City marketing tries to position cities in the mind of the public, although the process of creating and communicating city brands is still at an early stage of its development. One of the main tools for the communication of these brands is now the World Wide Web. This chapter describes the results of two combined studies (qualitative and quantitative) that analyzes a sample of official city Web...

200 What distinguishes Iowa City, IA, from all the other towns in North America? Iowa City is a UNESCO City of Literature, the third in the world and the only one in North America. The University of Iowa is largely responsible for UNESCO’s recognition of Iowa City. Our highly acclaimed Writers’ Workshop was the first creative writing degree program in the country and continues to be the model f...

Easy access to different necessities of daily life makes a city more livable. This has motivated urban planning researchers to quantify urban accessibility from official city data. However, due to the manual nature of data collection, these earlier survey based analyses were limited in scope and scalability, and mostly offered insights on cities of developed countries like the UK and the USA. U...

Global Sydney is essentially a knowledge city. The global Sydney thesis has focused on Sydney’s performances in the knowledge-based economy, especially the advanced producer services, in an increasingly integrated world economy. Sydney’s emergence as a global city has been inseparable from its migrants from overseas and elsewhere in Australia. This study aims to bridge the theses of global Sydn...

The encoding of cities into non-planar dual graphs reveals their complex structure. We investigate the statistics of the typical space syntax measures for the five different compact urban patterns. Universal statistical behavior of space syntax measures uncovers the universality of the city creation mechanism. 1 Paradigm of a city Although, nowadays the majority of people live in cities [1] the...

One of the simplest methods to construct a 3D city model is to extrude building footprints to obtain “block-shaped” polyhedra representing buildings. While the method is well-known and easy to implement, if the 2D topological relationships between the footprints are not taken into account, the resulting 3D city models will not necessarily be topologically consistent (i.e. primitives shared by 3...

Recently ubiquitous cities have been developed all over the world. They aim at embedding information and communication technology, information services and digital content in the urban landscape to make the citizens’ everyday lives easier. One of these future-oriented cities is Oulu in Finland. It makes part of the most “intelligent” communities in the world. Oulu offers an information and comm...

BACKGROUND The global epidemic of hepatitis B and hepatitis C is a serious publichealth problem. Chronic hepatitis B and hepatitis C are among the leading causes of preventable death worldwide. World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that up to two billion people in the world have been infected with HBV; about 350 million people live with chronic HBV infection, and about 600,000 people die fr...

Complex sociopolitical, economic, and geographical realities cause the 20 million residents of Mexico City to suffer from some of the worst air pollution conditions in the world. Greenhouse gas emissions from the city are also substantial, and opportunities for joint local-global air pollution control are being sought. Although a plethora of measures to improve local air quality and reduce gree...

“...the whole world had one language one common speech for all people. The people of the earth became skilled in construction and decided to build a city with a tower that would reach to heaven. By building the tower they wanted to make a name for themselves and also prevent their city from being scattered. God came to see their city and the tower they were building. He perceived their intentio...