Stay points are important for recognizing significant places from a mobile user’s GPS trajectory. Such places are often located indoors and in urban canyons, where GPS is unreliable. Consequently, mapping a user’s stay point to a Place of Interest (POI) using only GPS data is particularly challenging. Our novel algorithm employs both spatio-temporal density estimation and line count inference t...

Census Designated Places (CDPs) are the Rodney Dangerfields of urban geography— they get no respect. The public does not understand them and researchers often overlook CDPs because they are seen as census-derived statistical artifacts as opposed to “real” places. Yet a CDP is a residential concentration whose population sees itself as belonging to a specific place, even if the place is not an o...

Urban sprawl has been at the center of current debate on urban structure. Compared to the rich literature on urban sprawl in Western cities, relatively little is known about whether Chinese urban expansion is excessive or inefficient. This paper provides an integrated analysis of two seemingly contradictory phenomena in China’s urban development in recent two decades, namely development zones a...

Efforts toward controlling secondhand smoke in public places have been made throughout China. However, in contrast to the western world, significant challenges remain for effectively implementing smoke-free regulations. This study explores individual and regional factors which influence smoking in smoke-free public places. Participants included 16 866 urban residents, who were identified throug...

Like many African rural-to-urban migrants, Igbo-speaking migrants to cities in Nigeria maintain close ties to their places of origin. 'Home people' constitute a vital core of most migrants' social networks. The institution of kinship enables migrants to negotiate Nigeria's clientelistic political economy. In this context, dichotomous distinctions between rural and urban can be inappropriate ana...

Objectives. Park planning and development in the Los Angeles metropolitan area offer an opportunity to explore the assertion that ‘‘Western cities are now being managed, organized and governed in different ways’’ leading to a ‘‘new urban politics,’’ and the suggestion that urban regime theory captures cultural and civil societal influences and organizations in its descriptions of coalitions and...

China provides a unique social-economic and political context for urban conservation and regeneration within the current trend of modernisation and globalisation. This paper investigates 4 urban regeneration projects conducted in four most internationalised historical Chinese cities from 1989 to 2005, in order to understand how traditional architectural elements are manipulated in these project...

Urbanisation is a long standing problem and phenomenon all around the world. It means more and more challenges for scientists. Remote sensing techniques with high spectral and spatial resolution open novel approaches which enable the analysis of vegetated and non-vegetated urban surfaces with high heterogeneity. In this paper it is demonstrated how hyperspectral images and thermal maps can be u...