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Urban growth strategy in Greater Sydney leads to unintended social and environmental challenges
Cities have advanced in terms of economic and social status over the past five decades, improving the living conditions of hundreds of millions of people. However, population growth and urban expansion have put pressure on social and environmental conditions. This study examines urban policymakers’ perceptions about causal relationships in the urban system as revealed in urban planning reports. Here we analyzed 500 pages from published urban plans of Greater Sydney between 1968 and 2018 and coded the text into causal maps. The findings show that policymakers adopted a dominant urban development strategy over the past 50 years to pursue economic and public infrastructure growth. Over time, this growth strategy resulted in a number of social and environmental challenges that negatively impacted societal well-being. Although policymakers eventually recognized the seriousness of social and environmental challenges, they never attempted to fundamentally change the dominant growth strategy. Instead, policymakers sought to address the challenges (that is, symptoms) by responding to each issue piecemeal.
The decreasing housing utilization efficiency in China’s cities
‘Ghost cities’ are a well-known phenomenon of (almost) complete vacancy of urban living space in China. Underutilization of urban living space, however, is far more common than complete vacancy. Here we propose the concept of housing utilization efficiency (HUE) and present the following findings: (1) the overall HUE in China’s highly urbanized areas decreased from 84% in 2010 to 78% in 2020, (2) the HUE in central, old urban areas was generally lower than that in the outer layers of urban areas and declined more from 2010 to 2020 and (3) four development types are found to represent different patterns of urban population movement, urban housing growth and HUE change at the intraurban level. These findings provide comprehensive insight into the discrepancies between urban housing supply and demand in China and highlight their connections to the country’s particular urbanization characteristics and policies, which are crucial for future housing development and planning.
Socio-economic factors constrain climate change adaptation in a tropical export crop
Climate change will alter the geographical locations most suited for crop production, but adaptation to these new conditions may be constrained by edaphic and socio-economic factors. Here we investigate climate change adaptation constraints in banana, a major export crop of Latin America and the Caribbean. We derived optimal climatic, edaphic and socio-economic conditions from the distribution of intensive banana production across Latin America and the Caribbean, identified using remote sensing imagery. We found that intensive banana production is constrained to low-lying, warm aseasonal regions with slightly acidic soils, but is less constrained by precipitation, as irrigation facilitates production in drier regions. Production is limited to areas close to shipping ports and with high human population density. Rising temperatures, coupled with requirements for labour and export infrastructure, will result in a 60% reduction in the area suitable for export banana production, along with yield declines in most current banana producing areas.
Toward change in the uneven geographies of urban knowledge production
More than four-fifths of the global urban population live in the Global South and East. Most urban theories, however, originate in the Global North. Building on recent efforts to address this mismatch, this paper examines the geographies of urban knowledge production. It analyzes the institutional affiliations of contributions in 25 leading Anglophone journals (n = 14,582) and nine urban handbooks (n = 252). We show that 42% of the journal articles and 17% of the handbook chapters were authored outside the Global North. However, only 15% of the editor positions (handbooks: 10%) were held by scholars based outside the Global North. This indicates that Global Northern institutions still dominate knowledge gatekeeping, whereas authors are more diverse. Additionally, more empirical journals and those with fewer Northern board members tend to publish more non-Northern authors. Our findings underscore the need for greater epistemic diversity in gatekeeping positions and broader understandings of what counts as theory to better incorporate diverse urban knowledge.
Medical ontology learning framework to investigate daytime impairment in insomnia disorder and treatment effects
Specificity challenges frequently arise in medical ontology used for the representation of real-world data, particularly in defining mental health disorders within widely used classification systems such as the International Classification of Diseases (ICD). This study aims to address these challenges by introducing the Disease-Specific Medical Ontology Learning (DiSMOL) framework, designed to generate precise disease representations from clinical physician notes, with a focus on daytime impairment in insomnia disorder.
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