The majority of the world’s citizens now live in cities. Although urban planning can thus be thought of as a field with significant ramifications on the human condition, many practitioners feel that it has reached the crossroads in thought leadership between traditional practice and a new, more participatory and open approach. Conventional ways to engage people in participatory planning exercis...

Brent D. Ryan first visited Detroit in 1993. Describing this experience, he says: ‘‘The sense of emptiness was overpowering. ... I felt as if I was walking into the ruin of America.’’ In his book ‘‘Design after decline—how America rebuilds shrinking cities,’’ Ryan tries to understand why so many American cities have been losing population, what was and is done to change the fortune of these cit...

Nigeria’s cities, as elsewhere in Sub-Saharan Africa, lack adequate infrastructure for housing, sanitation, water, and open space amenities. Much of this is due to the absence of land planning statutes that encompass the evolving functions and responsibilities of urban areas, as numerous Nigerian research studies have documented. This paper reviews the status of urban planning in Nigeria and ca...

Spatial differences in urban environmental conditions contribute to health inequalities within cities. The purpose of the paper is to map environmental inequalities relevant for health in the City of Dortmund, Germany, in order to identify needs for planning interventions. We develop suitable indicators for mapping socioeconomically-driven environmental inequalities at the neighborhood level ba...

The paper discusses the benefits of specific user’s oriented tools in urban planning processes, throughout the applications of an original system devised to define the localisation of urban services based on traffic distribution. Operative examples concern the Italian city of Pavia. The system ULISSE (Urban Location Interactive System for SErvices), created by the author, uses a static model of...

more than 50% of the global population already lives in urban settlements which are projected to absorb almost all the global population growth to 2050, amounting to some additional three billion people. over the next decades the increase in rural population in many developing countries will be overshadowed by population flows to cities. rural populations globally are expected to peak at a leve...

CONTEXT Previous studies have identified positive relationships between geographic proximity to family planning services and contraceptive use, but have not accounted for the effect of contraceptive supply reliability or the diminishing influence of facility access with increasing distance. METHODS Kernel density estimation was used to geographically link Malawi women's use of injectable cont...