Environmental Urban Planning Research Articles

Contesting the greening of the urban growth machine: Ecological modernization and the promethean counter-discourse

Urban environmental governance and planning are increasingly characterized by the adoption of “sustainability fixes,” namely political compromises which try to conciliate economic and ecological goals in order to safeguard long-term growth. If sustainability fixes have been harshly criticized for being sociospatially selective, resistance to them does not always come from radical groups who demand stronger and fairer measures, but from actors who oppose the idea of sustainability because it goes against their interests, habits, or values. This paper focuses on this “contestation of the greening of the urban growth machine,” by presenting an empirical study of a sustainable mobility policy in Quebec City, Canada, which has given rise to a controversy opposing two divergent perspectives. The first is an ecological modernization discourse advocating for a green and attractive public transit system. The second is a promethean counter-discourse which supports the unconditional growth of automobility and urban sprawl. Results show that even if urban environmental policies are increasingly attuned to the “growth first” logic, they could still face strong opposition, especially from suburban and conservative interests. More generally, this paper shows that, in some contexts, sustainability fixes could be a “better than nothing” solution, namely a step toward fairer and greener cities.

تاثیر الگوهای فضایی ساختار سبز شهری برتغییر دمای جزایر حرارتی مورد مطالعه: شهر تهران

تاثیر الگوهای فضایی ساختار سبز شهری برتغییر دمای جزایر حرارتی مورد مطالعه: شهر تهران

BUILDING EXTRACTION OF POLARIMETRIC SAR IMAGE BASED ON ASSOCIATED FEATURE AND SVM

Abstract. The identification and extraction of building is a vital task in urban environmental planning and research. High-resolution SAR technology has the advantages of all-day, all-weather and strong penetration, and has become one of the important technical means to study urban areas. A novel method for building extraction using both associated features and SVM that based on the full polarization SAR image of GF-3 is proposed in this paper. Firstly, filtering the GF-3 image to reduce the speckles of the image, then texture features based on Span map are extracted by using GLCM. Principal component analysis is used to remove the correlation between them and select the best texture features. The normalized circular-pol correlation coefficient is introduced as the polarization feature and combines with the best texture features. Finally, the image is classified and extracted by SVM. In this paper, the extraction results are compared with the results of the texture feature building extraction method. The experimental results show that the proposed method can obtain higher extraction precision, and the extraction effect is obviously optimized.

Visual Environment of South Russian Cities in the Assessments of Citizens

The article analyzes the perception of visual characteristics of the urban environment in terms of cultural values represented in this process. The analysis is based on a sociological study of the cities in the Southern Federal District, conducted by the authors in 2018. Considerable attention is given to the city dwellers’ contradictory attitudes to the city and the factors that bind it with a person. The study attempts to reveal how assessment of the visual urban environment depends on the type of the city. It is shown that the most acute contradictions include the gap between attachment to the city as a “small homeland” and its actual condition (architectural planning solutions, aesthetic appeal, cleanliness in public places, etc.), increased visualization of social inequality, imbalance in the content of monumental propaganda, dissatisfaction with the general cultural level of city dwellers. The study reveals the city dwellers' controversial attitude to the content of advertisements: residents of small cities tend to evaluate them from a more traditionalist standpoint. The practical value of the obtained results is due to the fact that they may contribute to the improvement of visually perceived urban environment and municipal strategic planning.

Features of Forming the Composition of the Atmosphere in the City of Murmansk

The article is devoted to the issues of planning and development of urban environment in the Arctic region of the Russian Federation, the city of Murmansk located beyond the Arctic Circle is investigated as an example. The article provides a description of the natural and climatic conditions, characteristic of the latitude of the city, it also gives a detailed analysis of the site development and the microclimate it formed, impacting greatly on the distribution of pollutants in the city’s outside air and, consequently, on the comfortable conditions for the northerners living. The conclusions are based on the surveys of more than 200 industrial facilities located on the territory of Murmansk and the city’s transport as well. The analysis of their combined impact on the outside atmosphere of the city was conducted by the specialists of JSC Research Institute ”Atmosphere” applying the system of summary calculation.

Analysis and assessment of urban planning safety to achieve sustainable development of urban planning environment

The urban planning environment is multiple-element and multifaceted. As the urban planning environment develops, its originally incorporated elements are changing, which determines its quality level. To achieve sustainable development of the urban planning environment, it is proposed to analyze the urban planning security of the territory. The analysis of urban planning security involves the analysis of various factors of the urban planning environment. As a result of the assessment of the urban planning environment, the level of development of the urban planning system is determined, as well as the possible direction of its development, to obtain an effective result.

Historical cities as an object of protection: approaches to the preservation of urban planning heritage in Russia

The historical city is one of the most complex objects of research, being a “living” organism, the environment of modern man, a combination of natural and man-made, tangible and intangible elements. The relevance of the study of the historical and urban planning environment is caused by the ongoing search for the most effective approaches to preserving the heritage of cities and the sustainable development of their territories. Systematic and structural analysis of such a phenomenon as a historical city, identification of internal relationships of elements that make up the historical and urban planning environment; comparison of existing tools for the protection of urban planning heritage and determination of the most effective mechanism for its preservation, proposed by modern Russian legislation. Based on the analysis of existing tools for the protection of the historical urban planning environment, the authors propose to consider the procedure for determining the boundaries and subject of protection of historical settlements as one of the aspects of the implementation of the international approach to the preservation of historic urban landscapes (HUL approach), and identify ways to improve the national tools in the field of urban planning heritage protection.

Evaluating Multivariable Statistical Methods for Downscaling Nighttime Land Surface Temperature in Urban Areas

For research and practice in fields such as the environment and meteorology, nighttime land surface temperature (LST) images at fine resolution provide important basic data. Since only a few satellite sensors can take fine-resolution thermal infrared images at night, such images are rather scarce. Downscaling of coarse-resolution LST images is a potential method for obtaining high-resolution LST images. However, downscaling methods have been mostly proposed for daytime LST images. This study aimed to evaluate the performance of methods that combine multiple explanatory variables and machine learning algorithms for downscaling coarse-resolution nighttime LST images in urban areas. Verification showed that the errors in the downscaling results were acceptable (mean absolute errors within 2 K). The resulting images could depict the spatial pattern of night LST in the study area in great detail. It was demonstrated that visible-near infrared images taken in the daytime could be used for downscaling of nighttime LST images, the rationality of which was deduced. It was also demonstrated that the performance of the spectral explanatory variables in nighttime LST downscaling was not lower than that of the mechanism explanatory variables. This method has high application value in many academic and practical efforts, such as land-atmosphere interface radiation budget studies, suitability assessments of human settlement, and urban environmental planning.

Development of building exploitation programs in the concept of energy-sustainable urban development

In the life of every major metropolis, there comes a time when it is impossible to reach new levels of development without the use of innovative technologies. They are necessary to optimize ongoing processes in the urban environment and ensure energy-sustainable urban development. The purpose of the study was to develop a model of an exploitation program designed to monitor and ensure the safe and energy efficient exploitation of buildings and assess the quality of work of managing organizations. The relevance of the study is justified, on the one hand, by the lack of a unified system of planning and quality control of building management, and, on the other hand, by the need to use information technologies as part of the Digital Economy of the Russian Federation program for successful planning of a sustainable urban environment. The object of research was the process of technical operation of buildings. The subject of the study was the study of the principles of the formation of building maintenance programs based on information technologies taking into account energy efficiency requirements. One of the significant results of the study is the developed algorithm for the formation of a building maintenance program for deciding on corrective maintenance measures. Criteria are proposed for assessing the quality of managing the safety and comfort of a building, which can be taken into account when developing voluntary national standards in the field of "green" construction.

A Short Survey of Integrating Urban Agriculture and Environmental Planning

A Short Survey of Integrating Urban Agriculture and Environmental Planning

The Optimization of Urban Ecological Network Planning Based on the Minimum Cumulative Resistance Model and Granularity Reverse Method: A Case Study of Haikou, China

In recent years, the high-speed urbanization process and human activities have led to the fragmentation and the connectivity reduction of natural landscape patches, resulting in the degradation of urban ecological services and biodiversity. The construction of ecological network and the optimization of landscape pattern are significantly important to improve the urban ecological environment and urban ecological security. In this paper, a case study of Haikou, an island city of China is performed, the selection of ecological source areas is optimized by granularity reverse method and principal component analysis. The minimum cumulative resistance model (MCRM) is used to construct the ecological resistance surface, and ecological corridors and ecological nodes are obtained, so as to optimize the urban ecological network and the connectivity of landscape patches. The results show that the 1400m granularity landscape component is the optimal landscape component structure for Haikou. There are 38 ecological source areas in Haikou, and 14 ecological landscape patches need to be added. The distribution of ecological source areas is mainly affected by topography and geomorphology. The northwest has huge and scattered ecological source areas, while the southeast has small and concentrated ecological source areas. In the areas around Meilan airport and Hongcheng lake, there is an ecological trap with significant difference between dominant and recessive ecological resistance separately. Haikou ecological network consists of 81 ecological corridors and 76 ecological nodes. Affected by the main urban area in the north, Haikou ecological network has the high density in the middle and southern areas. The construction of ecological network has significantly improved the overall connectivity of the ecosystem in the study region. This research provides a scientific basis for the future urban ecological environment planning of Haikou.

Urban Environmental Management Towards Achieving Integrated Water Management in the City

In the world’s most developed countries, urban planners are increasingly emphasizing the need to adopt environmental concepts that integrate water management; this guarantees human and environmental rights, and also the sustainable use of natural resources. We based our research on previous studies related to urban environmental management; these studies emphasize the weak cognitive integration in many aspects of the research. Our research aims to show how urban environmental planning impacts sustainable water management, with further implications for community viability. When dealing with the impact of climate change, it is necessary for urban water management departments to engage community participation. Our hope is that this research prompts decision makers to educate their communities, particularly those individuals who are interested in water management, thereby closing the gap between the views held by water specialists and the urban residents. We used field surveys and data collection for our analysis, and we created a questionnaire for distribution across different community samples. We were able to test for compatibility between respondents’ opinions, and how strongly these opinions impacted urban environmental management trends in the study area. We also measured the interconnection between respondents' opinions and water management.

Реализация новаторских концепций группы Эрнста Мая на примере планировочной схемы Тыргана

A study devoted to the origin of the planning system of the Tyrgan district to the west of the Siberian city of Prokopyevsk is presented. The planning system concept originally proposed by a design team led by the German architect Ernst May was considered for the development of the Tyrgan district. The study is based on cartographic, literary and iconographic sources, as well as on an examination of buildings preserved from the 1920-1930s. The historical reasons for attracting foreign specialists, including the personal input of Ernst May, to create a master plan for the development of this industrial area are provided. The structure of the master plan for the development of Tyrgan and the role of the first conceptual proposals by "May Brigade" architectural group led by Ernst May for the placement of residential buildings in the borderless territory are analysed with the revealed elements of buildings that previously existed in this territory. In the historical zone, a fragment of “line building” is revealed repre-sented by five residential buildings having a unique urban planning environment in combination with communal houses and the Mining College. Information on the current state of identified objects is pre-sented. The conducted study justifies the rejection of an opinion expressed in a number of publications on the indirect influence of the Tyrgan planning scheme developed by the Ernst May design team in 1930 on the modern layout of the city which served as the basis for further design proposals. According to this scheme, the directions of the main highways in the historical eastern part of the city were laid along with a definition of the development concept of the district as a whole. The residential territory as envisaged in the scheme Ernst May developed in the western direction, taking into account the com-plexity of the relief.

Biases and environmental risks in urban Africa: household solid waste decision-making

We argue in this paper that the urban environmental planning and management literature has paid insufficient attention to the nexus of risk and human psychology in urban dynamics, particularly for the rapidly urbanizing areas of the Global South. We then draw on two household surveys in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania to present two empirical examples that incorporate these dimensions, using solid waste management as a contemporary urban environmental challenge. These examples illustrate the sensitivity of behavioral preferences to the framing of risks, and the influence of risk preferences on solid waste behavior. Incorporating such concepts into environmental planning and management research offers the potential to increase understanding of urban dynamics and to improve the environmental quality of life in urban Africa and elsewhere in both developing and developed country settings.

DEVELOPMENT OF THE CITY PUBLIC SERVICE MODEL ON THE BASIS OF INTEGRATED TRANSPORT FLOW INDICATORS

The problem of modeling public services based on architectural and planning decisions is considered, the role of traffic in the formation of a model of city services is analyzed. An integrated criterion for the quality of public services is proposed. A method has been developed for determining segmented public services taking into account the transport areas of the city, which will make it possible to evenly disperse public service centers. The basis is a socio-planning organization, as a material-spatial system containing anthropogenic and natural components – the territory and institutions where the functional processes that take place in the urban planning environment take place. The described model has certain versatility, and is simultaneously suitable for characterizing various categories of service institutions. Thus, the task of optimizing the quality of public services in the city is reduced to a mathematical model for which, by setting the basic design criteria, the optimal result can be obtained. On the basis of a questionnaire survey and analysis of statistical data, calculation of traffic intensity, the demand and supply of the level of public services фre studied. The structural elements of this model: population, territory, transport and service institutions, are in dialectical interaction, which is described by the mathematical model in this study. The model is based on the calculation of the minimum population in the service area, which allows to have i-th type establishments using the social potential method, as well as a graph-analytical method in determining the optimal location of service institutions in the city. As a result of the research, a conceptual model of public services for cities is built, a layout of supermarkets in the territory of Uzhhorod and distribution of service areas of these institutions is proposed. This optimization will ensure uniform domestic servicing of the territory, optimal performance indicators of service establishments and minimum average service radii of points.

Spatial quantitative analysis of the potential driving factors of land surface temperature in different “Centers” of polycentric cities: A case study in Tianjin, China

Revealing the dominant driving factors of land surface temperature (LST) plays an important role in mitigating the urban heat island (UHI) effect. Numerous international metropolises are developing polycentric forms under the process of suburbanization in conjunction with rapid urbanization, generating new UHI spatial patterns in internal urban areas. To comprehensively understand the effects of multi-factors on the thermal environment, our study examined a typical polycentric city, Tianjin. According to the concept of polycentrism, this study focused on three types of city “centers”: major city core, new district core and industrial park. Eleven potential driving factors of LST were explored from four layers, and the geo-detector model was applied to rank the explanatory degree of these factors on LST. Three different city centers of the polycentric city showed varied UHI spatial pattern characteristics, and their response to the effect of natural factors and social factors on LST were quite diverse. Heat island areas were distributed homogeneously in the major city core; the UHI pattern on the east-west axis was unbalanced in the new district core due to the unsaturated urban space and dynamic planning policies; in industrial park, production areas were segregated by green belts with clear boundaries. For the whole city and the major city core, the imperviousness factor had the highest explanatory rate for LST, followed by the greenness factor. In contrast to the results of previous studies, the wetness factors had a greater impact on LST in the new district core and industrial park, second only to the greenness factor. Furthermore, selected factors exhibited bilinear or nonlinear enhanced relationships in their interactions. The driving laws of LST in different city centers were summarized with an explorative case study, aimed at providing theoretical basis and practical guidance for optimizing urban thermal environment planning, especially for highly urbanized polycentric cities.

Strategic environmental urban planning - A contextual approach for defining performance goals and informing decision-making

Environmental performance objectives in terms of energy consumption and carbon emission targets can be found in various building norms and certifications schemes. These targets are often dependent upon the building program (e.g. office), but independent from its context; the same value is imposed for two buildings of the same program regardless of other possibly influential characteristics (e.g. solar exposure). Such targets serve as references against which a project's performance is measured following its description and assessment using an evaluation tool. In this paper, we question the suitability of this procedure within the context of urban planning by asking: should a district-level performance objective be allocated in a ‘uniform’ manner or through a ‘contextual’ approach, capable of capturing specificities throughout the site and allowing compensation between areas? To address this question, a novel method is proposed to distribute a site-level target differently between lots presenting distinct conditions over the site, through a combined top-down and bottom-up approach. The method relies on the exploration of databases of lot-specific scenarios, generated by varying design parameters that have not yet been fixed at the planning stage, such as building shape and construction materials. Applied on a case-study district in Switzerland, the contextual method results in differentiated lot-specific targets that are up to 11% away from the uniform targets. Although apparently small, these shifts can increase the feasibility of reaching the site-level target by up to 30%. Such information can guide the design team towards defining a coherent environmental strategy and making informed decisions.

«PRESERVATION» AND «ENSURING PRESERVATION» IN THE DESIGN OF IMPROVEMENT AND GREENING OF CENTERS OF HISTORICAL CITIES

The urgency of the problem of comprehensive improvement and greening of the centers of historic cities has increased with the «May» decrees of the President of the Russian Federation V. V. Putin in 2018. Howev-er, the scientific foundations, methodology and design methodology of improvement does not take into ac-count the peculiarities of historical cities, the need to preserve architectural monuments, landscape and gar-den-garden art, valuable urban planning and natural environment. Evaluation of projects implemented in 2010-2018, own design experience in the historical territories of Moscow confirmed that many of the pro-ject’s shortcomings are due to the lack of special regulatory and methodological documents for design. The current GOST regulates the composition and content of works for the preservation and facilitation of the modern use of cultural heritage sites that are works of landscape and landscape art. For ordinary ob-jects of improvement in the centers of historical cities located in protective and protective zones, in the united protective zones, a design technique is necessary taking into account the status and features of such territo-ries according to the current legislation. According to the experience of designing in Moscow, most of the projects of comprehensive landscaping are areas that do not have the status of cultural heritage sites, and ordinary public spaces, landscaped and near-house areas of 0.5–2.5 hectares, located within the boundaries of protected, protected areas, including the united security zone of the historical part of Moscow established within the boundaries of the Kamer-Kollezhsky Val. Often, small parks, squares, boulevards in various functional areas, small public spaces ad-jacent to subway exits are being developed. For a comprehensive improvement and greening of the city center of historic cities, a systematic ap-proach is important – not only the preservation of cultural heritage sites, valuable urban planning, land-scape and natural environment based on the status and mode of use of territories established in accordance with Federal Law No. 73-FZ «Heritage (historical and cultural monuments) of the peoples of the Russian Federation». Within the boundaries of cultural heritage sites, there should be a «conservation» mode, in pro-tected areas and in protected zones, a «security preservation» regime of cultural heritage sites. The prospects for the use of integrated improvement and landscaping as a special type of urban plan-ning activity and means providing a socially and environmentally oriented solution of the issues of regenera-tion of the centers of historic cities are considered.

Perception of thermal comfort in outdoor public spaces in the medium-sized city of Chillán, Chile, during a warm summer

The study of thermal comfort in Latin American cities has been gaining great relevance for urban environmental planning. Some studies have evaluated the relationship between environmental and perceived comfort; however, the causes and social determinants of the different perceptions of the population have not been explored. The perception of thermal comfort in public spaces in the city of Chillán (Chile), which has an inland Mediterranean climate, is discussed in this context. First, we measured the environmental thermal comfort, adapting the Actual Sensation Vote index. A survey of 362 users of the five selected public spaces was carried out between 29 January and 01 February 2016 to obtain perceived comfort and relate it to the individual climatic history, use of public space and place of residence in the city. The results show that perceived thermal discomfort dominates over comfort on summer days; however, those users who visit public spaces for recreational purposes feel more comfortable, as well as those living in low socioeconomic status (SES) neighborhoods. On the other hand, users living in areas with higher socioeconomic status, have higher expectations regarding thermal environmental conditions.

Exploring Psychophysiological Restoration and Individual Preference in the Different Environments Based on Virtual Reality.

Accumulated evidence claims that urban green spaces (UGS) have a positive impact on the physical and mental health of humans. However, little information is available to clearly reveal what the most important driving factors are for human psychophysiological restoration. In order to unveil this uncertainty, this study employed virtual reality (VR) technology to investigate the physiological (electroencephalogram, EEG), and psychological (attention, positive mood, negative mood) responses and individual preferences for different urban environments. Participants (120) were recruited and randomly assigned to experience six different types of environments varying in land use and vegetation structures, which were: Grey space, blue space, open green space, partly open green space, partly closed green space, and closed green space. The results showed that the experience of the six environmental types through VR devices had positive restorative effects on the individuals’ attentional fatigue and negative mood; however, all the participants obtained the highest levels of physiological stress restoration when asked to close their eyes for relaxation. The physiological measurements of the EEG showed no significant differences among the selected types of environments. Meanwhile, the results of the psychological measures suggested that only negative mood showed significant differences of change among the six types of environments, and while the partly open green space had the most positive effect on negative mood, the closed green space had the worst. The blue space and partly closed green space received higher recreational preference ratings than the other four environments, while the closed green space received the lowest recreational preference rating. Moreover, the findings showed that there was a strong positive correlation between people’s preferences and the improvement of their positive mood. This indicated that as the popularity of a natural environment increased, so did the benefits of human health and well-being. In addition, this study shows that VR technology may be utilized as a possible surrogate measure to real scenes in evaluating human physiological and psychological restoration in the future. The present findings can provide the theoretical basis and practical guidance for future optimal planning of urban restorative environments.