Long term meteorological records ( > 100 years) from stations associated with villages are generally classified as rural and assumed to have no urban influence. Using networks installed in two European villages, the local and microclimatic variations around two of these rural-village sites are examined. An annual average temperature difference (1T ) of 0.6 and 0.4 K was observed between the bui...

from the past to the present time, in all civilizations and countries, urbanization is considered the most striking evolution of human societies. with the advent of the industrial revolution and the rapid expansion of cities, societies were faced with numerous problems. one of the most significant problems is extreme centralization in one city or more and fragmentation of urban hierarchical sys...

Urban sprawl has been at the center of current debate on urban structure. Compared to the rich literature on urban sprawl in Western cities, relatively little is known about whether Chinese urban expansion is excessive or inefficient. This paper provides an integrated analysis of two seemingly contradictory phenomena in China’s urban development in recent two decades, namely development zones a...

DEDICATION To my parents and family for their endless love and support. v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Special thanks to Kathleen Lugosch and Stephen Schreiber for their academic advices and kind help. Urban Villages are a specific phenomenon raised in modern China due to the high-speed economic development and urbanization in recent three decades. And there are social, economic, cultural and architectural ...

‘Urban villages’ is the Chinese version of informal settlement. It is a unique phenomenon that comprises mainly low-rise and congested, often illegal buildings surrounded by new constructions and high-rise buildings. Due to a lack of an unambiguous definition allowing for a spatial delineation of such areas, this article investigates a joint use of high-resolution optical and SAR satellite data...

Health status of neonates in urban slums has not been studied in smaller towns. A questionnaire was administered to 154 families of 10 urban slums of Anand (population - 197351) and 160 families from 6 villages of Anand district. The socioeconomic and education status of the slum dwellers versus rural participants were significantly lower (P<0.001). Antenatal care (79.9 vs 94.4%, P<0.001), hosp...

The past decades have witnessed a number of informal land developments on the urban fringe in China although many strict state regulations have been made to control this. The dual urban rural land system is widely believed to be one major determinant of informal developments in the existing literature. However, the important role of local villages and townships are often neglected. This paper a...