Cities are hubs of human activity; the everyday actions of myriad households, businesses, and industries located within a city’s geopolitical boundary. Measuring greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions associated with cities is confounded by the relatively small spatial scale of cities compared with the large-scale engineered infrastructures in which they are embedded; that is, the electricity grid, tra...

Despite the composed ‘predict and provide’ attitude displayed in the National Urban Policy Paper towards change in Australian Cities, our cities have been more vulnerable to an increasing range of events and trends. The experience of the last year alone is a clear indicator that prediction along traditional lines is an increasingly unreliable way of managing cities. Instead, planning policy and...

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...

How does isolation affect the economic activity of cities? Transport costs are widely considered an important barrier to local economic activity but their impact in developing countries is not well-studied. This paper investigates the role of intercity transport costs in determining the income of sub-Saharan African cities. In particular, focusing on fifteen countries whose largest city is a po...

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...

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...

This paper reports results of a study that explored the relationship between the local environmental actions of Healthy Cities programs and the adverse health impacts of climate change. The analysis is primarily based on a limited literature review of climate change and health, with particular attention to the relationships between Healthy Cities and climate change, and on documentary analysis ...

Over half of the world’s population lives in cities and United Nations (UN) demographers project an increase of 2.5 billion more urban dwellers by 2050. Yet there is too little systematic comparative research on the practice of urban health policy and management (HPAM), particularly in the megacities of middle-income and developing nations. We make a case for creating a global database on citie...

In the traveling salesman problem, one must find the length of the shortest closed tour visiting given “cities”. We study the stochastic version of the problem, taking the locations of cities and the distances separating them to be random variables drawn from an ensemble. We consider first the ensemble where cities are placed in Euclidean space. We investigate how the optimum tour length scales...

Context The topic of this conference – ‘the right to the city’ – implies that the city is an important social stake. By association it also suggests that the struggle is between classes. As such it raises all manner of questions about the relation between society and space, class and territory that merit attention, even concern. In understanding events in cities, can one confine oneself to an u...