City Networks

The significant increase in urbanization has led to cities of unprecedented sizes and densities. The trend towards mega-cities is likely to continue in the next decades and will lead to even higher concentrations of populations in urban areas. They pose challenges from an economic, social, and environmental point of view. To face these challenges, smarter solutions are needed. Specifically, new approaches in information and communication technology are required. New paradigms such as the Internet of Things, advances in wireless technologies, and smart devices have fostered the emergence of what is called the Smart City. Smart Cities aim to improve supply, waste disposal, transport, security, and the overall quality of life in the towns of the future. This chapter describes the state-of-the-art technologies that form the base of future living.

City networks are systems of relations through which cities can cooperate in order to face the challenges of economic development, social protection, and environmental sustainability. Consequently, city networking assists local authorities in carrying out their most distinctive function, i.e. the creation of public value in a financially sustainable way. This function has become increasingly complex, leading to a wide and growing interest in urban strategic planning, which, in fact, may offer a useful contribution to local government, as long as it is set and implemented in an authentic and substantial way. This paper aims to contribute to the definition and classification of city networking, analyse its involvement in the creation of public value, and underline its importance in urban strategic planning, identifying some critical points and providing some useful suggestions for the future.

The advances in wireless communication technologies and the proliferation of mobile devices have enabled the emergence of intelligent environments for citizen to interact with each other, receive information in real time, and access a large variety of services, thus making the cities they live in smarter. Internet of things (IoT) materialized with the appearance of connected objects that are becoming smarter and more powerful. IoT dramatically modified our daily lives since it allowed progress in health monitoring, transportation management, pollution surveillance, etc. Communication is a key point in such environments. Another important problem in governance of a smart city is traffic management. In this chapter, we present a review of techniques based on graph theoretical concepts to optimize flows management in both network communication and route traffic.

This study aims to evaluate measures for the reduction of carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions from automobile traffic in the 23-ward district of Tokyo (central Tokyo), Japan, using the methods of spatial analysis by Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and statistical analysis. All of the measures to prevent global warming in Japan were first investigated to extract nine measures to reduce CO₂ emissions and then classified into the three groups. Secondly, using the GIS functions for database creation and information analysis, a digital map databases reflecting the real situation of automobile traffic in the study area was created. Using this database, the reduction of CO₂ emissions was calculated before and after the implementation of the above nine measures (2005 and 2011) in each road unit. Furthermore, in order to evaluate these measures, the situation of the reduction of CO₂ emissions was visualized in each road unit on the digital maps using GIS, and the CO₂ emissions before and after the implementation effects of the above nine measures were grasped by t-tests using R language. Based on the evaluation results, it was clear that CO₂ emissions are the highest on the main roads in the city center, while the roads with a high reduction of CO₂ emissions differed according to each measure. It was also found that all the above nine measures were effective, except for the promotion of eco-drive for small-size automobile. This is because, in the case of small-size automobiles, the diffusion rate of eco-drive did not increase greatly, the reduction effect of CO₂ emission was small, and the reduction of CO₂ emissions by fuel consumption was low.

Biking as a travel mode has become more and more common and popular recently. However, some problems occured in the development of cycling. This chapter explores the use of microblog data in the form of sentiment analysis and statistical analysis to determine if relationships exist between how bikeable a place is and talking about on the microblog Twitter. The results demonstrate that there is relationship between peoples’ attitudes, bicycling facilities, and physical environment factors. We also provide suggestions about some good strategies of developing cycling for bicycling planners and policymakers by using the results indicated in this study.

The EU’s long-term outlook for transport in the EU and its associated emissions demonstrates that the 2050 decarbonization goals for the transport sector require not only incremental changes but a systematic change (EEA Transitions towards a more sustainable mobility system. EEA technical report, Copenhagen, 2016). The intensive problems that many urban areas are facing caused by the operation of the transport system such as traffic congestion, air pollution, degradation of the environment, etc. require a paradigm shift in the planning process. Banister (Transp. Policy 15:73–80, 2008) said that “transport planning has a crisis of identity and its future is uncertain, particularly as the increasing complexity of cities and societies make simple approaches to analysis, which views transport congestion as the problem and transport as the solution”. Transport should have a basic role in achieving sustainable development. Towards this direction sustainable urban transport planning is a challenge.

With increasingly scarce global resources, gradually worsening waste emissions, and rising environmental protection awareness, an increasing number of countries enacted strict regulations to protect the environment; in addition, the issues on recycling and reusing used products have caught worldwide attention. Adapting to environmental protection and consumer requirements has compelled manufacturers and distributors to formulate forward and reverse logistics networks (RLNs) simultaneously. Moreover, the increasingly transparent contradiction between the supply and demand of resources coincides with the enterprises’ experience of growing cost pressures, for which recycling and remanufacturing gradually became important techniques to reduce the production cost. Under this background, the closed-loop logistics (CLL) has received significant attention from the academia and industry. In this chapter, we defined the related concepts with CLL; proposed the theoretical framework, including the CLL network structure and sustainable operations of logistics; and analyzed the effect of CLL on manufacturing, services, and people’s lives with a special focus on the main sustainable operations, namely, recycling and remanufacturing. The results revealed that implementing CLL management became a strategic choice for many enterprises, with its vital significance to decrease waste emissions, protect the environment, reduce production costs, improve economic efficiency, enhance competitiveness, promote enterprise technology innovation, and strengthen environmental protection.

The health perspective in urban science brings new methodological challenges to planning of city networks. Due to the system of systems nature of healthcare, new methods are needed to facilitate disciplinary integration and management of models and models-of-models. Participation of stakeholders and policy makers demands the uptake of new methods and a new perspective on the use of interfaces and boundary objects. In this chapter, the authors discuss evidence from five projects that use gaming, simulation, modeling, and data analytics in unconventional ways for design of large-scale urban systems to provide a methodological path forward for overcoming traditional engineering approach issues.

Understanding the need and the lines of the increasing numbers of older residents within the rapidly changing urban environment becomes a priority of urban architects, social gerontologists, city planners, and decision-makers. The aim of this study is to assess the possible association between the living conditions and the urban environments, where aging process is experienced. We propose also a model for secondary analysis of datasets provided by city registry offices that aims to realize a decision support system focused on detailed geo-mapping representation of the city of Genoa, Italy.

The Healthy Cities project of the World Health Organization (WHO) is a global movement. It engages local governments in health development. There are many national Healthy Cities networks, and a large number of cities in Greece have already joined them. Meanwhile, especially in big cities like Thessaloniki, health infrastructures are very old and operationally and spatially suffocate. The current research thoroughly records the health infrastructure in Macedonia and Thrace. Data clearly highlights that the major “healthcare issues” are concentrated in Thessaloniki. Hospitals operate in old buildings with urgent need for reconstruction and a definite need for expansion. A methodology for identifying a hospitals’ priority list is presented and applied taking into account the age of buildings, the building area/per bed, the field area/per bed, the coverage of beds, and the population being served. PROMETHEE methodology is implemented to rank healthcare units, on the basis of the urgency for improvement action. According to the analysis’ results, the hospitals in Thessaloniki that require immediate attention, considering their infrastructure, are “Theagenio” Anticancer Hospital, Psychiatric Hospital, and “St. Paul” General Hospital. Various improvement actions were proposed including expansion of hospitals in adjacent land and buildings, transfer of specific clinics to new buildings within the city, relocation of certain healthcare activities or part of them to new hospitals on the outskirts of city, upgrading of primary healthcare, and reinforcement of neuralgic hospitals in other prefectures. Finally, a discussion about the appropriateness of each type of intervention per hospital is presented.

Developed societies have for long been engaged in finding ways to increase, deepen, and strengthen their social capital levels as a means to sustain institutional quality and their overall growth potential. However, this is a multifaceted and complex task, especially when linked to urban sustainability. Analysis of social capital as a spatial phenomenon is rather limited, despite the commonly held view that locally embedded associations, partnerships, and initiatives can foster community empowerment and regeneration by building and sustaining well-functioning communities. To that extent, social capital is inexorably linked to the territorial capital that regions and localities might mobilize toward addressing the wider social, economic, environmental, and developmental challenges that they face. Within this context, the present study analyzes the civic engagement pattern of urban residents in Greece and tests for the effect of soft social capital constructs such as social trust, social altruism, equality, tolerance, and humanitarianism, upon this pattern. Analysis is based on microlevel data drawn from the European Social Value surveys round 4 (2008) and round 5 (2010). Results show that, while controlling for the sociodemographic and economic profile of respondents, the onset of the economic crisis in the country has negatively affected the social capital scores of both urban and nonurban residents, with urban residents showing higher levels of civic engagement compared to nonurban residents.

For meeting the demands imposed by the transition from the current tate networks to smart grids and smart cities, the planning of distribution networks will operate. We propose a method of optimizing urban power distribution networks using the idealized networks using the idealized concept.

Sustainability in urban water management is of utmost importance. The distribution of water should depend not only on the availability of the valuable natural resources but also on its efficient use. Water quality plays an equally significant role since if different water uses are taken into account could provide a more sustainable water distribution. We establish that water quantity and quality should be jointly studied and managed in order to acquire a beneficial sustainable water environment for urban areas.

This chapter presents black-box (or derivative-free) optimization from the perspective of architectural design optimization. We introduce and compare single- and multi-objective optimization, discuss applications from architectural design and related fields, and survey the three main classes of black-box optimization algorithms: metaheuristics, direct search, and model-based methods. We also give an overview over optimization tools available to architectural designers and discuss criteria for choosing between different optimization algorithms. Finally, we survey recent benchmark results from both mathematical test problems and simulation-based problems from structural, building energy, and daylighting design. Based on these empirical results, we recommend the use of global direct search and model-based methods over metaheuristics such as genetic algorithms, especially when the budget of function evaluations is limited, for example, in the case of time-intensive simulations. When it is more important to understand the trade-off between performance criteria than to find good solutions and the budget of function evaluations is sufficient to approximate the Pareto front accurately, we recommend multi-objective, Pareto-based optimization algorithms.