Tianyu Su (p), Carole Voulgaris

Fabien Petit

Urban parks and green spaces provide critical access to nature for urban dwellers, leading to diverse benefits for physical, mental, and social well-being. Meanwhile, these health benefits of urban parks can vary substantially among demographical and social groups, such as genders. While understanding gender disparities in park visitation and health benefits is essential for designing more inclusive and gender-friendly parks, scholars can lack data and tools to generate relevant park-level information. The considerable time and labor cost of traditional observation methods limits them to scale, making it nearly impossible for city-wide empirical studies. In this study, we propose a novel measurement of parks’ relative attraction to female visitors-female visitor proportion-and quantify it using large-scale publicly available social media data. We then associate female visitor proportion with diverse park attributes through ordinary least squares (OLS) regressions. We find that parks with higher quality levels and the presence of child facilities are associated with higher park-wise female visitor proportion. On the other hand, park area, neighborhood population density, and neighborhood walkability, while associated with park visitation, do not have significant effects on female visitor proportion. This research contributes to the growing line of research that pays specific attention to disparities among user groups of urban public spaces and provides a new approach to data collection and analysis enabled by the advancements of urban big data and computation.

Priyanka Chakraborty (p), Kunal Kanti Maiti

Tianyu Su

Urban Heat Island (UHI) occurs when cities replace natural land cover with dense concentration of pavement, building and other surfaces that absorb and retain heat. Structures such as buildings, roads, and other infrastructures absorb and re-emit the sun’s heat more than natural landscape such as forests and water-bodies. The main objective of the study is to map the urbanization and urban heat island dynamics of the rapidly growing Cuttack-Bhubaneswar twin city of Odisha inn India. In the study, the relationship between urbanization, land use change and heat island Land Surface Temperature (LST) dynamics will be analyzed during 1990 to 2022 using earth observation datasets (e.g., Landsat, Sentinel 2) and machine learning algorithms (e.g., SVM). In order to address objective, the study attempted to employ quantitative approach (e.g., Correlation, Principal Component Analysis, Hotspot etc.) in exploring the relationship between the urbanization, temperature, and land use change with the several indices including Normalized Vegetation Index (NDVI), Normalized Difference Built-up Index (NDBI), Urban Thermal Field Variance Index (UTFVI), LST, UHI, land change metrics, rate of urbanization, land consumption rate etc. The study will reveal the hidden hotspot of unplanned development, land conservation and possible cause of undesirable land surface temperate dynamics. This study will be a promising guideline for the local authority, planner, and policymakers to develop a livable, healthy, and sustainable city to support Sustainable Development Goals (e.g., SDGs-11).

Dimitrios Karkanis (p), Stamatina Kaklamani, Marie-Noëlle Duquenne

Priyanka Chakraborty

Sustainable technological upgrading of the African countries’ production processes is considered a key strategy in order to bridge the inequality gap between developed and less developed countries. On the other hand, in order for several countries to utilize domestically the abundant natural and energy resources along their mainland. Technological diffusion in domestic production and local human resource training can achieve sound results in terms of economic development and, in some respects, even more beneficial than the Big Push model. The econometric model applied here aims to capture country-time fixed effects of urban development and external capital flows on technological development of 38 African states during the period 2008-2019. The quality of technological development is represented here by employing the Frontier technology readiness index (FTRI), for which data derives from the UNCTAD database. The empirical findings suggest that foreign capital investments enhance technological readiness, the latter being accompanied by low unemployment rates. However, it appears that good performance in terms of technological development occurs simultaneously with relatively poor performance in terms of urban infrastructure. The demographic pressures on urban infrastructure are expected to continue as long as rural population inflows into the urban agglomerations last, on the one hand, and on the other hand the persistently higher fertility patterns – compared to developed countries – in both rural and urban areas of African states. This perspective implies the need for the reorientation of foreign or national investment policies towards the expansion of urban residential stock, in order to sustain economic development.