An Environmental Health Typology as a Contributor to Sustainable Regional Urban Planning: The Case of the Metropolitan Region of São Paulo (MRSP)

Zhao

European Journal of Remote Sensing

et al. 2021

Environmental changes significantly affect urban ecological systems that are supported by green infrastructure. Therefore, assessment of the health of green infrastructure is virtually a quality assessment of the residential environment. For the sustainable and healthy management of urban environments, we need an effective system for estimating, diagnosing, and constructing assessment tools for green infrastructure. In this study, remote sensing technology was used to assess the green infrastructure of the Taipei metropolitan area (Taiwan) in a systematic way. To this end, we used the comprehensive index method of vigor, organization, and resilience (VOR) to classify a landscape index and to construct a healthy assessment index. We determined the primary index and weights using the entropy weighting method to establish the assessment model. We show that the core of the metropolitan area lacks green infrastructure with the lowest VOR index, thus indicating that this district requires governmentsupervised intervention and improvement. We prove that the increase in green infrastructure has a promoting effect on the impact of various health assessment evaluations, and it will gradually slow down and get stabilized after reaching a certain degree. The entropy weighting method can make the data model more stable and reliable, making the results more representative.

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Urban green infrastructure health assessment, based on landsat 8 remote sensing and entropy landscape metrics

Zhao

European Journal of Remote Sensing

et al. 2021

“…As cities are home to more than 60% of the world’s population [ 5 , 8 ], the growing understanding of these relationships in the way cities are planned and built and how this impacts health has evolved over the years [ 9 ]. Nowadays, sustainable cities have come to the forefront of environmental health (EH) priorities [ 10 ].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It is known that the collection of monitoring and surveillance data is a key task for many governmental organizations and industries charged with ensuring the wellbeing of the population [ 17 ]. Environmental interactions are difficult to quantify and evaluate, and to gather evidence-based information for decision-making is far from straightforward [ 10 , 18 ]. As it is essential to build evidence-based tools for the development of EH interventions, there must be a rationale on how to select the dimensions and indicators to assess EH [ 19 ].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Selecting Indicators to Monitor and Assess Environmental Health in a Portuguese Urban Setting: A Participatory Approach

Salgado

Vieira

Torres³

et al. 2020

IJERPH

Environmental health (EH) is influenced by complex interactions between health and the built and natural environments, there being little research on its specificities in urban settings. The use of suitable indicators to monitor and assess EH is fundamental in informing evidence-based interventions at the local level. A participatory approach to selecting indicators to inform the monitoring and assessment of EH in Lisbon is herein considered. Evidence derived from a systematic review of literature and data from Lisbon and Portuguese databases were analyzed by 12 Portuguese experts in individual semi-structured interviews. The interviews aimed at identifying relevant indicators and important emerging issues in the Lisbon urban setting. The outputs from the interviews were validated by a two-round Web-Delphi process in which panelists (22 experts) from different areas of expertise expressed their views regarding the relevance of the indicators for the analysis of EH in urban settings. Seventeen indicators were validated in the Web-Delphi process. High participation achieved along this process supports the view that this participatory approach was useful for validation. Results from the adopted participatory approach point out gaps in the collection of noise and mobility indicators data and raise emerging issues on housing indicators that require further research. The results also suggest the need for local action to improve indicators and tools in order to help the monitorization of EH in urban contexts. The adopted participatory approach can be replicated for other Portuguese and European urban settings.

A Local Line Optimization Model for Urban Rail Considering Passenger Flow Allocation

He,

Tang,

Chen

et al. 2024

Urban Rail Transit

It is important to strengthen the research on urban rail transit (URT) existing line renovation strategies. In this paper, we investigate the optimization of bottlenecks that are less attractive but have strong travel demand in existing URT networks. A URT local line optimization model is constructed. The maximum passenger flow and minimum project cost are chosen as the optimization objective for the benefit of both passengers and operators, and several actual constraints are considered in the proposed model, such as the station interval. In order to obtain higher computational efficiency and accuracy, a passenger flow allocation method is embedded in a genetic algorithm with elitist preservation. Taking the local network of the Beijing URT as a case study, the calculation results show that the designed algorithm can quickly and effectively obtain the optimal solution, and the generated local line scheme is able not only to meet the regional travel demand, but also to optimize the connection relationship of the existing URT network. This study can provide a reference method for increasing the attraction of URT and optimization of existing URT networks.