In recent years, motorization has accelerated the expansion of urban sprawl and the decline of central city areas in many cities in Japan. In order to reverse this trend, the Government of Japan enacted the Downtown Revitalization Act in June 2007. To revitalize the city centers, it is very important to increase the attractiveness of urban space as a whole, rather than only introducing attracti...

In urban landscapes, gardens provide refuges for bee diversity, but conservation potential may depend on local and landscape features. Foraging and population persistence of bee species, as well as overall pollinator community structure, may be supported by the abundance, richness, and spatial distribution of floral resources. Floral resources strongly differ in urban gardens. Using hand nettin...

Our societies are reliant on metals to such an extent that the total amounts of some of them in the built environment are comparable in size to the remaining amounts in known mountain ores. Because of concerns about mineral scarcity, the United Nations has assessed alternative sources for metal extraction and targeted urban areas in general and infrastructure systems in particular, since these ...

Although urbanization in Africa has been characterized by fragile socio-economic successes, the sustainability of city infrastructure is now central to planning processes as a pathway to closing the deficit in terms of coverage and access. This paper builds on survey and interview data from Kampala city, to demonstrate how the principle gender responsiveness can inform improvements in urban inf...

Green infrastructure, that is, wet weather management approaches and technologies that infiltrate, evapotranspire, capture, and reuse stormwater to maintain or restore natural hydrologies, can affect temperature in different aspects of the urban environment. Restoration of natural landscape features and local installations of rain gardens, green roofs, green walls, infiltration planters, permea...

Urban sprawl refers to the outgrowth of urban areas caused by uncontrolled, uncoordinated and unplanned growth. This outgrowth seen along the periphery of cities, along highways, and along roads connecting a city, lacks basic amenities like sanitation, treated water supply, primary health centre, etc. as planners were unable to visualise such growth during planning, policy and decision-making. ...

The urban fringe which can be seen as a special form of regional ecosystems with a spatial structure gradually from urban to rural areas of transition, has strong heterogeneity and is typical of ecologically sensitive areas. The expansion of city caused wide attention to the landscape effect of the changes. With the help of GIS, we got landscape pattern changes before and after town planning of...

Remote sensing technology has great potential for acquisition of detailed and accurate land-use information for management and planning of urban regions. However, the determination of land-use data with high geometric and thematic accuracy is generally limited by the availability of adequate remote sensing data, in terms of spatial and temporal resolution, and digital image analysis techniques....

China has experienced unprecedented urbanization since the 1980s, resulting in substantial climatic effects from local cities to broad regions. Using the Weather Research and Forecasting model dynamically coupled to an urban canopy model, we quantified the summertime climate effects of urban expansion in China's most rapidly urbanizing regions: Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei (BTH), Yangtze River Delta (...