cervids in their municipality. In the region with the first feeding ban, 80.2% of municipalities were feeding in 2015–2016 before the ban, which was reduced to 68.4% in 2016–2017 and remained at 68.4% in 2017–2018. In the remainder of Norway, 81.4% were feeding in 2015–2016, and 72.6% were feeding in 2016–2017, but after the ban, this increased to 78.6% in the harsh winter of 2017–2018. Our study highlights that regulations across broad scales may not be followed and that more spatially targeted regulations and increased enforcement are required for disease transmission to be more effectively combated. © 2019 The Authors. Journal of Wildlife Management published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of The Wildlife Society.

Heterogeneous local dynamics revealed by classification analysis of spatially disaggregated time series data

Time series data provide a crucial window into infectious disease dynamics, yet their utility is often limited by the spatially aggregated form in which they are presented. When working with time series data, violating the implicit assumption of homogeneous dynamics below the scale of spatial aggregation could bias inferences about underlying processes. We tested this assumption in the context of the 2015–2016 Zika epidemic in Colombia, where time series of weekly case reports were available at national, departmental, and municipal scales. First, we performed a descriptive analysis, which showed that the timing of departmental-level epidemic peaks varied by three months and that departmental-level estimates of the time-varying reproduction number, R(t), showed patterns that were distinct from a national-level estimate. Second, we applied a classification algorithm to six features of proportional cumulative incidence curves, which showed that variability in epidemic duration, the length of the epidemic tail, and consistency with a cumulative normal density curve made the greatest contributions to distinguishing groups. Third, we applied this classification algorithm to data simulated with a stochastic transmission model, which showed that group assignments were consistent with simulated differences in the basic reproduction number, R0. This result, along with associations between spatial drivers of transmission and group assignments based on observed data, suggests that the classification algorithm is capable of detecting differences in temporal patterns that are associated with differences in underlying drivers of incidence patterns. Overall, this diversity of temporal patterns at local scales underscores the value of spatially disaggregated time series data.

Metropolitan growth, urban cycles and housing in a Mediterranean country, 1910s–2010s

Long-term urbanization trends reflect important transformations at the metropolitan scale, being increasingly dependent on place-specific processes of change. By investigating vertical profile and age of buildings over one century, the present study identifies sequential urban cycles in Greece and characterizes the dominant socioeconomic profile at local scale over 12 time intervals between mid-1910s and mid-2010s. The Greek metropolitan system underwent rapid changes during both economic expansions and recessions. The empirical results of this study outline a spatially complex path of urban expansion with sequential waves of dense urban growth, hyper-densification of inner cities, semi-dense suburbanization of fringe districts and sprawl in coastal and more accessible internal rural areas. Distinct patterns of building activity at the spatial scale of municipalities, reflected a traditional coastal-inland divide and divergent responses to market stimuli and planning constraints. A local-scale analysis of urban cycles grounded on indicators derived from official statistics and covering a relatively long time period sheds light on latent patterns of cities' growth and change, clarifying the contribution of housing and real estate markets to an integrated strategy for sustainable development of metropolitan systems.

Revisiting the arts as a socially innovative urban development strategy

ABSTRACTArts and cultural activities have become an increasingly important aspect of urban and regional development. Can such projects be seen as socially innovative? Socially innovative projects are here understood as those that create new ways of looking at problems, new organisational means for dealing with problems and solutions that go beyond market efficiency. This paper considers arts-based redevelopment projects at regional, municipal and neighbourhood scales. Its focus is on US cities with some examples drawn from Europe. Initiatives to build regional creative economies and creative clusters, and to revitalise buildings and neighbourhoods through cultural activities can be seen as socially innovative, although they can also catalyse market processes that can have deleterious impacts on vulnerable communities.

Multi-scale water use balance for a typical coastal city in China

Coastal cities play significant roles in the strategy of regional economic development as well as national water resource supply. As a typical coastal city in Hebei Province, China, Qinhuangdao is the main water supplier in Hebei Province but also faces increasingly scary water shortages at the same time. Taking Qinhuangdao as a case, this work analyzes the water supply and demand of a coastal city by multi-scale input-output analysis and conducts a comprehensive assessment on the water resource balance from the perspectives of global, domestic, provincial and municipal scales. Overall, the water use efficiency of Qinhuangdao is lower than that of Beijing but higher than China's average. Notice that, Qinhuangdao's local water resources only account for about 39.18% of its final water demand, which cannot fully satisfy its own demands. However, Qinhuangdao as a net embodied water exporting economy, has a total net export volume of 1.52E+08 m3 of embodied water. Especially, the secondary industry of Qinhuangdao has a great contribution to the provincial embodied water exports, while the primary industry is more essential in the domestic and foreign embodied water exports. From the global, domestic and provincial perspectives, the multi-scale supply chains of water resources at Qinhuangdao could provide a solid foundation for water allocation balance at different scales, which is necessary for regional water utilization and water saving policies from an embodied perspective.

The Dimensions of Agricultural Diversification: A Spatial Analysis of Italian Municipalities

AbstractDiversification in agriculture could ensure the survival of farming by broadening the income base of farms and encouraging agricultural sustainability. The diversification of on‐farm activities may depend on socioeconomic and environmental characteristics. Although multifunctionality is a hotly debated topic, few papers have focused on the farm characteristics that influence diversification and none have focused on the influence of the spatial pattern. This paper examines the relationship between farm characteristics and the adoption of a specific type of diversification. An econometric model is presented that uses a spatial autoregressive lag model at the municipal scale. The results demonstrate that the activation of each diversification dimension is influenced by both internal and external factors, encompassing farmers’ characteristics, the farm structure, and territorial features, including regional and spatial patterns. Deepening is mainly influenced by the farmer’s age, education, and the presence of small and labor‐intensive farms. The key factors for broadening diversification are the presence of small farms and farms with mixed production (breeding and crop cultivation). Regrounding is most affected by the labor‐intensive farms in the area and the farms with mixed production.

Alternative Food Networks (AFNs): Determinants for consumer and farmer participation in Lombardy, Italy

Scaling up supply chains in the interest of cost-effectiveness has led to an increasing disconnection between producers and consumers in today’s globalised food system. This paper assesses the agricultural and territorial drivers that influence the development of Alternative Food Networks (AFNs), where consumers and producers act together, by implementing an Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression. The analysis was carried out at a municipal scale in Lombardy, in northern Italy. The territorial characteristics of the local areas were less important in explaining the level of consumer and producer participation in the alternative food networks, rather than the specific factors related to the agricultural sector.

Disclosure and Competition for Capital

We study the relation between disclosure and competition for capital, using Moody's 2010 recalibration of the municipal rating scale. On a relative basis, the recalibration advantaged highly upgraded issuers and disadvantaged lowly upgraded issuers. We develop a model to show that for disadvantaged issuers, the recalibration exacerbates a potential conflict between social welfare and government officials' personal preferences. Higher quality disclosures can mitigate this conflict. Empirically, we find that the disadvantaged issuers provide timelier and more frequent financial statements after the recalibration, particularly when those issuers face relatively intense competition for capital. This evidence supports the idea that a competitive disadvantage in raising capital can motivate issuers to improve disclosure quality.

Geomorphic response of inlet barrier islands to storms

Inlet Barrier Islands (IBIs) are infrequently studied, and are often poorly represented in coastal lidar records. The fetch limited barrier island (FLBI) model was introduced to describe geomorphic changes of IBIs over time. The FLBI model predicts that the morphology of IBIs should remain largely static during predominate weather conditions due to sheltering from oceanic wave energy but undergo significant erosion when local and non-local waves magnify during storms, subsequently failing to recover volume and elevation losses. Using three years of high-frequency small unoccupied aircraft systems (sUAS, aka drone) surveys and existing lidar records, we document geomorphic changes on Bird Shoal (a protective IBI near the town of Beaufort, NC) resulting from storms and predominate conditions, testing the FLBI model and documenting island evolution. Our results indicate that Bird Shoal exhibits different spatial trends in erosion, accretion, and shoreline migration across its 4 km length, likely driven by varying shoreline orientation to the Beaufort Inlet and back barrier bathymetry in Back Sound. Our data indicate that the geomorphic behavior of Bird Shoal currently does not adhere to the classic FLBI model. Foreshore storm recovery and growth on Western Bird Shoal and shoreline retreat on Central Bird Shoal occurred during predominate conditions, and beach morphology was not an artifact of past storm events. The Western Bird Shoal shoreline consistently retreated landward in decades of historic imagery, but transitioned to seaward expansion sometime between 2011 and 2014. This shift is likely driven by erosion of the western end of Shackleford Banks and concurrent widening of the Beaufort Inlet, allowing increased wave energy to enter the back-barrier sound and push flood deltas onto Bird Shoal during predominate conditions. Our results suggest that open ocean inlet width and location interact with back-barrier deltas to control sediment supply and wave energy for IBIs, and that IBIs may fall into and out of conformance with the FLBI archetype over time. This study demonstrates sUAS deploying frequently over a municipal scale to fill spatial and temporal gaps in traditional coastal remote sensing datasets.

Quantification and Analysis of Impervious Surface Area in the Metropolitan Region of São Paulo, Brazil

The growing intensity of impervious surface area (ISA) is one of the most striking effects of urban growth. The expansion of ISA gives rise to a set of changes on the physical environment, impacting the quality of life of the human population as well as the dynamics of fauna and flora. Hence, due to its importance, the present study aimed to examine the ISA distribution in the Metropolitan Region of São Paulo (MRSP), Brazil, using satellite imagery from the Landsat-8 Operational Land Imager (OLI) instrument. In contrast to other investigations that primarily focus on the accuracy of the estimate, the proposal of this study is—besides generating a robust estimate—to perform an integrated analysis of the impervious-surface distribution at pixel scale with the variability present in different territorial units, namely municipalities, sub-prefecture and districts. The importance of this study is that it strengthens the use of information related to impervious cover in the territorial planning, providing elements for a better understanding and connection with other spatial attributes. Reducing the dimensionality of the dataset (visible, near-infrared and short-wave infrared bands) by Karhune–Loeve analysis, the first three principal components (PCs) contained more than 99% of the information present in the original bands. Projecting PC1, PC2 and PC3 onto a series of two-dimensional (2D) scatterplots, four endmembers—Low Albedo (Dark), High Albedo (Substrate), Green Vegetation (GV) and Non-Photosynthetic Vegetation (NPV)—were visually selected to produce the unmixing estimates. The selected endmembers fitted the model well, as the propagated error was consistently low (root-mean-square error = 0.005) and the fraction estimates at pixel scale were found to be in accordance with the physical structures of the landscape. The impervious surface fraction (ISF) was calculated by adding the Dark and Substrate fraction imagery. Reconciling the ISF with reference samples revealed the estimates to be reliable (R2 = 0.97), regardless of an underestimation error (~8% on average) having been found, mostly over areas with higher imperviousness rates. Intra-pixel variability was combined with the territorial units of analysis through a modification of the Lorenz curve, which permitted a straightforward comparison of ISF values at different reference scales. Good adherence was observed when the original 30-m ISF was compared to a resampled 300-m ISF, but with some differences, suggesting a systematic behavior with the degradation of pixel resolution tending to underestimate lower fractions and overestimate higher ones; furthermore, discrepancies were bridged with the increase of scale analysis. The analysis of the IFS model also revealed that, in the context of the MRSP, gross domestic product (GDP) has little potential for explaining the distribution of impervious areas on the municipality scale. Finally, the ISF model was found to be more sensitive in describing impervious surface response than other well-known indices, such as Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and Normalized Difference Built-up Index (NDBI).

VisualUVAM: A Decision Support System Addressing the Curse of Dimensionality for the Multi-Scale Assessment of Urban Vulnerability in Spain

Many-objective optimization methods have proven successful in the integration of research attributes demanded for urban vulnerability assessment models. However, these techniques suffer from the curse of the dimensionality problem, producing an excessive burden in the decision-making process by compelling decision-makers to select alternatives among a large number of candidates. In other fields, this problem has been alleviated through cluster analysis, but there is still a lack in the application of such methods for urban vulnerability assessment purposes. This work addresses this gap by a novel combination of visual analytics and cluster analysis, enabling the decision-maker to select the set of indicators best representing urban vulnerability accordingly to three criteria: expert’s preferences, goodness of fit, and robustness. Based on an assessment framework previously developed, VisualUVAM affords an evaluation of urban vulnerability in Spain at regional, provincial, and municipal scales, whose results demonstrate the effect of the governmental structure of a territory over the vulnerability of the assessed entities.

Skenario Pengembangan Sistem Pengelolaan Sampah Kabupaten Pasaman Barat dengan Pendekatan Skala Pengolahan Sampah di Tingkat Kawasan dan Kota

<p>This study aims to analyze the existing conditions of the solid waste management system in Pasaman Barat Regency and discuss the alternative development of solid waste management systems with a solid waste treatment approach At the regional and municipal scale as a solution to the problem of solid waste management in Pasaman Barat Regency. From this study it is known that the level of existing solid waste management services was only 9.13% of total solid waste generated. The problems faced in solid waste management in Pasaman Barat Regency were still high levels of unserved solid waste, inadequate operational facilities and infrastructure for solid waste management, uneven handling of solid waste in service area coverage and the low practice of waste minimization and utilization. The solid waste man-agement system in Pasaman West Regency in the future can apply a combination of solid waste manage-ment approaches at the regional level based on Solid Waste Treatment Station with reduce-reuse-recycle approach (TPS 3R) in domestic areas and treatment at the city level based on Intergrated Solid Waste Treatment Station (TPST) at the landfill site, with the development of the system planned for 15 years, solid waste volume taken into the landfill site can be reduced by 22.40%</p>