Groundwater quality and its change over a decade: An analysis of a coastal urban environment from the west coast of India

Mangalore, one of the fastest growing cities along the west coast of India has witnessed a leap in industrialisation and urbanisation during the last decade. This study focuses on the quality of the groundwater of Mangalore city. The results are compared with an earlier study to record the change in water quality over a decade. HCO₃ and Na were found exceeding the highest desirable limit of the World Health Organisation (WHO) and Indian Standards Institute (ISI) standards for drinking water. The pH values at seven localities are not within the limits prescribed by WHO or ISI (highest desirable level or maximum permissible level). The present study shows that there has been an enrichment of chemical constituents during the last decade and that the Gurupur River, which flows parallel to the coast, plays an important role in impeding saltwater intrusion along the coast.     

Private sector involvement in urban governance: The case of Business Improvement Districts and Town Centre Management partnerships in England

Although it has many merits, the voluminous literature on urban governance gives scant attention to the actual involvement and positioning of business elites and businesses within Public-Private Partnerships. There is also little consensus among academics as to why the private sector become involved in such schemes. This paper begins to address these issues through a critical empirical examination of how and why the private sector is involved with three English Town Centre Management (TCM) partnerships and the Business Improvement District (BID) subsidiaries all three partnerships have recently developed. In order to do this, the empirical study is guided by a conceptual framework that foregrounds the relationship between (a) the opening up and monitoring of ‘institutional space’ by partnerships and the state, and (b) the motivations and ‘constrained agency’ of the business elites. The paper demonstrates that the positioning of the private sector is more multifarious and fractured than previous studies of urban governance have suggested. It also reveals that business elites and businesses view their participation as an ‘investment’ that needs to accrue significant financial returns and that partnership and state officials are highly selective in their choice of ‘who governs’.     

Is remote sensing useful for finding and monitoring urban farms?

As the world becomes increasingly urbanized, the need for fresh fruits and vegetables in urban areas grows while the difficulty of bringing these perishable products to these areas also increases. Small-scale agriculture located in urban areas is a highly effective and profitable way to provide these products to communities that are far from extensive commercial agricultural areas. Here we describe how remote sensing can be used with data mining approaches to monitor urban and peri-urban farms within cities in both developed and developing countries. Using very high resolution satellite imagery together with moderate and coarse resolution imagery and information from social media and the web, we analyze the usefulness of different methods to identify farms within urban boundaries in four countries. The analysis shows how a mixed-method approach is necessary in order to identify where urban farming is occurring and to monitor its change through time. Although remote sensing-based vegetation and water indices were useful, without ancillary data they are not effective at remotely mapping the locations of urban farms. However, remote sensing is a good way to monitor vegetation condition in locations where actively managed urban farms are known to exist.     

Redevelopment and the urban forest: A study of tree removal and retention during demolition activities

Though relationships between urbanization and tree cover are generally well studied, the effect of redevelopment on urban trees, at the scale of the individual property, is not well understood. Developing knowledge in this area is important in order to limit tree loss during redevelopment and thus, ensure sustained ecosystem services. Here, we explore the removal or retention of trees adjacent to building demolition in Christchurch, New Zealand. We mapped the presence or absence of individual trees on 123 properties prior to, and following, building demolition. Using a classification tree (CT) analysis, the presence or absence of 1209 trees was modelled as a function of: tree-related variables, property-related variables, and economic variables. The CT model estimated tree presence/absence with overall accuracy of 80.4%. Results show that 21.6% of all trees were removed as a consequence of building demolition, resulting in a tree canopy cover reduction of 19.7% across all 123 properties. The CT showed that tree crown area was the most important variable for predicting the presence/absence of trees, whereby trees with small crown areas (<7.9 m²) were most frequently removed, especially if they were within 0.7 m of a demolished building. Land value was also an important determinant of tree presence/absence, such that tree removal was more prevalent on properties with higher land value ($/m²). The results provide important new insights into some of the reasons for tree removal or retention during redevelopment at the scale of the individual property where most tree-related decisions are made.     

A high-performance cellular automata model for urban simulation based on vectorization and parallel computing technology

Cellular automata (CA) models can simulate complex urban systems through simple rules and have become important tools for studying the spatio-temporal evolution of urban land use. However, the multiple and large-volume data layers, massive geospatial processing and complicated algorithms for automatic calibration in the urban CA models require a high level of computational capability. Unfortunately, the limited performance of sequential computation on a single computing unit (i.e. a central processing unit (CPU) or a graphics processing unit (GPU)) and the high cost of parallel design and programming make it difficult to establish a high-performance urban CA model. As a result of its powerful computational ability and scalability, the vectorization paradigm is becoming increasingly important and has received wide attention with regard to this kind of computational problem. This paper presents a high-performance CA model using vectorization and parallel computing technology for the computation-intensive and data-intensive geospatial processing in urban simulation. To transfer the original algorithm to a vectorized algorithm, we define the neighborhood set of the cell space and improve the operation paradigm of neighborhood computation, transition probability calculation, and cell state transition. The experiments undertaken in this study demonstrate that the vectorized algorithm can greatly reduce the computation time, especially in the environment of a vector programming language, and it is possible to parallelize the algorithm as the data volume increases. The execution time for the simulation of 5-m resolution and 3 × 3 neighborhood decreased from 38,220.43 s to 803.36 s with the vectorized algorithm and was further shortened to 476.54 s by dividing the domain into four computing units. The experiments also indicated that the computational efficiency of the vectorized algorithm is closely related to the neighborhood size and configuration, as well as the shape of the research domain. We can conclude that the combination of vectorization and parallel computing technology can provide scalable solutions to significantly improve the applicability of urban CA.     

An Extended Minimum Spanning Tree method for characterizing local urban patterns

Detailed and precise information on urban building patterns is essential for urban design, landscape evaluation, social analyses and urban environmental studies. Although a broad range of studies on the extraction of urban building patterns has been conducted, few studies simultaneously considered the spatial proximity relations and morphological properties at a building-unit level. In this study, we present a simple and novel graph-theoretic approach, Extended Minimum Spanning Tree (EMST), to describe and characterize local building patterns at building-unit level for large urban areas. Building objects with abundant two-dimensional and three-dimensional building characteristics are first delineated and derived from building footprint data and high-resolution Light Detection and Ranging data. Then, we propose the EMST approach to represent and describe both the spatial proximity relations and building characteristics. Furthermore, the EMST groups the building objects into different locally connected subsets by applying the Gestalt theory-based graph partition method. Based on the graph partition results, our EMST method then assesses the characteristics of each building to discover local patterns by employing the spatial autocorrelation analysis and homogeneity index. We apply the proposed method to the Staten Island in New York City and successfully extracted and differentiated various local building patterns in the study area. The results demonstrate that the EMST is an effective data structure for understanding local building patterns from both geographic and perceptual perspectives. Our method holds great potential for identifying local urban patterns and provides comprehensive and essential information for urban planning and management.     

试论经济中心型城市旅游的商务主导模式--以汕头市为例

城市旅游是当代旅游的主体,旅游职能也是当代城市的一个重要职能,提出考虑城市旅游发展的动力机制,必须分析影响产业发展的诸因素,以针对性地找到推动城市旅游发展的主动因素。经济中心型的城市旅游主体市场产生于以大流通为标志的广泛经济联系,以商贸为代表的大流通业是经济活力的核心,商务旅游是这一类城市旅游发展的主导。     

绿洲型城镇体系的空间组织格局--以甘肃省酒泉地区为例

绿洲城镇体系表现出明显的地域个性。就酒泉地区而言,疏密相间、 反差极大的窨密度组织,“团块－轴各”的空间网络组织及松散的空间相互作用是绿洲区域城镇体系空间组织的基本特征。     

广州都市农业旅游深度开发探讨

广州都市农业旅游呈现发展速度快、起点高、规模大和效益好等特点,但也存在缺乏规划、项目趋同、文化内涵不深、科技含量不高、特色不显、品牌不强、发展无序等问题。今后应当依托地方农业旅游资源特色和各种优越的发展条件,重点发展设施农业旅游、园艺农业旅游、休闲度假农业旅游、农业博物馆旅游4种类型,按北部山区、中部城区农业区、城郊田园、南部滨海4大空间区域合理布局,并通过政府主导、科学规划、突出特色、品牌带动、挖掘文化内涵、突显农业科技、培养专业人才、提高管理水平等策略和措施,推进都市农业旅游和城市化健康持续发展。