Urban heat waves and the overall growing trend in the annual global temperature underline the importance of urban/architectural resilience and the need to reduce energy consumption. By designing urban voids, it is possible to create thermodynamic buffers, i.e., bubbles of controlled atmosphere that act as mediators between the natural and built environments, between the human body and the surro...

We propose a decision-aiding evaluation procedure (i) for classifying road crossings based on their impact on walkability and, subsequently, (ii) for prioritising street improvements, in urban-rural fringe areas. In the peripheral urban-rural fringes, pedestrian mobility is usually less developed and people generally depend more on cars for their everyday chores. Partly this is inevitable given...

The present work discusses the possibilities offered by the evolution of Information and Communication Technologies with the aim of designing a system to dynamically obtain knowledge of accessibility issues in urban environments. This system is facilitated by technology to analyse the urban user experience and movement accessibility, which enabling accurate identification of urban barriers and ...

Nowadays the quality of life is one of the factors that have special standing in the context of urban planning studies. This factor became significant due to the increasing importance of quality of life in the monitoring of public policy and its role as an efficient tool in the management and planning. Urban life quality is usually measured through the surveying and evaluation of subjective per...

Urban bee ecology is an emerging field that holds promise for advancing knowledge of bee community dynamics and promoting bee conservation. Published studies of bee communities in urban and suburban habitats are fewer than those documenting bees in agricultural and wildland settings. As land lost to urbanization is predicted to increase in coming years the necessity of studying urban bee popula...

Numbers of greenroofs in urban areas continue to grow internationally; so designing greenroof soil to reduce the amount of nutrients in the stormwater runoff from these roofs is becoming essential. This study evaluated changes in extensive greenroof water discharge quality and quantity after adding biochar, a soil amendment promoted for its ability to retain nutrients in soils and increase soil...

Urban modeling is an important tool for efficient policy designing. We herein present a methodological framework for urban modeling which attempts to access the multi-level urban growth dynamics and express them in linguistic terms. The suggested framework incorporates a set of fuzzy systems, each one of which focuses on different aspects of the urban growth dynamics, while the systems’ structu...