There is much enthusiasm currently about the possibilities created by new and more extensive sources of data to better understand and manage cities. Here, I explore how big data can be useful in urban planning by formalizing the planning process as a general computational problem. I show that, under general conditions, new sources of data coordinated with urban policy can be applied following f...

We study how the availability and use of family planning services in African countries influences the family planning situation of households and through this the educational participation of young children. A district panel dataset is used for 441 urban and rural areas within 233 districts of 25 countries. Path analysis shows that a decrease in the number of births is associated with an increa...

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An urban forest assessment is essential for developing a baseline from which to measure changes and trends. The most precise way to assess urban forests is to measure and record every tree on a site, but although this may work well for relatively small populations (e.g., street trees, small parks), it is prohibitively expensive for large tree populations. Thus, random sampling offers a cost-eff...

This bulletin is based on research conducted by Dr Gethin Davison, Mr Ryan van den Nouwelant, A/Prof Simon Pinnegar and Prof Bill Randolph at the AHURI Research Centre—the University of New South Wales, Prof Nicole Gurran at the AHURI Research Centre— the University of Sydney, and Prof Glen Bramley at Heriot-Watt University Edinburgh. The research examined how planning practices in urban renewa...

Biodiversity underlies many of the ecosystem services demanded by humans. For cities, the design of ‘green infrastructures’ or ‘nature-based solutions’ has been proposed to maintain the provisioning of these services and the preservation of biodiversity. It is unclear, however, how such green infrastructure can be implemented, given existing planning practices that generally ignore biodiversity...

Capacity dimensioning is performed before launching a cellular network, which includes coverage estimation and forecast of throughput. Cellular companies in developing countries like Pakistan are only providing 2G services, while 3G services are still in process of being launched. Although a lot of research has been done on 3G services in developed countries but there is very little knowledge r...

There is a tradition of planning cities and their infrastructure to successfully tackle communicable disease arising from urban development. Non-communicable disease follows a different course. Development brings in its wake a basket of adverse health and health equity outcomes that are proving difficult to tackle. In response, within Phase V of the European Healthy Cities Network, municipaliti...