Over half of the world’s population lives in cities and United Nations (UN) demographers project an increase of 2.5 billion more urban dwellers by 2050. Yet there is too little systematic comparative research on the practice of urban health policy and management (HPAM), particularly in the megacities of middle-income and developing nations. We make a case for creating a global database on citie...

In the traveling salesman problem, one must find the length of the shortest closed tour visiting given “cities”. We study the stochastic version of the problem, taking the locations of cities and the distances separating them to be random variables drawn from an ensemble. We consider first the ensemble where cities are placed in Euclidean space. We investigate how the optimum tour length scales...

Context The topic of this conference – ‘the right to the city’ – implies that the city is an important social stake. By association it also suggests that the struggle is between classes. As such it raises all manner of questions about the relation between society and space, class and territory that merit attention, even concern. In understanding events in cities, can one confine oneself to an u...

The links between urban planning and health are many and varied. Environmental, social and economic conditions in cities can have both positive and negative influences on human health and centre. Urban planning and related professions play an important role in shaping those conditions. Healthy Cities and the City Planning process is a background paper supporting the developmental work of the WH...

Ecosystem services (ES) in cities and surrounding suburban areas are one of the major factors which guarantee quality of life. Most studies directly referring to urban ecosystem services are conducted on a local scale or for selected cities. There are few studies which focus on temporal changes of the provision of ecosystem services across a large number of cities. This paper analyzes selected ...

A LONG-STANDING BELIEF in development studies holds that, on the whole, living conditions in developing countries are superior for residents of large cities than for persons living in smaller cities, towns, and villages. The concept of big cities as " islands of privilege " (Harrison 1982: 145) is fundamental to otherwise discrepant theories of modernization, dependency, world systems of cities...

Introduction: Framing the Analysis This chapter is concerned with the long-term sustainability of cities. My starting premise is that because of accelerating global ecological change, cities everywhere are facing unprecedented challenges to their functional integrity and even survival. Unprecedented challenges require unprecedented solutions. In keeping with this reality, I depart from most urb...

In this study an attempt has been made to assess the potential of land as a municipal financing tool in four Indian cities, to enable better public service delivery and attainment of the MDGs. The institutional arrangements for land use are fragmented in India’s cities between the urban development authorities, which are state agencies, and the cities. To determine whether or not transfer of re...

This paper investigates whether Japanese banks followed herd behavior in lending in local financial markets during 1980—1999. By using loan data from Japanese banks, arranged by geographical area, we find leader-follower relationships between lending behavior of different types of banks. Specifically, herding is mostly caused by local banks. Local banks follow major banks in urban cities, while...

By leveraging advancements in information and communications technology (ICT), Smart Cities offer many potential benefits like improved energy efficiency, management and personal security. However, this dependence on ICT also makes smart cities prone to cyber attacks. In this paper, we investigate the topic of cybersecurity for smart cities. We show how the specific characteristics of smart cit...