Research In Urban Studies Research Articles

What do International City Networks Contribute to Global Governance? Towards a Better Conceptual and Empirical Assessment

ABSTRACT This article systematically assesses international city networks (ICNs) and their contribution to global governance. Research in urban studies has frequently emphasised the growing number and activities of ICNs in global politics, particularly environmental politics. However, systematic and comparative assessments of their main characteristics and how they contribute to global governance in different issue areas remain rare. To advance our conceptual, empirical, and comparative understanding of these networks, we review existing approaches and analyse a sample of 30 ICNs concerning three categories, namely their structures, aims, and activities. The results show that ICNs assemble diverse actors, closely collaborate with international organisations, and are dedicated to the implementation, but also the change of global norms in several issue areas of global governance. At the same time, the results suggest that more empirical data and comparative analyses of ICNs are necessary to advance our conceptual understanding of ICNs and their relevance in global governance.

Green in their own way: Pragmatic and progressive means for cities to overcome institutional barriers to sustainability

To realise their potential to lead in sustainability development, cities require both symbolic resources such as social capital and legitimacy and material resources such as financial and technical support. Recent research in urban studies has shown that cities overcome institutional barriers to urban sustainability by drawing on support from their wider environment. However, we argue that resource needs vary depending on whether cities spotlight or sideline sustainability. Drawing on in-depth interviews with sustainability managers in cities with variable seriousness about sustainability, and representatives of city networks and support organisations, we show that cities express different symbolic and material resource needs as well as means to acquire them. When cities express pragmatic needs, they seek to demonstrate political feasibility and look to peer cities for legitimation; when cities express progressive needs, they aim to push the boundaries of technical possibility and broadcast their achievements to the world. Since cities require dissimilar external support, skewed attention towards ‘leading’ cities in extant research limits our understanding of how cities can overcome institutional barriers to climate action, especially when these barriers are high. Our findings offer contributions to the literature on city strategies for climate change on the institutional drivers of urban sustainability.

Huygens’s Principle for Dynamic Urban Growth

Successful management of urban areas requires continuous improvement in knowledge related to its underlying processes. The present study proposes a novel technique for analyzing urban boundary expansion. The analysis using remote sensing data at various sampled times of development shows that each point in the boundary has a forward flux outwardly from the developed region. Such behavior allows the use of Huygens’s principle of wavefront propagation to study dynamic boundary expansion and its drivers. A simplified urban region near Mumbai city is taken to implement the method. The urban boundaries are extracted using Landsat satellite data for three periods—1999, 2009 and 2019. The extracted boundaries are smoothened and discretized into fifty equal sections. The discretized points act as the source of Huygen circles used to capture the rate of change in the magnitude and direction of urban boundaries. A regression analysis is used to relate the expansion rates to the potential driver variables. Results show that whereas the change in magnitude is likely to occur closer to highways and toward the nearby city center, it is expected to spread away from the railway stations due to the lack of space closer to them. The proposed technique opens up new avenues of research in urban studies.

A unified dataset for the city-scale traffic assignment model in 20 U.S. cities

City-scale traffic data, such as traffic flow, speed, and density on every road segment, are the foundation of modern urban research. However, accessing such data on a city scale is challenging due to the limited number of sensors and privacy concerns. Consequently, most of the existing traffic datasets are typically limited to small, specific urban areas with incomplete data types, hindering the research in urban studies, such as transportation, environment, and energy fields. It still lacks a city-scale traffic dataset with comprehensive data types and satisfactory quality that can be publicly available across cities. To address this issue, we propose a unified approach for producing city-scale traffic data using the classic traffic assignment model in transportation studies. Specifically, the inputs of our approach are sourced from open public databases, including road networks, traffic demand, and travel time. Then the approach outputs comprehensive and validated citywide traffic data on the entire road network. In this study, we apply the proposed approach to 20 cities in the United States, achieving an average correlation coefficient of 0.79 in average travel time and an average relative error of 5.16% and 10.47% in average travel speed when compared with the real-world data.

Review of Research on Urban Social Space and Sustainable Development

Urban social space and sustainable urban development are both prominent areas of research in urban studies. The development of a city is closely tied to the development of its social space. The level of sustainable development in a city can be assessed by examining the evolution of its urban social space. Therefore, the two are highly interconnected in a close relationship. However, the social dimension of sustainable development has always received the least attention compared to the economy and the environment. Therefore, this paper examines urban transformation and urban spatial structure, social composition, the activity space and living space of urban residents, the social integration of urban residents in urban communities, and urban planning. This paper provides a comprehensive literature review of research on urban social space and sustainable development. On the one hand, this literature review thoroughly examines the correlation between urban social space and sustainable urban development. On the other hand, it broadens the perspectives of urban research, highlights the key role of social dimensions in sustainable urban development, and helps to draw the attention of academics to this topic. In addition, this literature review may provide policymakers with more comprehensive information on urban social space and sustainable development.

A Methodological Approach for Data Collection and Geospatial Information of Healthy Public Spaces in Peripheral Neighborhoods—Case Studies: La Bota and Toctiuco, Quito, Ecuador

Adequate public spaces and urban green areas are key criteria for urban development and infrastructure implementation in healthy cities. Latterly, there have been an increasing number of research methods using artificial intelligence (AI) to monitor, quantify, and control the state of these spaces with an aim toward pioneering research in urban studies. However, in informal areas, open-data access tends to lack adequate and updated information, making it difficult to use AI methods. Hence, we propose a methodology for restricted open data collection and preparation for future use in machine learning or spatial data science models for similar areas. To that extent, we examine two peripheral and low-income neighborhoods in Quito, Ecuador—La Bota and Toctiuco—to analyze their public spaces, urban green areas, points of interest, and road networks, and how they address healthy cities criteria. We develop an original methodological approach that combines an index of proximity, accessibility, quantity, and quality for these spaces with geospatial and network analysis techniques. Results indicate that the connectivity and structure of these spaces are centralized and nodal, representing exclusion and segregation. This work provides insights into potential healthy spaces and information to urban planners and policymakers in decision-making for healthy urban infrastructure.

Response to Bas van Heur, ‘What, where and who is urban studies? On research centres in an unequal world’

Recognizing the unequal distribution of urban studies research should also spur us to think in more depth about the way we understand and communicate about our shared subjects: cities and urbanization.

To whom does geography owe a future? Lessons from urban studies

The stresses of the neoliberal academy relating to the precaritisation of labour and metricisation of research can often make it difficult in the present to envision a future of geographical thought and praxis which is capable of addressing the past and present epistemic injustices which human geography has inherited. Within the field of urban studies, the discourse of ‘urban futures’ has often been used to promise a more just and efficient future. This commentary takes the often-evoked notion of an urban future and considers how recent research in urban studies has sought to deconstruct the notion of the ‘urban’ in order to illustrate the complex and antagonistic present underlying such futures. Here urban studies has an analogous lesson for human geography more generally. Disaggregating the identity of ‘geographer’ from academic status and training can open up new practices for the co-production of knowledge beyond professional boundaries, which themselves can also aid in the creation of more just urban futures.

Urban visual intelligence: Uncovering hidden city profiles with street view images

A longstanding line of research in urban studies explores how cities can be understood through their appearance. However, what remains unclear is to what extent urban dwellers' everyday life can be explained by the visual clues of the urban environment. In this paper, we address this question by applying a computer vision model to 27 million street view images across 80 counties in the United States. Then, we use the spatial distribution of notable urban features identified through the street view images, such as street furniture, sidewalks, building façades, and vegetation, to predict the socioeconomic profiles of their immediate neighborhood. Our results show that these urban features alone can account for up to 83% of the variance in people's travel behavior, 62% in poverty status, 64% in crime, and 68% in health behaviors. The results outperform models based on points of interest (POI), population, and other demographic data alone. Moreover, incorporating urban features captured from street view images can improve the explanatory power of these other methods by 5% to 25%. We propose "urban visual intelligence" as a process to uncover hidden city profiles, infer, and synthesize urban information with computer vision and street view images. This study serves as a foundation for future urban research interested in this process and understanding the role of visual aspects of the city.

What, where and who is urban studies? On research centres in an unequal world

This paper poses the question of what the proliferation of urban research centres across the world means for urban studies as a field of research, what this tells us about the (uneven) geographies of urban knowledge production and circulation, and who are the key institutions and researchers involved. In other words: what, where and who is urban studies? Building on a minor tradition of bibliometric research in urban studies and related disciplines, the paper assesses the Scopus-registered 2011–2021 publication output of the more than 1000 researchers affiliated to 30 urban studies centres across the world. The analysis points to four main observations. First, urban studies output is published in an extraordinarily wide range of journals, representing work from research communities across the social sciences and humanities, engineering, natural sciences and medical sciences. Second, clear global hierarchies exist in knowledge production, but co-authorship relations are also shaped by geographical proximity and the multidisciplinary profile of each individual research centre. Third, English is the dominant language of academic publications, but other languages play important roles for individual centres at the level of co-authorship relations and journals. Fourth, the article provides evidence of a diverse and globally distributed landscape of mid-sized urban studies centres that contribute substantially to the top urban studies journals. Each observation is linked to a reflection on the potential role for research centres in creating a more equal playing field for urban studies.

What is the Future of Survey-Based Data Collection for Local Government Research? Trends, Strategies, and Recommendations

Surveys are an important vehicle for advancing research on urban policy and governance. The introduction of online tools eased survey-based data collection, making it cheaper and easier to obtain data from key informants like local elected officials or public administrators. However, the utility of web-based survey administration may be diminishing. To investigate this dynamic and search for strategies to support survey research in urban studies, we perform a systematic review of survey research in urban policy and administration scholarship and conduct an original survey follow-up experiment. Our findings identify a clear downward trend in survey response rates that was accentuated during the COVID-19 pandemic. Results from our survey experiment show distinctly different costs per solicitation and per completed survey, depending on administration mode. These findings stimulate discussion on how scholars may continue to use surveys to generate high-quality, empirically rigorous research on urban affairs in light of recent trends.

Re-Imaging the Future in Urban Studies and Built Environment Discourse: A Neurourbanism Perspective

Neurological constructs are being applied in various fields; within urban studies and built environments, neurourbanism stands out. To understand this concept, this study seeks to conduct a scientometric analysis of the concept of neurourbanism. To do so, we gauged the intellectual structure and clarified the influencers and emerging themes while seeking to identify essential gaps in neurourbanism research in urban studies and the built environment. Data were sorted from Dimensions Artificial Intelligence platform because of its reliability in providing the needed dataset accurately, and the Citespace software was used to analyze the data. Our results suggest plurality in explaining the risk factors in urbanicity research, particularly regarding prevalence, incidence, and the general cause of psychosis in urban living. The study also shows that players in the construction sector, such as engineers, town planners, and developers, have not fully grasped how the built environment assists in improving well-being, reducing stress levels of urbanists, assisting migrants in settling into the community, and the general mental wellness of those who live in the city. The study also identified a correlation between urbanization and mental health and added that the main recipient of rapid urban transformation countries does not show leadership in neurourbanism studies.

“Place Making” and “Place Attachment” as Key Concepts in Understanding and Confronting Contemporary Urban Evictions: The Case of Givat-Amal, Tel Aviv

This article expands on the usability of the concepts of “place making” and “place attachment” as recently developed in urban studies research in the context of housing insecurity of marginalized communities in today’s neo-liberal city. Particularly, against the growing threat of urban evictions, the article utilizes a transdisciplinary approach, showing the relevance of both concepts for (a) a better understanding of bottom-up processes of spatial production and attempts to create a sense of place on the part of such communities, and (b) offering an innovative legal strategy for doing justice to these communities in terms of their compensation rights, especially where a title to land has not been registered on a private basis. These issues are critically examined on the site-related case of the Givat-Amal quarter in Tel Aviv, Israel. This district is now under actual final threat of forced evictions following seven conflicted decades with the state, municipal authorities and private entrepreneurs. Our transdisciplinary study is based on qualitative methodologies in human geography such as fieldwork, visual evidence, and interviews, with a glimpse into philosophy. It is equally based on revisiting “traditional” legal property rights through the lens of post-liberal human rights analysis. The argument can apply to many situations of forced evictions across Africa, Latin America, and the West itself.

Big Data in the city

This editorial introduces a Special Issue on Big Data in the City. Collectively, six research articles and two commentaries explore the roles that Big Data can and might play in enhancing our understanding of urban processes and the qualities of urban outcomes. Big Data may be intrinsically considered a neutral technology but – refracted through existing power structures and resource distributions – its application within cities is by no means guaranteed always to help in the amelioration of social injustices or in the promotion of urban well-being. In application, Big Data becomes a performative technology that can be, is and will be further used in the creation and regulation of the cities of this century, a process that will be messy and of mixed consequence. The task for urban studies research is to shape that performativity, and to challenge any tendency that emerges to the further entrenchment of social inequities. In pursuit of these aims, and sensitively deployed, Big Data can be cast as part of the route map to better urban futures.

Urban forests, air quality and health: a systematic review

Cities are complex systems where many factors interconnect, therefore multidisciplinary research is crucial to understand their functional capacity and to improve the quality of life that these spaces offer. This research provides a decade of scientific literature review (2006 to 2016) about urban forest, air quality and health. This review aims to increase the discussion of the importance of multidisciplinary research in urban studies. In total we found 236 papers, from which 50 were selected for the systematic analyses. The number of multidisciplinary research papers is scarce in general, however, it has been growing in recent years. Most studies are found in the United States and China, a few in Latin America, but no studies have been reported in Africa. Few studies approached the three themes aforementioned simultaneously, which highlights the importance of strengthening a multidisciplinary approach for international urban forest research, creating results that allow integration of urban forest environments.

The experience of living in deprived neighbourhoods for LGBT+ people: Making home in difficult circumstances

Research in urban studies on lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans (LGBT+) people and their housing choices has focused on economic choices and the role of exclusion, or conversely higher household disposable income, in residential location. Evidence on lived experiences has focused on residence in so-called ‘gaybourhoods’ with high concentrations of non-heterosexual households, or experiences within the home. Contrasting to this scholarship, in this paper we focus on LGBT+ people who live in socially rented housing in deprived neighbourhoods that are geographically, socially and economically marginal. Our evidence shows how complex experiences of exclusion for LGBT+ people, not always directly connected to their sexual or gender identity, led to individuals living in these neighbourhoods. Using the theoretical approach of housing pathways, we further suggest that these neighbourhoods offer limited affordances for wellbeing for LGBT+ individuals that need to be recognised by housing and other service providers. We also argue that mainstream housing and urban studies needs to use sexual and gender identity as a category of analysis in research so we can better understand the lived experiences of non-heterosexual individuals and households.

Zrozumieć miasto. Hermeneutyka jako metoda badania fenomenu współczesnego miasta

In this article, the author presents the hermeneutic perspective of research in urban studies (‘hermeneutics of the city’) carried out within the field of cultural urban studies. ‘Hermeneutics of the city’ is still an unrealized project within the spatial turn in cultural studies. It is necessary to review and systematize the existing positions that make up the ‘hermeneutics of the city’ and outline its frameworks as theory.

Urban Rail Transit Provides the Necessary Access to a Metropolitan Area: A Case Study of Portland, Oregon, USA

Access to good public transit for low-socioeconomic communities has been an important concern in transportation planning and urban studies research. In Portland, Oregon, USA, the rapid growth of housing prices and rents in the urban core has caused displacement of low-income residents to peripheral and suburban neighborhoods where housing is more affordable. Because public transit is generally more limited in the urban periphery and suburbs, there is concern that the low-income suburban residents may have more limited access to Portland’s light rail transit service than more affluent residents do. This study examines the relationships between the light rail transit accessibility and socioeconomic status—income, race and ethnicity—in the Portland metro area. Light rail transit accessibility is compared for all income and racial/ethnic groups across four access zones. Multinomial logistic econometric models were used to measure likelihood differences of being located in different access zones between each demographic group. The results show that there is no significant barrier for low-income and racial and ethnic minority residents to access urban rail transit in Portland. The results suggest that despite low-income residents’ movement to the suburbs, Portland’s urban rail transit system continues to serve all residents by providing cohesive connections between the urban core, periphery and suburbs.

Financial Engineering by City Governments: Factors Associated with the Use of Debt-Related Derivatives

Despite significant coverage in the financial press in recent years, financial engineering by city governments via the use of financial derivatives such as interest rate swaps remain an understudied area of urban financial policy. Indeed, press accounts and other case or conceptual urban studies research emphasizing the downside of these transactions are some of the only sources of information on these instruments. These stories and studies often allude to or speculate on a more basic question: Why would a government choose to enter into a complex financial instrument like a debt-related derivative? This research posits three exploratory hypotheses—financial health, financial experience and/or financial sector influence, and governance structure—culled from media accounts and the urban studies literature on the use of debt-related derivatives by city governments in the United States. It empirically explores these hypotheses by examining the various fiscal, financial, and issuer characteristics of the largest 50 U.S. cities and their choice of whether to use debt-related derivatives. The research finds that the characteristics of government most associated with debt-related derivative use are declining financial condition, increased financial experience and/or financial sector influence, and prior use of interest rate swaps.

Populism, art and the city: An interdisciplinary pedagogy for our time

Abstract Populism on the far left and the far right is reshaping the contemporary city and the urban condition. In this special short-form section, we put forward populism, art and the city as a linked theoretical and methodological framework through the UC Berkeley Global Urban Humanities Initiative. Our conversations brought together new research in urban studies, art, architecture, public policy, and performance studies into what many people described as a decidedly populist age. Following a short introduction, we share a collection of four papers from such conversations that offer ‘focus sites’ from San Francisco to Palm Springs, Hong Kong to Mexico City, with a diverse set of theoretical proposals that branch from our discussions and shared readings in art, populism, and the city.