Port cities are historically important breeding places of civilization and wealth, and act as attractive high-quality and sustainable places to live and work. They are core places for sustainable development for the entire spatial system as a result of their dynamism, which has in recent years reinforced their position as magnets in a spatial-economic force field. To understand and exploit this...

Government-regulated business closures, social distancing from people, and stay-at-home orders emptied the urban environment of presence people. This effectively created new sonic relationships between natural urbanised sounds within our built society. As Covid-19 instilled a state abandonment spaces with each variation lockdowns, there was an opportunity to document these changes through sonic...

Lead in maternal blood can cross the placenta and result in elevated blood lead levels in newborns, potentially producing negative effects on neurocognitive function, particularly if combined with childhood lead exposure. Little research exists, however, into the burden of elevated blood lead levels in newborns, or the places and populations in which elevated lead levels are observed in newborn...

The range and use of ecosystem services provided by urban sacred sites has hardly been considered in studies of urban ecology, sustainability and human wellbeing. This paper examines the perceived ecosystem services supplied by green spaces or gardens associated with places of religious worship and appreciated by worshippers in a mid-sized town in South Africa. A questionnaire with open, closed...

Participation as self-organization has emerged as a new form of citizen activism, often supported by digital technology. A comparative qualitative analysis of two case studies in Helsinki indicates that the self-organization of citizens expands the practice of urban planning. Together, they enable the mobilization of different groups around issues related to urban space. The consequences have b...

In recent decades, the world has experienced rates of urban growth unparalleled in any other period of history and this growth is shaping the environment in which an increasing proportion of us live. In this paper, we use a longitudinal dataset from Foursquare, a location-based social network, to analyse urban growth across 100 major cities worldwide. Initially, we explore how urban growth diff...

This study provides quantitative evidence on the local benefits and costs of wind farm developments in England and Wales, focussing on their visual environmental impacts. In the tradition of studies in environmental, public and urban economics, housing costs are used to reveal local preferences for views of wind farm developments. Estimation is based on quasiexperimental research designs that c...

Mobile geotagging services offer people new ways to interact with and through urban space. In this paper, we focus on a mobile geotagging service called Socialight and the social practices associated with it. In-depth interviews and participant observation were conducted in order to explore how Socialight’s virtual ‘‘sticky notes’’ were used in everyday life. Findings indicated how users commun...