In recent years, the evolution of urban environments, jointly with the progress of the Information and Communication sector, have enabled the rapid adoption of new solutions that contribute to the growth in popularity of Smart Cities. Currently, the majority of the world population lives in cities encouraging different stakeholders within these innovative ecosystems to seek new solutions guaran...

The Egyptian new towns experience is among the most comprehensive and ambitious, regionallyand worldwide. Initiated as a governmental policy within a general strategy to tackle the multitude of problemsburdening Egyptian settlements in general and major and secondary cities surrounded by agricultural land. New townswere thought as an effective partial solution for the problems of: encroachment ...

China has achieved rapid urbanization and unprecedented economic booming over the past three decades. Numerous cities and towns dreamed of cloning the miracles of Shenzhen and Pudong, Shanghai, in terms of their international development. However, inappropriate development strategies have meant that the majority of fast expanding urban suburbs or newly developed towns suffer a high ratio of vac...

B ig City Health Departments: Leadership Perspectives highlights innovative strategies and programs of the health commissioners of the largest American cities. Led by Drs Jonathan Fielding of Los Angeles and Thomas Frieden of New York City, the commissioners formed the Big Cities Health Coalition (BCHC) in 2002 to reflect their needs as distinct from those of the many smaller jurisdictions acro...

This paper provides a new geospatial perspective on whether or not Zipf’s law holds for all cities or for the largest cities in the United States using a massive dataset and its computing. A major problem around this issue is how to define cities or city boundaries. Most of the investigations of Zipf’s law rely on the demarcations of cities imposed by census data, e.g., metropolitan areas and c...

Economic theories of systems of cities explain why production and consumption activities are concentrated in a number of urban areas of different sizes and industrial composition rather than uniformly distributed in space. These theories have been successively influenced by four paradigms: i) conventional urban economics emphasizing the tension between economies due to the spatial concentration...

In recent decades, the world has experienced rates of urban growth unparalleled in any other period of history and this growth is shaping the environment in which an increasing proportion of us live. In this paper, we use a longitudinal dataset from Foursquare, a location-based social network, to analyse urban growth across 100 major cities worldwide. Initially, we explore how urban growth diff...

Economic theories of systems of cities explain why production and consumption activities are concentrated in a number of urban areas of different sizes and industrial composition rather than uniformly distributed in space. These theories have been successively influenced by four paradigms: i) conventional urban economics emphasizing the tension between economies due to the spatial concentration...

As cities grow, they add jobs and services, becoming more complex economically as well as physically. The need for new jobs places huge demands on cities that are struggling to provide the public services that growth demands, often in the face of existing unemployment. In the developing world, many of the new jobs needed are for unskilled and relatively uneducated workers, both migrants and tho...