Urban Environmental Governance Research Articles

Integrating IoT Sensors, Cloud AI, and Satellite Broadband for Enhanced ESG Governance in Smart Cities: A Tripartite Approach to Real-Time Environmental Monitoring

Urbanization is accelerating at an unprecedented rate, pushing the limits of environmental sustainability and demanding innovative solutions for effective management. Traditional methods for monitoring the environment fall short, lacking the scalability, immediacy, and comprehensive coverage required for modern urban settings. Our paper introduces an innovative solution to bridge these gaps, harnessing the power of Internet of Things (IoT) sensors, advanced cloud-based AI through Claude 3 Sonnet models on Amazon Bedrock, and the extensive reach of Project Kuiper's satellite broadband. This threefold integration forms a cutting-edge approach to urban environmental governance. It enables the analysis of environmental data in real time, offers predictive insights, and achieves wide-ranging coverage. The system equips city leaders, policymakers, and citizens with precise, actionable information, fostering decisions that align with Environmental Social Governance (ESG) goals. More than just improving urban life and sustainability, our approach makes environmental data accessible to all, promoting a collaborative and inclusive model of urban environmental management.

TOXIC FORMATIONS: Race, Place and the Politics of Pollution on the Banks of the Ganga

AbstractPollution in the environment emerges as a legal and technical object on the one hand, and as a repository of social and cultural beliefs on the other. What happens when we trouble the idea that these belong to different domains and think about seemingly divergent meanings of pollution together? In this article, I draw from anti‐caste and anti‐racist work to explore this question. Extending critical urban scholarship on environmental politics, I attend to formations of caste and religion alongside judicial and political discourse on preventing pollution to the river Ganga in North India. In our present moment, on the banks of the sacred river, extremist leaders mobilize regulations to target minoritized Muslim and Dalit communities in Kanpur's leather industry. I argue that the roots of these actions lie in an environmental petition from the mid‐1980s which transformed urban environmental governance in North India, as the court decoupled questions of environmental protection from economic and social justice. I suggest that the analytic of regional racial formations helps us grapple with uneven socio‐spatial landscapes in postcolonial cities and sharpens our understanding of environmental injustices by moving beyond fixed categories of difference.

Online Decision Support Infrastructures for Integrating Spatial Planning and Flood Risk Management Policies

Accessible geospatial data are crucial for informed decision making and policy development in urban planning, environmental governance, and hazard mitigation. Spatial data infrastructures (SDIs) have been implemented to facilitate such data access. However, with the rapid advancements in geospatial software and modelling tools, it is important to re-visit the theoretical discussion about the different roles of data-focused SDIs and decision support and modelling tools, particularly in relation to their different impacts on policy making and policy integration. This research focuses on addressing this issue within the specific context of policy integration in spatial planning and flood risk management. To investigate this, an experiment was conducted comparing a data-focused SDI, the Myplan Viewer, with a prototype Internet-based Spatially Integrated Policy Infrastructure (SIPI). The findings reveal that the SIPI, which provides access to both data and decision support and modelling tools, significantly enhances policy integration compared to the Myplan Viewer. Moreover, drawing upon communicative action theory, this study underscores that while data-focused SDIs support instrumental goals, they possess limitations in facilitating trade-offs and balancing diverse interests in the policy-making process, particularly in supporting strategic and communicative actions.

A sustainable solid waste management framework for Egyptian cities based on synthesis the integrated solid waste management approach and urban environmental governance tool : Applying on New Damietta city

A sustainable solid waste management framework for Egyptian cities based on synthesis the integrated solid waste management approach and urban environmental governance tool : Applying on New Damietta city

Digging in: Toward a more just urban garden land policy

Surging interest in urban agriculture has prompted cities across North America to adopt policies that give gardeners access to publicly owned land. However, if not carefully designed, these policies can exacerbate existing racial inequities. Drawing on theories of urban and environmental justice, we use a contextualized case comparison to explore the radical potential and practical constraints of garden land policies at two distinct institutions: the City of Minneapolis and the independently elected Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board. Based on participant observation, document review, and interviews with a range of policy actors, we argue that what appear to be minor, common-sense policy details systematically shape who benefits from the garden land policies, sometimes in surprising ways. Compared to the City, the Park Board goes substantially further in addressing racial equity. Furthermore, though both cases included public participation, we argue that the more inten­sive participation during the Park Board policy development process—particularly in determining the details—was pivotal in crafting a policy that reduced barriers to racial equity. The present study contributes to the growing scholarship on urban agriculture and environmental governance and offers concrete insights for actors working toward more just policies.

Does environmental governance matter to the relationship between digital transformation and high-quality development? Evidence from manufacturing sector in China.

Environmental governance has emerged as a crucial tactic to support the sustainable development of human civilization in light of the serious environmental issues. Meanwhile, during the process of promoting the high-quality development of China's economy, digital transformation plays a significant role in improving the total factor productivity of the manufacturing sector. We seek to find out whether urban environmental governance has an impact on micro-enterprises, and therefore, the study selects the data of A-share listed manufacturing companies from 2012 to 2020 to study the effect of digital transformation on the total factor productivity of the manufacturing industry and how the effect of environmental governance affects the relationship between digital transformation and total factor productivity. The results unveil that digital transformation can significantly contribute to the total factor productivity of the manufacturing industry. At the same time, digital transformation can promote the high-quality development of enterprises by promoting the fulfillment of corporate social responsibility. Additionally, it is shown that poor environmental governance will weaken the promoting effect of digital transformation on total factor productivity. Furthermore, in state-owned companies and non-heavy polluting industries, environmental governance has a more significant moderating influence on digital transformation and total factor productivity. This study enriches the literature on urban environmental governance and micro-enterprise development, and they support the notion that, from the standpoints of environmental protection and economic development, the level of environmental governance should be continuously optimized and the development of ecological civilization should be strengthened.

Becoming non-commensurable: synthesis, design, and the politics of urban experimentation in post-Superstorm Sandy New York

This article uses a case study of the Rebuild by Design (RBD) program in post-Superstorm Sandy New York City to advance research into experimental urban environmental governance, notably that aiming to enhance resilience. Existing literature about experimentation tends to distinguish experimental governance from more conventional, modernist forms of environmental governance. Our technical critique of RBD’s design-based experiments in post-disaster reconstruction and urban resilience planning instead situates experimentation in the wider history of ongoing cybernetic transformations in liberal rule. We draw attention to new practices of control and regulation that do not eliminate socio-ecological difference but instead try to make such difference transparently knowable and functionally useful. As we demonstrate through an analysis of the troubled implementation of design-driven urban resilience projects in RBD, the issue for such experimentation is that the push for synthesis and solutions can deny the existence of forms of knowledge that are qualitatively, intrinsically different. In this reading, the politics of experimentation in the Anthropocene increasingly hinges on recognizing and maintaining the potential for some things and groups to be non-commensurable—that is, irreducible to resources for others’ resilience.

Preface

The first International conference on Design Innovations and Management for Sustainable Environment (ICDIMSE) was conducted on 15th and 16th March 2022 jointly by Sathyabama Institute of Science and Technology, India and Eastern Mediterranean University, North Cyprus held online in Zoom due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The conference aimed to bring together academicians, scientists, practitioners, researchers and students from a range of different disciplines to explore and share their experiences and research work in Sustainable Design of Built Environment. To prevent technical issues that can arise during the virtual mode of presenting, all the presentations of the accepted research papers were compiled beforehand which ensured a seamless conduct of the event by the participants who were from different parts of the world.Day 1 began with an opening session, which was followed by the keynote presenters Prof. DR. Shaleen Singhal, Dean (Research & Partnerships), TERI School of Advanced Studies, and Prof. Ali A. Alraouf (Associate AIA, Middle East and Gulf Chapter, Professor at HBK University in Qatar). Four parallel sessions that were moderated and chaired by DR. Monsingh David Devdas, Prof. Polat Hançer, Ar. Milon Dutta, and Prof. Illiona Outram followed the inaugural session.DR. Steffen Lehmann (Assoc. AIA, RIBA) and Prof. DR. Rohinton Emmanuel (Director of the BEAM Research Centre, Professor in Sustainable Design and Construction in Glasgow Caledonia University) delivered the keynote address on Day II of the conference. This was followed by four parallel sessions moderated and chaired by Tokie Laotan-Brown, DR. Abdul Razak, Yonca Hürol and DR.Swetha Madhusudhan. For all the eight sessions, best papers were awarded.Seventy nine research papers were presented during the conference under the themes: Design Innovations, Building Design and Performance Evaluation, Smart Materials and Artificial Intelligence, Sustainability in Architectural Design, Sustainable Design and Construction Processes, Urban Resilience, Safety, Disaster and Risk Mitigation, Sustainable Urban and Rural Development and Environmental Policy and Governance. The online conference was of great success having a diverse group of expertise and backgrounds with participants around the globe. This enabled a rich knowledge sharing environment with enthusiastic discussions.Forty of the conference papers were accepted for publication in the IOP EES Conference Proceedings. We express our gratitude to all the members who were a part of the peer review process and spent their valuable time in reviewing the papers.We express our deep gratitude to the Management of the Sathyabama Institute of Science and Technology and Eastern Mediterranean University, invited speakers, reviewers, and session chairs for their hard work along the series of conference events until this proceeding publication. We also thank all participants and authors for taking excellent opportunity for discussing and publishing the papers. We thank all the committee members and all those who have contributed for the success of ICDIMSE 2022 and publications of the Proceedings.List of Organising Committee, Executive Committee, Advisory Committee, Scientific Committee, Peer Review Committee, Technical Committee is available in the pdf.

Effect of landscape pattern of urban surface evapotranspiration on land surface temperature

Land surfaces in urban areas can be classified into artificial surfaces (impervious surface such as buildings and roads) and natural surfaces (vegetation, soil and water), and the natural surfaces have important influence on the urban environmental thermal regulation. Current research on urban spatial characteristics mostly focuses on the regulation of urban green spaces to mitigate the urban heat island effect and rarely explores the effect of the landscape pattern of urban natural surface evapotranspiration (ET) on land surface temperature (LST). Xuzhou, China, was selected as the study area, and the urban RS-PM and improved mono-window algorithm were applied to invert ET and LST values based on Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager and Thermal Infrared Sensor images, respectively. The study area was divided into five levels (LV5 to LV1) from high to weak, according to the ET intensity (ETi), four landscape-level (SHDI, SHEI, PD, and CONTAGION) and five class-level landscape metrics (PLAND, LPI, LSI, AI, and COHESION) were extracted based on the moving-window approach. Bivariate Moran's I was then used to calculate the spatial correlation between each landscape metric and LST. The weighted impact of each landscape metric on LST was obtained using principal component analysis and multiple regression. The results indicate that only five class-level metrics of high (LV5) and sub-high (LV4) ETi patches had significant negative spatial correlations with LST, and the weighted impacts of the high ETi patch metrics were all greater than those of the sub-high ETi patches. The weighted impacts of all class-level metrics that can mitigate LST were ranked as COHESION_LV5 > PLAND_LV5 > LPI_LV5 ≈ AI_LV5 > LSI_LV5 > LSI_LV4 > PLAND_LV4 > COHESION_LV4 > LPI_LV4 > AI_LV4. These findings revealed the importance of ET spatial pattern for urban thermal environment regulation, which may provide a new perspective in urban planning and environmental governance.

The Opening of High-Speed Railways, the Improvement of Factor Allocation Efficiency between Regions, and the City's Environmental Quality Improvement.

Based on the panel data of prefecture-level cities in China from 2006 to 2019, this paper uses the PSM-DID method to empirically test the internal impact mechanism among high-speed railway opening, inter-regional factor allocation efficiency, and urban environmental governance. The research results show that: (1) There is a serious factor-misallocation problem among prefecture-level cities in China. From 2006 to 2019, the factor misallocation between prefecture-level cities led to an average annual loss of total factor productivity in China's economy of 52.5%, an average labor misallocation of 23.16%, and an average capital misallocation of 18.69%. Since 2013, capital misallocation has exceeded labor misallocation as the main reason for factor misallocation among prefecture-level cities in China. (2) The opening of high-speed railways can promote the efficiency of urban factor allocation through the technological innovation effect, the foreign investment attraction effect, and the population agglomeration effect. The improvement of urban factor allocation efficiency can promote the improvement of urban environmental quality through the effects of industrial structure optimization, income enhancement, and human capital agglomeration. Therefore, the opening of a high-speed railway can improve urban environmental quality through the intermediary effect of improving the efficiency of urban factor allocation; that is, the opening of a high-speed railway has a dual positive effect of economic efficiency and environmental quality improvement. (3) The optimization effect of factor allocation and the environmental governance effect of the opening of high-speed railways have strong urban scale heterogeneity, urban characteristic heterogeneity, and regional heterogeneity. The research content of this paper has important guiding significance for the construction of China's new development paradigm, accelerating the construction of "a unified national market," and green and low-carbon development.

Can low-carbon city construction reduce carbon intensity？Empirical evidence from low-carbon city pilot policy in China

Low-carbon city pilot policy (LCCP) is an innovative initiative for promoting low-carbon transformation and green development in China, which is of great practical significance for realizing China's vision of “double carbon” on schedule. In this study, LCCP implementation is treated as a “quasi-natural experiment,” and the spatial difference-in-differences approach is used to quantitatively examine the carbon reduction effects and impact mechanisms of LCCP using panel data of 283 cities in China from 2006 to 2017. The results show that since 2011, LCCP has significantly reduced the carbon intensity of the pilot cities by 0.13%, resulting from the effects of urban environmental governance, industrial structure optimization, and urban innovation level improvement. Meanwhile, there is a significant spatial spillover effect which results in a 0.9% reduction in carbon intensity of neighboring cities. The spatial spillover range of the reduction effect is about 500 km, which decays with distance. Moreover, the carbon reduction effect of the policy is spatially and temporally heterogeneous, and the reduction effect is more significant for resource-based cities, and different for resource-based cities in different development stages. The above findings provide useful policy insights for constructing low-carbon cities under China's “dual carbon goals” and help to realize the win–win path of green development and carbon reduction transition.

The temporality of geographic contexts: Individual environmental exposure has time-related effects on mood.

Research on environmental exposure and its impacts on people's mood has attracted increasing attention. Most studies focus on the spatiality of geographic contexts, but they neglect the influence of temporality in the relationships between environments and mood. To this end, a survey was conducted in January 2019 in Guangzhou, China, and measured data (micro-environments, built environments, EMA records, GPS trajectories, and activity logs) covering a weekday were collected from 125 participants. Then, multiple linear regression models are employed to examine and compare the associations between environments and mood based on three possible types of temporal responses (cumulative response, momentary response, and time-lagged response). The results indicate that there are great differences in environmental mood effects based on different types of temporal responses. Specifically, (i) for three types of temporal responses, exposure to PM2.5 and noise have mood-blunting effects, whereas exposure to green spaces has mood-augmenting effects. (ii) For two types of temporal responses, higher temperature (in winter) may positively influence individual mood based on cumulative and time-lagged response, and higher POI density can positively affect mood based on cumulative and momentary response. (iii) Relative humidity may not have time-related effects on mood. Although all three types of temporal responses are observed in this study, the most significant manifestation is momentary response. These findings not only enrich theoretical research on environmental mood effects and temporality, but also inform the practice of more refined and humanistic urban planning, environmental governance, and public services.

Environmental collaborative governance of urban agglomeration in China: influencing factors and drivers.

This study attempts to examine how urban agglomerations establish sustainable environmental collaborative governance. To achieve this goal, the qualitative comparative analysis method is used to explore the conditions and models for urban agglomerations to establish environmental collaborative governance, with 12 urban agglomerations approved by the Chinese authorities as examples. Based on the collaborative governance framework, this paper proposes six starting conditions that affect the establishment of urban agglomeration collaboration: vertical intervention, horizontal cooperation, leadership attention, governance capacity, initial pollution, and economic governance. The interaction of these conditions was tested in the practice of environmental cooperation in urban agglomerations. The results show that horizontal cooperation, leadership attention, and economic governance are necessary conditions for the establishment of urban agglomeration cooperation. The authority-driven mode, capability-driven mode, and pressure-driven mode can promote cooperation. Vertical intervention, governance capacity, and initial pollution constitute the external and internal driving forces of urban agglomeration cooperation. These findings supplement the literature on urban agglomeration collaboration and provide policy makers with insight into sustainable urban agglomeration collaborative environmental governance.

Burning Wet Waste: Environmental Particularity, Material Specificity, and the Universality of Infrastructure

The problem of plastic waste accumulating in the environment has become ubiquitous in recent years. One way in which urban governments are looking to solve this issue is by investing one of several thermodynamic technologies that fall under the umbrella term ‘waste-to-energy’. The drawback of such technologies is that the waste stream must be consistent in quality and quantity. By drawing on ethnographic research with environmental activists in Kochi, South India, I demonstrate that particular environmental and material conditions—in this case Kochi’s immense wetness—confound the supposed universality of such infrastructures. Querying waste infrastructures in this way also leads to insights that suggest that investing in infrastructures to address issues of plastic waste often deepen attachments to plastic economies of capitalist accumulation. I ultimately argue that addressing environmental and social concerns about plastic waste means broadening what is relevant to infrastructural interventions in urban environmental governance.

Effects of revetments on soil ecosystems in the urban river-riparian interface

SummaryBy altering material and energy exchange between river and riparian, the city revetments have an unknown impact on the service function of river-riparian interface (RRI) ecosystems. This study analyzes the differences in natural, permeable (PR), and impervious revetment (IR). We found that the water-filled porosity of revetment increased from 20% to 100%, which coincided with an increase in soil potassium, air-filled porosity, the surface soil of moisture and organic matter (SOM), and a decrease in soil nitrogen, phosphorus nutrients, and in the middle and deep soil SOM. The changes affected the abundance of dominant bacterial and fungi genera. Compared with the PR, surface soil moisture, pH, and underground biomass were lower in IR surface soils, while surface soil SOM and middle soil moisture were higher. This research provides a development direction and theoretical basis for future urban planning and environmental governance.

Research on Data Cleaning Algorithm Based on Multi Type Construction Waste

Owing to urbanization, the output of construction waste is increasing yearly. Garbage treatment plays a vital role in urban development and construction. The accuracy and integrity of data are important for the implementation of construction waste treatment. Abnormal detection and incomplete filling occur when traditional cleaning algorithms are used. To improve the cleaning of construction waste data, a data cleaning algorithm based on multi-type construction waste was presented in this study. First, a multi-algorithm constraint model was designed to achieve accurate matching between the cleaning content and cleaning model. Thereafter, a natural language data cleaning model was proposed, and the spatial location data were separated from the general data through the content separation mechanism to effectively frame the area to be cleaned. Finally, a time series data cleaning model was constructed. By integrating “check” and “fill”, large-span and large-capacity time series data cleaning was realized. This algorithm was applied to the data collected by the pilot cities, which had precision and recall rates of 93.87% and 97.90% respectively, compared with the traditional algorithm, ultimately exhibiting a certain progressiveness. The algorithm proposed herein can be applied to urban environmental governance. Furthermore, this algorithm can markedly improve the control ability and work efficiency of construction waste treatment, and reduce the restriction of construction waste on the sustainable development of urban environments.

‘Best-scenic zone’ selection as a method of reducing sulfur dioxide emissions: A quasi-experiment in Chinese urban environmental governance

By treating the designation of “best-scenic zone” as an exogenous event for a natural experiment, we apply a difference-in-difference method to gauge the extent to which the designation of best-scenic zone can help alleviate the conflict caused by environmental protection and economic growth for local governments, increase the attention to environmental governance, and therefore reduce the emission of sulfur dioxide. Our results indicate a significant reduction of sulfur dioxide emissions in cities designated as best-scenic zone, especially in ones facing high public pressure. Our study enriches studies on environmental governance by guiding local governments on how to strike a balance between economic growth and environmental governance.

Gatekeepers of local environmental progress? Self-referencing practices of urban bureaucracy

ABSTRACT We argue that contemporary debate on innovative urban environmental governance underestimates the influence of bureaucratic self-referencing practices. Informed by organisational and institutional theories, we define them as mechanisms for strategic incorporation of new environmental rules while keeping former administrative structures stable. Analysis of new units in Polish cities identified three such practices: defining bureaucratic identity, translating environmental issues, and managing external actors. Thus, urban bureaucracy is ‘a gatekeeper’ that can soften or strengthen the administrative boundaries of environmental progress. We, therefore, recommend the careful evaluation of innovative administrative forms to determine whether they meet social and environmental expectations.

Time-Series Monitoring of Dust-Proof Nets Covering Urban Construction Waste by Multispectral Images in Zhengzhou, China

Rapid urbanization has produced a huge amount of construction waste. The operations and consequences of construction and demolition can lead to windblown dust problems, profoundly affecting the living environment of residents. Fortunately, dust-proof nets have been used in construction sites to reduce and prevent pollution by fine particles such as dust, so it is important to monitor and evaluate their efficacy. In this study, Earth observation techniques were used for the extraction and monitoring of solid waste and dust-proof nets. In order to fully perceive the validity and necessity of dust-proof nets for urban air health, we conducted a case study in Zhengzhou, China. We explored the potential of multispectral remote sensing available for monitoring urban construction waste and proposed a multi-layer classification method to identify construction waste and dust-proof nets based on Landsat-8 OLI and Sentinel-2 MSI data, with an average identification accuracy and Kappa coefficient of 96.27% and 0.93 for construction waste in the study area from 2015 to 2020, respectively. In addition, our study revealed the driving factors and impact of temporal variations in regional construction waste areas and dust-proof nets coverage. The results indicate the classification can track municipal solid waste management and changes in air pollutant concentrations and is useful for achieving SDG 11.6 (reduce the adverse per capita environmental impact of cities, including by paying special attention to air quality and municipal and other waste management). This study has the potential to monitor construction waste and dust-proof nets, paving the way for better urban environmental governance and surveillance actions in the future, especially involving big data.

Does the development of digital finance have environmental governance effect? – empirical evidence from China

ABSTRACT Based on panel data of 285 cities in China, we carry out an empirical test for the impact of digital finance development on urban environmental governance with a fixed-effects model. The results show that digital finance can significantly reduce urban pollutant emissions, suggesting a positive environmental governance effect. After using an instrumental variable and a lagged response variable to test the robustness of the results, the conclusion still holds. Through further analysis, we find that for cities in the central and western regions and cities with a higher degree of green finance development, the environmental governance effect of digital finance is more significant. This paper enriches research on the economic consequences of digital finance and provides empirical evidence for the positive environmental effect of digital finance.