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Urban systems are managed using complex textual documentation that need coding and analysis to set requirements and evaluate built environment performance. This paper contributes to the study of applying large-language models (LLM) to…
An urban planner might design the spatial layout of transportation amenities so as to improve accessibility for underserved communities -- a fairness objective. However, implementing such a design might trigger processes of neighborhood…
Given the importance of urban sustainability and resilience to the future of our planet, there is a need to better understand the interconnectedness between the social, economic, environmental, and governance outcomes that underline these…
Participatory urban planning is the mainstream of modern urban planning and involves the active engagement of different stakeholders. However, the traditional participatory paradigm encounters challenges in time and manpower, while the…
Despite growing evidence that neighborhoods play a critical role in shaping economic mobility and well-being, effective policies to address neighborhood disadvantage remain elusive. This study evaluates the impact of the Promise Zone…
While informal settlements lack focused development and are highly dynamic, the quality of spatial data for these places may be uncertain. This study evaluates the quality and biases of AI-generated Open Building Datasets (OBDs) generated…
Cities today generate enormous streams of data from sensors, cameras, and connected infrastructure. While this information offers unprecedented opportunities to improve urban life, most existing systems struggle with scale, latency, and…
Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have become commonplace in addressing major challenges in computer vision. Researchers are not only coming up with new CNN architectures but are also researching different techniques to improve the…
We study how urban quality evolves as a result of carbon dioxide emissions as urban agglomerations grow. We employ a bottom-up approach combining two unprecedented microscopic data on population and carbon dioxide emissions in the…
In the past decade, cities have experienced rapid growth, expansion, and changes in their community structure. Many aspects of critical urban infrastructure are closely coupled with the human communities that they serve. Urban communities…
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to describe, evaluate and interpret places, yet it remains unclear whether they do so from a culturally neutral standpoint. Here we test urban perception in frontier LLMs using a balanced…
Urbanization has been the dominant demographic trend in the entire world, during the last half century. Rural to urban migration, international migration, and the re-classification or expansion of existing city boundaries have been among…
Large language models (LLMs) like GPT-3 and BERT have revolutionized natural language processing (NLP), yet their environmental costs remain dangerously overlooked. This article critiques the sustainability of LLMs, quantifying their carbon…
We revisit the longstanding question of how physical structures in urban landscapes influence crime. Leveraging machine learning-based matching techniques to control for demographic composition, we estimate the effects of several types of…
A longstanding puzzle in urban science is whether there's an intrinsic match between human populations and the mass of their built environments. Previous findings have revealed various urban properties scaling nonlinearly with population,…
Sustainable urban design or planning is not a LEGO-like assembly of prefabricated elements, but an embryo-like growth with persistent differentiation and adaptation towards a coherent whole. The coherent whole has a striking character -…
In this study, we propose using a neural embedding model-graph neural network (GNN)- that leverages the heterogeneous features of urban areas and their interactions captured by human mobility network to obtain vector representations of…
We address the problem of visual place recognition with perceptual changes. The fundamental problem of visual place recognition is generating robust image representations which are not only insensitive to environmental changes but also…
Large-scale natural language understanding (NLU) systems have made impressive progress: they can be applied flexibly across a variety of tasks, and employ minimal structural assumptions. However, extensive empirical research has shown this…
The nonlinear synergy between global warming and urbanization is amplifying extreme climate risks in cities worldwide. While observations and simulations confirm these compounding effects, two fundamental bottlenecks impede predictive…