Search results for "Urban Studies"
showing 10 items of 240 documents
Empty Urbanism: the bursting of the Spanish housing bubble
2015
The depth of the Spanish housing crisis manifests itself in the collapse of construction activity and in the amount of housing and land stocks. The geography of the crisis shows its widespread nature, and the intensity of the previous bubble explains spatial differences. Resulting from this collapse are some problematic areas of 'empty urbanism'. An enormous land bubble, emerging from the peculiar Spanish urban development model, was a key factor in the impacts - caused by the crisis - on the territory and land-use plans. The crisis has demonstrated the unsustainability of this and the urgency of change in the existing land-use plans.
Mood, Physical, and Mental Load in Spanish Teachers of Urban School: The Role of Intensive or Split Shift
2019
Psychosocial risk factors threaten the health of teachers, who are considered to be a group at high risk of suffering burnout syndrome. The objective of this study is to measure the levels of work satisfaction, burnout, engagement, emotional stability, fatigue, and mood of teachers, depending on their workday: intensive or split shift. A nonexperimental, descriptive–comparative research design is proposed for this study. A follow-up questionnaire has been developed to assess a teacher’s levels of physical fatigue, mental fatigue, and mood at the beginning and end of the 9 days of work analyzed. The study sample consisted of 125 teachers (102 women and 23 men) with a mean age of 38.67 years…
Surface to boundary layer coupling in the urban area of Lisbon comparing different urban canopy models in WRF
2019
Abstract This work presents a sensitivity study to evaluate different Urban Canopy Models (UCM) existing within the Weather Research and Forecasting Model (WRF) in the urban area of Lisbon, Portugal. Several hind-cast simulations were carried out for a selected period in July 2010, in which synoptic conditions favoured urban heat island formation. We aim to gain knowledge on the feedback of modified urban canopy representation in WRF on local scale meteorology and the boundary-layer dynamics over the urban area, by comparing a single layer urban canopy model (SLUCM) and a more sophisticated multi-layer building effect parametrisation (BEP). We find significant differences in the characteris…
Il gesto comparativo negli studi urbani critici
2021
Non tutte le città sono uguali tra loro, ma i processi che si verificano al loro interno sono assimilabili e analizzabili grazie a modelli più o meno universali. O almeno, per molti anni così si è sostenuto: più anni di quanti forse pensiamo, se consideriamo che ancor oggi diversi studiosi di fatti urbani sostengono posizioni universalistiche. Il confronto tra due testi, un classico di Ernest W. Burgess e una lettura più recente e alternativa di Jennifer Robinson, ha come scopo la messa in discussione di questo tema all’interno degli studi urbani critici. Not all cities are the same, but the processes that occur within them can be assimilated and analyzed thanks to more or less universal mo…
Passenger Car Equivalents for Heavy Vehicles at Roundabouts. a Synthesis Review
2019
Passenger Car Equivalents (PCEs in the following) are used to transform a mixed fleet of vehicles into a fleet of equivalent passenger cars and to analyze capacity and level-of-service of roads and intersections. Most roundabouts guidelines propose constant values for PCEs but a single PCE value can result improper under heterogeneous traffic conditions. PCEs should be vary with traffic and road conditions and consequently PCEs applied to undersaturated traffic conditions can overestimate the heavy vehicle effect or be not sensitive to the traffic level or characteristics of heavy vehicles. Compared to other at-grade intersections, the interaction between the operational performances of the…
Smart city. Four approaches to the concept of understanding
2020
The paper analyzes the rhetoric of the smart city (SC) concept in order to recognize, categorize, and describe different perspectives of understanding the notion. Four approaches to the SC concept were isolated: three affirmative, and one rejecting. The approaches present a different understanding of the SC and indicate different elements creating urban ‘smartness.’ Despite differences, there is one common goal in every affirmative approach: to improve the quality of urban life. It is achieved through activities covering five dimensions distinguished within affirmative approaches. Together they can serve, i.e.,as a framework for SC case study analyses.
Estimation of Passenger Car Equivalents for Two-Lane and Turbo Roundabouts Using AIMSUN
2020
The paper addresses issues related to Passenger Car Equivalents (PCEs) at roundabouts. Compared to other road units, the curvilinear elements of roundabout geometric design may impose greater constraints on vehicular trajectories and have a significant effect on the swept envelope of heavy vehicles. Specifically, the aim of the paper is to present the methodological approach which used traffic microsimulation to estimate PCEs. Focus is made on a case study which considered the conversion of a two-lane roundabout into a basic turbo roundabout with comparable size. Empirical capacity functions for both roundabouts were derived as target values to which simulated capacities by lane were compar…
Perspectives of operation of the Tajo-Segura Transfer (Spain): new rules of operation and the impulse of the desalination as replacement resource
2018
El Trasvase Tajo-Segura se ha convertido desde su inauguración en 1979 en una de las infraestructuras hidráulicas que más tensiones interterritoriales ha originado en España. A ello se une su valor estratégico para el desarrollo de las provincias del sureste peninsular, donde atiende consumos agrícolas y urbano-turísticos con grandes implicaciones sociales y económicas. El objetivo de este trabajo es analizar las causas y las consecuencias del funcionamiento del Trasvase Tajo-Segura con la reciente modificación de sus normas de explotación (límite de no trasvase cuando en los embalses de cabecera almacenen menos de 400 hm3) y el impulso de la desalinización en la cuenca receptora como susti…
Quality of life ranking of Spanish cities: A non-compensatory approach
2021
Abstract Urban areas are hubs of economic activity, but also consumption centers where a high quality of life may attract human capital and increase prospects of economic growth and well-being. We rank 73 Spanish cities on the basis of 35 individual indicators covering three basic facets of quality of life: socio-economic performance, general livability conditions, and residents' health status. We reject the conventional approach of compensability among different quality of life dimensions in favor of a Condorcet-inspired non-compensability approach. We obtain three partial composite indicators, one for each of the aforementioned dimensions, and a global indicator that synthesizes the three…
Port–City Relationship and the Environment: Literature Survey and Methodological Approach for Project Appraisal in Presence of Environmental External…
2015
AbstractIn times of increasing environmental awareness, the port–city relationship has gained new meaning because ports have been seen as the origin of both negative and positive externalities affecting public welfare. While the former are the result of port expansion, the latter are the result of transforming obsolete port areas into recreational facilities. Therefore, to support effective policymaking, this paper considers the following question: What is the scope of economic valuation of these externalities in the context of port-project appraisal? Considering their nonmarket nature, which makes economic valuation more difficult, a contingent valuation method is introduced as an economic…