Traditional Neighborhood Research Articles

The Formation and Preservation of Urban Heritage Through Urban Landscape Transformation: A Case Study of Pittsburgh

This study examines the potential of urban landscape transformation to generate and develop new heritage and the role of heritage urbanism in an industrial city. It explores whether the changeover of urban heritage districts in Pittsburgh (PA, USA) can give rise to a novel type of urban heritage. Pittsburgh experienced urban development primarily driven by the presence and accessibility of natural resources, rather than favorable geographical conditions: topography characterized by rugged hills, rock formations, rivers, and stream valleys. The integration of the American-style grid within this unique natural environment resulted in intriguing juxtapositions. Consequently, elements such as bridges, viaducts, stairs, tunnels, and historical inclines gained paramount importance in shaping the urban fabric. The city’s remaining preserved or transformed urban heritage is protected through historic districts designated by the Department of City Planning, which enforces specific planning and design guidelines. The study employs a multi-faceted approach combining the concepts of historic stratification (urban palimpsest), integrated urban morphology, space syntax (integration analysis), and heritage urbanism. During the personally conducted long-term fieldwork, the selected case studies described herein (historic districts, university campus, and traditional neighborhood) proved to be the most suitable for demonstrating urban heritage formation through urban landscape transformation.

Multiplicities of Socialist Spaces: Subjectivity Construction and Spatial Configuration in 1950s Shanghai Urban Films

ABSTRACT Drawing from Henri Lefebvre’s influential theory, the triad of space production, this article analyzes three urban films released during the early years of the People’s Republic of China: Husband and Wife on the March (1951), Spring is Splendid Color (1959), and Today, I Rest (1959). These films explore the daily lives of Shanghai residents in changing everyday living spaces, from single-room apartments to traditional alleyway neighbourhoods and the expansive community system of Workers’ New Village. The changing spatial configurations serve as the backdrop for the unfolding cinematic narratives, fostering new forms of socialist relationships and interactions. Moreover, a new type of socialist communal life, seamlessly integrated with socialist production, emerged, catalysing the revolutionary reshaping of women’s identities and roles. A socialist community founded on mutual assistance and collective cooperation emerged as a model for social development and bureaucratic governance in the 1950s. This article argues that these three films provide compelling examples of Shanghai’s socialist urban transformation, exploring changes in the daily living spaces of socialist individuals in Shanghai and reflecting the dynamic shaping of socialist subjectivity in the new era.

On the Trail of Traditional Turkish Neighbourhood and Houses: Analysis of the Rural Settlement of Sadağı in Orhaneli

ABSTRACT As global resources dwindle, the significance of traditional rural settlements becomes ever more pronounced, serving as a crucial component of humanity’s shared heritage. The Orhaneli district and its villages in Bursa province offer a rich field of research, particularly in uncovering the architectural and cultural characteristics of the Turkish house. The Ottoman Empire, which ruled for centuries over a vast geographical area including Anatolia and the Balkans, was founded in and around Bursa, its first capital. Consequently, the earliest examples of settlements within the empire can be found in this region. The Sadağı neighbourhood of the Orhaneli district, which forms the subject of this study, is post-dated to a period prior to the conquest of Bursa. This settlement was established by the Turkmen (Yörük) population, who played a fundamental role in the foundation of the Ottoman Empire. Houses formed the core of the settlements of the Ottoman period. These dwellings incorporated traditional materials and methods, local culture and identity, climatic conditions, and local construction techniques, reflecting a traditional extended family lifestyle. In this study, the rural settlement of Sadağı was examined using a combination of historical research methods and field studies. Overall, the Sadağı neighbourhood is representative of traditional Ottoman-Turkish settlement characteristics.

The Role of Intangible Features in Developing Open Spaces

this paper focuses on the role of intangibleelements of the public spaces in the residential areas such asa neighbourhood. The main emphasis is the significance ofthe factor of social satisfactions on developing public spaces.The research to date has tended to focus on examining thephysical quality of public space, particularly tangiblefeatures, but fewer have dealt with the intangible featuresthat related to the residents’ social life and communityinteraction. Consequently, in this research, the analysisincludes some important intangible elements such as a senseof community, social satisfaction and safety and security inthe public spaces and the local initiatives. The researchincludes two case studies in Misurata, Libya. Both cases areneighbourhoods type with similar in size, population,number of houses and distance from the city centre.However, one case is a Governmental Neighbourhood GNswhile the other one is a Traditional Neighbourhood TNs.This inquiry is a qualitative research, however, it adoptedmixed methods approach, and i.e. both questionnaires andin-depth interviews were utilized for data collection. Theresults of this study show that there are a several crucialfindings related to the importance of these intangibleelements, these findings suggest some practical guidelines tobe considered in new development projects.

Spatial solar forecast verification with the neighborhood method and automatic threshold segmentation

Numerical weather prediction (NWP) has hitherto been the default tool for providing day-ahead forecasting services to the solar energy industry. Rapid advancements in solar forecasting using NWP call for more appropriate forecast verification procedures. Current solar forecast verification is almost always carried out through ground-based radiometric data collected at point locations. Consequently, spatial features embedded in the gridded NWP forecasts cannot be verified. This study presents the spatial verification of solar irradiance forecasts using the neighborhood method, with the main goal of emphasizing the importance of such verification procedures. By applying spatial smoothing one establishes a way to directly compare the observed and forecast fields, and concurrently, mitigate verification errors that may arise from small-scale spatial displacements. Within this framework, two variants of the neighborhood-based verification, namely, the fraction-field method and the upscaling method, are examined with respect to two reanalysis products, namely, ERA5 and MERRA-2. The results suggest that, in comparison to the upscaling method, the fraction-field method can better quantify forecast performance by providing fractions skill scores. On top of the traditional neighborhood approach, which involves the subjective selection of threshold for dichotomization, an automatic threshold segmentation method based on the three-component skew-normal mixture model is proposed to resolve the issue, which can also lead to substantial time savings in data processing. Given the spatio-temporal attributes and benefits of visualization, spatial verification is anticipated to serve as a complementary practice to the current mainstream point-location forecast verification.

More than Pierogi and Pączki

Abstract In many urban areas in the diaspora, churches, schools, and ethnic businesses are routinely established to feed the needs of the community. One that has more than a century of history in such communities is the deli. It is the place where products, purveyors, and purchasers interact. But the Polish deli has long escaped the lens of scholars. No longer is this the case. While delis provide sustenance and Polish products to customers in the diaspora, they are also gathering places for the broader ethnic community and crucial sites of memory where people experience and exercise symbolic ethnicity. Additionally, in Ottawa and Toronto, Ontario, Canada, contrary to the deli-lost narrative, the deli has adapted and followed the movements of people out of the traditional ethnic neighborhood and into the suburbs in the two metropolitan areas.

Simulating Urban Expansion from the Perspective of Spatial Anisotropy and Expansion Neighborhood

Exploring spatial anisotropy features and capturing spatial interactions during urban change simulation is of great significance to enhance the effectiveness of dynamic urban modeling and improve simulation accuracy. Addressing the inadequacies of current cellular automaton-based urban expansion models in exploring spatial anisotropy features, overlooking spatial interaction forces, and the ineffective expansion of cells due to traditional neighborhood computation methods, this study builds upon the machine learning-based urban expansion model. It introduces a spatial anisotropy index into the comprehensive probability module and incorporates a gravity-guided expansion neighborhood operator into the iterative module. Consequently, the RF-CNN-SAI-CA model is developed. Focusing on the 21 districts of the main urban area in Chongqing, the study conducts comparative analysis and ablation experiments using different models to simulate the land use changes between 2010 and 2020. Different model comparison results show that the recommended model in this study has a Kappa value of 0.8561 and an FOM value of 0.4596. Compared with the RF-CA model and the FA-MLP-CA model, the Kappa values are higher by 0.0407 and 0.1577, respectively, while the FOM values are improved by 0.0529 and 0.0654, respectively. Ablation experiment results indicate that removing gravity, SAI, and expansion neighborhood operators leads to a decrease in both Kappa and FOM values. These findings demonstrate that the RF-CNN-SAI-CA model, based on the expanded neighborhood iteration algorithm, effectively integrates spatial anisotropy features, captures spatial interaction forces, and resolves neighborhood cell failure issues, thereby significantly improving simulation effectiveness.

Measuring the Quality of Public spaces in Traditional and Governmental Neighbourhoods , Misurata City

One of the major indicators of urban quality and residents’ levels of satisfaction in city neighbourhoods is the public space. In Libya, in 2005, the government introduced a redevelopment scheme to provide new homes to the local residents and to build thousands of new housing units around the country. This initiative was to offset the shortage in housing numbers due to the rapid population growth and urbanisation. In 2011, 79% of the country’s population lived in urban areas. This high demand for housing drove significant changes to the urban planning composition of the country, particularly the residential areas. This paper focuses on two examples of typical neighbourhoods as case studies in Misurata City. It investigates the role of public spaces in the traditional neighbourhoods (TNs) and the governmental neighbourhoods (GNs). It examines the relationship between the residents of public spaces in both types of neighbourhood in terms of social integration. In addition, the researcher examines whether this new strategy has affected the social relationships within the local community or not, and assesses the extent of the possible impact on the daily activities of residents.

Neighbourhood social capital and political participation in neighbourhood governance: The case of Beijing, China

Determinants of individual participation in neighbourhood public affairs have been subject to growing scholarly interest. Urban scholars have adopted the social capital perspective to understanding both informal forms of civic engagement and formal participation in local politics. However, given the mixed findings from the existing literature, whether the social capital theory applies to understanding neighbourhood political participation in Chinese cities requires further investigation. This paper thus examines, in the context of housing marketization and neighbourhood governance reforms, the extent to which neighbourhood social capital promotes neighbourhood political participation among urban residents in China. Using data from a large-scale questionnaire survey conducted in 2017 in Beijing, China, we conducted statistical analysis and found an overall positive relationship between neighbourhood social capital and voting behaviour in neighbourhood elections. However, not all dimensions of social capital are significant, and the positive effects are more salient in newly-developed neighbourhoods of private governance, but not in traditional neighbourhoods in Beijing. These findings extend the international literature on the social capital theory of neighbourhood political participation with additional evidence from a developing country, while also contributing to an emerging line of inquiry on the determinants of civic engagement in neighbourhood governance in transitional urban China.

Research on Microclimate Performance Simulation Application and Scheme Optimization in Traditional Neighborhood Renewal—A Case Study of Donghuali District, Foshan City

With global warming and rapid urbanization, the microclimate in the Lingnan region is prone to health problems, such as pyrexia and infectious diseases, and the average annual number of heatwave-related deaths is rising rapidly. The large-scale regeneration of traditional neighborhoods in Lingnan under high-quality development is underway, which has implications for the thermal comfort of microclimatic environments. This study focused on the impact of different building unit types and spatial patterns on thermal comfort in the Donghuali traditional neighborhood of Foshan City as an example. We extracted eight basic morphological units and designed a prototype block of 400 m × 400 m. In the Rhinoceros & Grasshopper parametric software 6.7, a variety of plug-ins were integrated to establish a platform with parametric modeling, microclimate simulation and evaluation, and optimal design for thermal comfort. Through experiments, the effects of new single-type and new composite building units on thermal comfort were investigated, and the correlation equations between spatial morphology and microclimate comfort in Lingnan traditional neighborhoods were established. Finally, the multi-objective genetic optimization of thermal comfort was carried out as an example of real block renewal, which provides a practical reference for the planning and design of traditional blocks.

Madde Kullanıcısı Bireylerin Maddeye Ulaşma Sürecine Dair Nitel Bir Araştırma

This study aims to thoroughly examine the processes through which individuals who use substances access these substances. The main focuses of the study are the channels and locations of substance access, the process leading from substance use to procurement, communication with sellers, and applied privacy strategies. This research is designed according to qualitative research methods. During data collection, a semi-structured interview form was preferred, and interviews were conducted with 10 substance users. The collected data were analyzed using descriptive analysis methods, and the results were interpreted. The findings are presented under four themes: "Initiation of Substance Use, Methods of Accessing Substances and Privacy Strategies, Language and Trust Relationships in the Substance Acquisition Process, Locations for Substance Procurement, Risky Situations, and Social Consequences." According to the results of the study, it is highlighted that the process of starting substance use due to curiosity and experimentation, often influenced by social environment and friendships, turns into addiction, and individuals usually begin using substances between the ages of 14 and 18. The study finds that while experienced users resort to traditional neighborhood channels like street dealers, the new generation prefers social media platforms (such as Telegram, Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook) and certain games (like PUBG mobile, Minecraft) as covert channels. It has also been determined that the language and communication methods used in the process of procuring substances are developed using various names and jargons specific to different substances. On the other hand, the need to secure financial resources for continuous consumption and procurement during the transition from substance use to procurement often leads individuals to illegal actions such as theft, robbery, and violence, as well as to dangerous and risky behaviors.

Population and Morphological Change: A Study of Building Type Replacements in the Osaka‐Kobe City‐Region in Japan

As cities adapt to new needs and challenges, their forms change in close relation to population dynamics. This article focuses on the link between population dynamics and the evolution of building hull types. The case study is the Osaka‐Kobe city‐region in Japan, a country globally witnessing an intense population decline. Morphometric indicators are coupled with a tree‐like classificatory model in order to label buildings into consistent classes between two different periods (2003–2004 and 2013–2014). The building class distributions and their evolutions are studied in conjunction with population censuses. Urban adaptation processes are particularly accounted for through the study of the replacement of building types. Results show that, among other things, townhouses in traditional neighborhoods are gradually being replaced by small‐size collective complexes. In far outlying areas, people are still eager to move and live in detached single‐family homes despite a global context of population decline. Finally, central places are increasingly filled by narrow almost‐adjoining towers. Relations between building types and population dynamics, detailed through maps and statistics, show that peoples are increasingly concentrating in central locations associated with specific building types, while some other peripheral locations are concerned by both a disappearance of specific building types and a population decline.

Analysis of green art concept and interior design space utilization based on perception and behavioral association

Abstract This paper summarizes 13 indoor space design indicators that affect perception and behavior from three aspects: physical elements, other elements, and spatial attributes. Then, through the K-means algorithm and FP-growth correlation rule algorithm, we obtain the user’s behavioral habit data and carry out the simple correlation analysis and curve estimation regression analysis of the user’s perception and behavior based on the indexes in turn. On this basis, it is proposed that the indoor space stay time factor of green art users and spatial perception have 10 highly significant correlation indexes with 0.01 boundaries (two-tailed). Under the quadratic function model of the time factor R2=0.3425, the width in the spatial scale and the significance of the time factor have a P-value of 0.0065. The peak value of indoor natural light intake of the neighborhoods adopting the green design is 2,667.3% higher than that of traditional neighborhoods on cloudy days. The cost is 2667.3951 more, but the green interior design that is based on perception and behavioral association is highly effective.

주민자치조직의 지역공동체 의식에 관한 연구

Since the restoration of the self-governance system in 1995, Korea has been striving to stabilize the implementation of the local government system and expand local autonomy to overcome the limitations of representative democracy. In 1998, a local self-governance committee was established and operated to reflect the needs of residents through participation and communication at the town, village, and district levels, which are the basic units of local self-governance, but it did not achieve its purpose. Therefore, in 2010, a special law was enacted to expand the scope of resident participation, which was a limitation of resident autonomy committees. The purpose of the Act was to establish an efficient public service system by expanding residents' participation and restoring local traditional communities. This study sought to verify the effectiveness of the neighborhood association conversion policy by comparing the sense of community in neighborhoods that were converted to neighborhood associations and those that were not converted to neighborhood associations.
 Quantitative research was used as the research method, and the research model and hypotheses were derived through theoretical discussions on major factors such as residents' self-governance capacity as an independent variable and community consciousness as a dependent variable. A survey tool was utilized to measure residents' sense of community. Questionnaires were distributed to residents visiting 44 administrative wards in Goyang-si, Gyeonggi-do, and the collected questionnaires were analyzed using SPSS version 27.0. Descriptive statistics, analysis of variance, correlation, and multiple regression analysis were performed on the collected survey responses.
 The results of the study showed that there was no statistically significant difference in the level of residents' sense of community between neighborhood councils and neighborhood committees. This suggests that the policy of converting neighborhood committees into neighborhood associations had an unexpected effect, resulting in a policy error. In order to improve the sense of community and restore traditional neighborhoods, it is necessary to increase the level of residents' ‘local attachment’, ‘local identity’, and ‘sense of fulfillment’. It is also necessary to verify the professional competence of community council members to ensure their representation. In addition, it will be possible to overcome the limitations of representative democracy by solving local problems with residents through connecting with local resources and community organizations.

Social Drivers of Health and Pediatric Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation Outcomes.

Relationships between social drivers of health (SDoH) and pediatric health outcomes are highly complex with substantial inconsistencies in studies examining SDoH and extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) outcomes. To add to this literature with emerging novel SDoH measures, and to address calls for institutional accountability, we examined associations between SDoH and pediatric ECMO outcomes. This single-center retrospective cohort study included children (<18 years) supported on ECMO (2012-2021). SDoH included Child Opportunity Index (COI), race, ethnicity, payer, interpreter requirement, urbanicity, and travel-time to hospital. COI is a multidimensional estimation of SDoH incorporating traditional (eg, income) and novel (eg, healthy food access) neighborhood attributes ([range 0-100] higher indicates healthier child development). Outcomes included in-hospital mortality, ECMO run duration, and length of stay (LOS). 540 children on ECMO (96%) had a calculable COI. In-hospital mortality was 44% with median run duration of 125 hours and ICU LOS 29 days. Overall, 334 (62%) had cardiac disease, 92 (17%) neonatal respiratory failure, 93 (17%) pediatric respiratory failure, and 21 (4%) sepsis. Median COI was 64 (interquartile range 32-81), 323 (60%) had public insurance, 174 (34%) were from underrepresented racial groups, 57 (11%) required interpreters, 270 (54%) had urban residence, and median travel-time was 89 minutes. SDoH including COI were not statistically associated with outcomes in univariate or multivariate analysis. We observed no significant difference in pediatric ECMO outcomes according to SDoH. Further research is warranted to better understand drivers of inequitable health outcomes in children, and potential protective mechanisms.

Social Change İn Traditional Neighborhood Culture İn Turkey From The Ottoman Empire To The Present

Social Change İn Traditional Neighborhood Culture İn Turkey From The Ottoman Empire To The Present

Mitigation of urban voids in traditional neighborhoods: The case of the Al-Najada zone in Doha, Qatar

Urban voids and leftover spaces challenge the urban development of cities and result in land vacancy and other spatial planning issues. Such spaces have great potential for innovative intervention through piece-by-piece sustainable urban design and small-scale actions to foster livability and sustainability. This paper analyzes urban voids in the Al-Najada zone in Doha, Qatar. The zone has a valuable cultural and historical background. The paper uses the case study method to analyze the urban voids and develop re-planning scenarios through visual schematic design and photomontage. The paper demonstrates the application of sustainable and social principles to rejuvenate old areas by creating functions for urban voids.

Research on the renewal and renovation of Rabbit Mountain Site Park oriented by the construction of green blocks

ABSTRACT Through the review studies of ecological city construction and green neighbourhood development at home and abroad, green neighbourhood construction has become an important bridge between ecological cities and green buildings, but in China, there are fewer research results for green neighbourhood construction in urban renewal. Therefore, this study selects the national cultural heritage protection unit Rabbit Hill Heritage Park as the research scope, takes the traditional neighbourhood as the research object, and establishes a research framework for quantitative analysis of green neighbourhoods by combining the 2018 Green Urban Area Evaluation Criteria. Using the spatial analysis methods such as the spatial syntax software DEPTHMAP and ARCGIS, quantitative analysis is carried out for the current space from five levels: site layout, green transportation, green space system, public space, and disaster prevention system, and the optimization strategy for green neighbourhood renovation is proposed based on the quantitative analysis results to make up for the lack of existing green neighbourhood research results and provide data support for the smooth implementation of green neighbourhood renewal and renovation. It has certain innovative value and strong practical significance.

Urbanization Process: A Simulation Method of Urban Expansion Based on RF-SNSCNN-CA Model

One of the focal points in Geographic Information Science (GIS) is to uncover the spatial distribution patterns of geographical phenomena. In response to the insufficient spatial feature learning concerning neighborhoods in traditional machine learning-based Cellular Automata (CA) models for land use change, this study couples the Random Forest (RF) model and the Spatially Non-Stationary Convolutional Neural Network (SNSCNN) model to the CA model. The resulting RF-SNSCNN-CA model considers the issue of spatial non-stationarity by incorporating attention mechanisms. Using observed urban land change data from 2010 to 2017 in the 21 districts of Chongqing’s main city as an example, two sets of experiments comprising eight scenarios were designed to verify the neighborhood effects. The results demonstrate that the proposed RF-SNSCNN-CA model achieves an Overall Accuracy (OA) of 97.82%, Kappa of 0.7683, and Figure of Merit (FoM) of 0.3836. The study reveals the following findings. Firstly, the RF-SNSCNN-CA model integrates the dual advantages of traditional machine learning and deep learning models, in which SNSCNN improves by the combined effect of channel and spatial attention mechanisms improves the learning of neighborhood features; secondly, the machine learning-like urban sprawl CA modeling process, regardless of the approach taken to obtain development suitability, cannot completely replace the learning of the neighborhood part; lastly, the use of traditional neighborhood modeling methods may produce suppression of simulation results and make the model inadequately learn spatial features.

Urban design and cardio-metabolic risk factors

Accumulating evidence suggests that the built environment may be associated with cardiovascular disease via its influence on health behaviours. The aim of this study was to estimate the associations between traditional and novel neighbourhood built environment metrics and clinically assessed cardio-metabolic risk factors among a sample of adults in Canada. A total of 7171 participants from Albertas Tomorrow Project living in Alberta, Canada, were included. Cardio-metabolic risk factors were clinically measured. Two composite built environment metrics of traditional walkability and space syntax walkability were calculated. Among men, space syntax walkability was negatively associated with systolic and diastolic blood pressure (b = −0.87, 95% CI -1.43, −0.31 and b = −0.45, 95% CI -0.86, −0.04, respectively). Space syntax walkability was also associated with lower odds of overweight/obese among women and men (OR = 0.93, 95% CI 0.87, 0.99 and OR = 0.88, 95% CI 0.79, 0.97, respectively). No significant associations were observed between traditional walkability and cardio-metabolic outcomes. This study showed that the novel built environment metric based on the space syntax theory was associated with some cardio-metabolic risk factors.