Building functional cities

Henderson, J. Vernon; Venables, Anthony J.; Regan, Tanner; Samsonov, Ilia

doi:10.1126/science.aaf7150

Cited by 55 publications

(42 citation statements)

References 5 publications

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“…Other SAR data, such as the German terraSAR-X and Italian COSMO-Skymed with X-band resolution up to 1 m are used to map buildings and other human-made structures (Rossi andGernhardt 2013, Zhu andBamler 2010). However, most of these studies have been limited in geographic scope to individual city or neighborhood case studies, such as downtown Houston USA (Yu et al 2010), urban districts in Qingdao, China (Zhang 2015), Nairobi, Kenya (Henderson et al 2016), and mega-cities in East Asia (Zhang et al 2018). Another source of data to measure urban structure come from scatterometers.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Building up or spreading out? Typologies of urban growth across 478 cities of 1 million+

Mahtta

Mahendra

Seto

2019

Environ. Res. Lett.

132

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Urban form in both two-(2D) and three-dimensions (3D) has significant impacts on local and global environments. Here we developed the largest global dataset characterizing 2D and 3D urban growth for 478 cities with populations of one million or larger. Using remote sensing data from the SeaWinds scatterometer for 2001 and 2009, and the Global Human Settlement Layer for 2000 and 2014, we applied a cluster analysis and found five urban growth typologies: stabilized, outward, mature upward, budding outward, upward and outward. Budding outward is the dominant typology worldwide, per the largest total area. Cities characterized by upward and outward growth are few in number and concentrated primarily in China and South Korea, where there has been a large increase in high-rises during the study period. With the exception of East Asia, cities within a geographic region exhibit remarkably similar patterns of urban growth. Our results show that every city exhibits multiple urban growth typologies concurrently. Thus, while it is possible to describe a city by its dominant urban growth typology, a more accurate and comprehensive characterization would include some combination of the five typologies. The implications of the results for urban sustainability are multifold. First, the results suggest that there is considerable opportunity to shape future patterns of urbanization, given that most of the new urban growth is nascent and low magnitude outward expansion. Second, the clear geographic patterns and wide variations in the physical form of urban growth, within country and city, suggest that markets, national and subnational policies, including the absence of, can shape how cities grow. Third, the presence of different typologies within each city suggests the need for differentiated strategies for different parts of a single city. Finally, the new urban forms revealed in this analysis provide a first glimpse into the carbon lock-in of recently constructed energy-demanding infrastructure of urban settlements.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Building up or spreading out? Typologies of urban growth across 478 cities of 1 million+

Mahtta

Mahendra

Seto

2019

Environ. Res. Lett.

132

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“…Despite the best attempts to order social interaction through urban planning, cities are hard to manage: their structure and function emerge from multiple https://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol23/iss1/art1/ interactions across scales, subsystems, and the dispersed geographies from which resources are drawn, while their boundaries are fluid and elusory (Boone et al 2014, Henderson et al 2016. In contrast to natural systems, urban systems heavily rely on the construction and maintenance of built, human-made, and often publicly funded infrastructure.…”

Section: Theoretical Backgroundmentioning

confidence: 99%

Adaptive pathways and coupled infrastructure: seven centuries of adaptation to water risk and the production of vulnerability in Mexico City

Tellman¹,

Bausch²,

Eakin³

et al. 2018

E&S

108

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. 2018. Adaptive pathways and coupled infrastructure: seven centuries of adaptation to water risk and the production of vulnerability in Mexico City. Ecology and Society 23 (1) ABSTRACT. Infrastructure development is central to the processes that abate and produce vulnerabilities in cities. Urban actors, especially those with power and authority, perceive and interpret vulnerability and decide when and how to adapt. When city managers use infrastructure to reduce urban risk in the complex, interconnected city system, new fragilities are introduced because of inherent system feedbacks. We trace the interactions between system dynamics and decision-making processes over 700 years of Mexico City's adaptations to water risks, focusing on the decision cycles of public infrastructure providers (in this case, government authorities). We bring together two lenses in examining this history: robustness-vulnerability trade-offs to explain the evolution of systemic risk dynamics mediated by feedback control, and adaptation pathways to focus on the evolution of decision cycles that motivate significant infrastructure investments. Drawing from historical accounts, archeological evidence, and original research on water, engineering, and cultural history, we examine adaptation pathways of humans settlement, water supply, and flood risk. Mexico City's history reveals insights that expand the theory of coupled infrastructure and lessons salient to contemporary urban risk management: (1) adapting by spatially externalizing risks can backfire: as cities expand, such risks become endogenous; (2) over time, adaptation pathways initiated to address specific risks may begin to intersect, creating complex trade-offs in risk management; and (3) city authorities are agents of risk production: even in the face of new exogenous risks (climate change), acknowledging and managing risks produced endogenously may prove more adaptive. History demonstrates that the very best solutions today may present critical challenges for tomorrow, and that collectively people have far more agency in and influence over the complex systems we live in than is often acknowledged.

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“…Duranton and Turner (2015) show that increases in density show little impact on driving, suggesting that when given the chance, inhabitants exploit the larger scale that infrastructure offers rather than minimize their travel time. A popular conjecture is that cities are more productive if they have conducive land-use patterns, especially patterns that allow high density (Henderson, Venables, Regan, & Samsonov, 2016).…”

Section: Spatial Structure and Agglomeration Economies In Citiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Concrete agglomeration benefits: do roads improve urban connections or just attract more people?

Gerritse

Arribas‐Bel

2017

Regional Studies

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© 2017 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group Cities with more roads are more productive. However, it can be unclear whether roads increase productivity directly, through improved intra-urban connections, or indirectly, by attracting more people. Our theory suggests that population responses may obscure the direct connectivity effects of roads. Indeed, conditional on population size, highway density does not affect productivity in a sample of US metropolitan areas. However, when exploiting exogenous variation in urban populations, we find that highway density improves agglomeration benefits: moving from the 50th to the 75th percentile of highway density increases the productivity-to-population elasticity from 2% to 4%. Moreover, travel-based measures outperform population size as a measure of agglomeration externalities

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Building functional cities

Cited by 55 publications

References 5 publications

Building up or spreading out? Typologies of urban growth across 478 cities of 1 million+

Building up or spreading out? Typologies of urban growth across 478 cities of 1 million+

Adaptive pathways and coupled infrastructure: seven centuries of adaptation to water risk and the production of vulnerability in Mexico City

Concrete agglomeration benefits: do roads improve urban connections or just attract more people?

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