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The combination between innovative topics and emerging technologies lets researchers define new processes and models. New needs regard the definition of modular and scalable approaches, with society and environment in mind. An important…
Cities are different around the world, but does this fact have any relation to culture? The idea that urban form embodies idiosyncrasies related to cultural identities captures the imagination of many in urban studies, but it is an…
The visual dimension of cities has been a fundamental subject in urban studies, since the pioneering work of scholars such as Sitte, Lynch, Arnheim, and Jacobs. Several decades later, big data and artificial intelligence (AI) are…
Complex systems have become a popular lens for analyzing cities and complexity theory has many implications for urban performance and resilience. This paper develops a typology of measures and indicators for assessing the physical…
This study assesses the performance of a global Local Climate Zone (LCZ) product. We examined the built-type classes of LCZs in three major metropolitan areas within the U.S. A reference LCZ was constructed using a simple rule-based method…
We attempt to take a comprehensive look at the challenges of representing the spatio-temporal structures and dynamic processes defining a city's overall characteristics. For the task of urban planning and urban operation, we take the stance…
Cities play a pivotal role in human development and sustainability, yet studying them presents significant challenges due to the vast scale and complexity of spatial-temporal data. One such challenge is the need to uncover universal urban…
Urbanization enables economic growth but also harms the environment through degradation. Traditional methods of detecting environmental issues have proven inefficient. Machine learning has emerged as a promising tool for tracking…
We have assembled CO2 emission figures from collections of urban GHG emission estimates published in peer reviewed journals or reports from research institutes and non-governmental organizations. Analyzing the scaling with population size…
Understanding the multifaceted effects of climate change across diverse geographic locations is crucial for timely adaptation and the development of effective mitigation strategies. As the volume of scientific literature on this topic…
The growing homelessness crisis in the U.S. presents complex social, economic, and public health challenges, straining shelters, healthcare, and social services while limiting effective interventions. Traditional assessment methods struggle…
The city has proven to be the most successful form of human agglomeration and provides wide employment opportunities for its dwellers. As advances in robotics and artificial intelligence revive concerns about the impact of automation on…
Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly exhibit strong reasoning abilities, often attributed to their capacity to generate chain-of-thought-style intermediate reasoning. Recent work suggests that exposure to code can further enhance these…
Regulations govern many aspects of citizens' daily lives. Governments and businesses routinely automate these in the form of coded rules (e.g., to check a citizen's eligibility for specific benefits). However, the path to automation is long…
Over the past decades, improvements in data collection hardware coupled with novel artificial intelligence algorithms have made it possible for researchers to understand urban environments at an unprecedented scale. From local interactions…
Participatory urban planning is the mainstream of modern urban planning that involves the active engagement of residents. However, the traditional participatory paradigm requires experienced planning experts and is often time-consuming and…
Cities are physical manifestations of our competitive and cooperative behaviours. The tension between these two forces generates dynamic equilibriums whose material expressions are cities and their evolutions. In a Darwinian cooperative…
Rapid global urbanization is a double-edged sword, heralding promises of economical prosperity and public health while also posing unique environmental and humanitarian challenges. Smart and connected communities (S&CCs) apply data-centric…
Barriers in cities, such as administrative boundaries, natural obstacles, railways or major roads are thought to induce segregation. However, the empirical knowledge about this phenomenon is limited. Here, we present a network science…
We present a novel framework for automatically evaluating building conditions nationwide in the United States by leveraging large language models (LLMs) and Google Street View (GSV) imagery. By fine-tuning Gemma 3 27B on a modest…