At the high resolutions attainable with the new generation space-borne sensors, the focus moves increasingly from spectral characteristics to geometric features. This trend is even more evident for urban areas which tend to show an unpaired concentration of linear features with respect to any other land cover. This naturally applies to both optical and radar images, and suggests one may use loc...

Respect and reverence for water and trees are institutionalised in many ancient civilisations due to socio-cultural traditions, values and beliefs. In Iranian societies, respect for trees and water, separately and in composite form as gardens, is a well-known cultural value both before and after Islam. Therefore, the first part of this paper explains the value and importance of plants and ga...

Urban change detection of high resolution images is very difficult due to the complex nature of the urban environments. A robust approach is proposed in this paper for urban change detection of high resolution images, which is based on the integration of objectspecific features. To model the contextual information and improve the interclass variability between different classes, homogeneous reg...

features [ ] and [a] in place of the rural features [q] and [e] respectively in the vernacular Arabic of rural, non-migrant children and adolescents in the village of Oyoun Al-Wadi in Syria. The study shows that linguistic change in this village is moving in two opposing directions. Girls continue to use their initially acquired mothers’ urban features in their adolescent years; boys who initia...

The majority of the world's population will live in cities in the next few years, and the pace of urbanization worldwide will continue to accelerate over the coming decades. Such a dramatic demographic shift can be expected to have an impact on population health. Although there has been historic interest in how city living is associated with health, this interest has waxed and waned and a cogen...

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...

BACKGROUND Street-scale urban design policies are recommended to increase physical activity in communities. Our purpose was to examine U.S. public support for local street-scale urban design features and policies. METHODS Analysis is based on a cross-sectional national sample of adults (n = 4682) participating in the 2006 HealthStyles mail survey. RESULTS About 57% of adults rated local str...

We investigate the spectral complexity and unique spectral characteristics of urban environments using a comprehensive regional field spectral library of more than 4500 individual spectra. Spectral properties of urban surface materials are presented and interpreted, and their separability is systematically analyzed using the Bhattacharyya distance (B-distance) as a quantitative measure of spect...

Urban Environment planning can prevent abnormal behaviors, crime and felony in urban places by identifying effective local features and environmental conditions, along with other actions, so that the felon would have much less opportunities for committing criminal and unlawful acts in urban areas. This article is part of the outcomes of a study project called “formulation of environmental crite...

Detection of urban area extents by means of remotely sensed data is a difficult task, especially because of the multiple, diverse definitions of what an "urban area" is. The models of urban areas listed in technical literature are based on the combination of spectral information with spatial patterns, possibly at different spatial resolutions. Starting from the same data set, "urban area" extra...