Urban Fantesy

This book examines the “ethics in relation to city and urbanism” by evaluating the strengths and limitations of rights as a conceptual tool from the comparative East–West perspective in resolving urban controversies (involving conflicts of rights between different classes, different groups within the present generation, present vs future generations, human vs animals, human vs plants and nature), thereby facilitating urban policy-making and good urban governance.

Recently, remote sensing and GIS techniques have gained increasing importance for rapid urbanization, the expansion of urban growth, and the enlargement of populations, due to the application of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning algorithms. This Special Issue aims to present the state-of-the-art research on optics, SAR, hyperspectral images, and GIS techniques for monitoring urban area environments corresponding to changes in times using publicly available and commercial datasets such as satellite and UAV data.

This book proposes a Metamodel for heritage-based urban development, based on urban morphology, governance theory, and the metamodeling concept of John P. Van Gigch. Building on international policies such as the 2011 Recommendation for Historic Urban Landscapes and the results of the 2016 Urban Habitat III Conference, cultural heritage is now regarded as a potential resource for sustainable urban development. While more and more evidence of the potential benefits of cultural heritage for sustainable development has been published, this book is the first to develop and design a Metamodel that can be universally applied in a wide variety of settings.

This book investigates the dynamics and the role of green urban regeneration using nature-based solutions (NBS) in contributing to the cultural aspects of public spaces. In the first part of the book, insights on analytical methods, planning strategies and shared governance examples are given, as well as, an assessment tool, namely public space index (PSI), is given for successfully measuring sociability impact while using a placemaking approach to green urban regeneration processes. In the second part, the case study (Rose Kennedy Greenway of Boston, MA, USA) has been extensively researched during many years of observations and analysis which gives a realistic taste of the implementation of the proposed PSI. The book’s last part reflects on PSI to measure its adaptability and replicability in other contexts, whereas NBS are playing a major role in physical and spatial green urban regeneration in current cities contexts’.

Urbanisation of the world's population is an increasing trend; in China, for example, the proportion of the population living in cities increased from 13% in 1950 to 45% in 2010 (World Bank data).

This edited volume provides an essential resource for urban morphology, the study of urban forms and structures, offering a much-needed mathematical perspective. Experts on a variety of mathematical modeling techniques provide new insights into specific aspects of the field, such as street networks, sustainability, and urban growth. The chapters collected here make a clear case for the importance of tools and methods to understand, model, and simulate the formation and evolution of cities.