For some time, individuals in multiple contexts have been moving from rural to urban areas for economic reasons. In recent years, however, young people in Japan have been increasingly turning to rural areas to embrace a slower, lesshectic lifestyle. Despite this interesting development, researchers have thus far failed to identify determinants of residents’ well-being in rural and urban areas i...

In Sub-Saharan Africa rapid urban growth combined with rising poverty is creating diverse urban environments, the nature of which are not adequately captured by a simple urban-rural dichotomy. This paper proposes an alternative classification scheme for urban mapping based on a gradient approach for the southern portion of the West African country of Ghana. Landsat Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus...

With an ongoing variety of pervasive computing devices integrated in our environment and an increasing mobility of users, it is necessary for mobile systems and services to be context-aware. Introducing relevant contexts to the user is the main properties of context-aware systems especially spatial relevant contexts. Most often as situations change gradually, there is no sharp boundary about ho...

The Early Warning System (EWS) is a tool developed by the National High School Center to collect data on indicators including attendance, GPA, course failures and credits earned. These indicators have been found to be highly predictive of a student’s likelihood of dropping out of high school in large, urban areas. The EWS tool was studied in two suburban schools. With the exception of attendanc...

In an urban area, the demand for taxis is not always matched up with the supply. This paper proposes mining historical data to predict demand distributions with respect to contexts of time, weather, and taxi location. The four-step process consists of data filtering, clustering, semantic annotation, and hotness calculation. The results of three clustering algorithms are compared and demonstrate...

The multitude of satellite data products available offers a large choice for urban studies. Urban space is known for its high heterogeneity in structure, shape and materials. To approach this heterogeneity, finding the optimal spatial resolution (OSR) is needed for urban form detection from remote sensing imagery. By applying the local variance method to our datasets (pan-sharpened images), we ...

Socio-spatial studies of children's mobility in sub-Saharan Africa are rare and constitute a major research gap. This paper focuses on school children's experiences of travel, transport and traffic, with particular reference to southern Ghana. Drawing on interviews with children, parents and teachers, we examine children's travel patterns to school and broader travel patterns associated with th...

This paper reviews recent innovations in the use of participatory tools and methods that are relevant to urban areas. This includes the use of participatory approaches for understanding poverty, involving children, identifying livelihood opportunities, and monitoring and evaluating projects. It also highlights recent literature which discusses how participatory and conventional research and pla...