Resilience of Cities

Posted on August 5, 2020 by

 

Urban resilience has conventionally been defined as the “measurable ability of any urban system, with its inhabitants, to maintain continuity through all shocks and stresses, while positively adapting and transforming towards sustainability”.Therefore, a resilient city is one that assesses, plans, and acts to prepare for and respond to hazards – natural and human-made, sudden and slow-onset, expected and unexpected. Resilient Cities are better positioned to protect and enhance people’s lives, secure development gains, foster an investible environment, and drive positive change.

Climate Resilience is not about making development in a new way. It is about adding climate variability and change considerations to the planning and development framework to ensure long term sustainability and preparedness towards climate change

A resilience building process entails strengthening of:

  • City systems (Infrastructure, services, sectors) – drainage, water supply, transport, health facilities etc.
  • City planning (development norms, land-use planning)

How are climate-resilient cities different or better?

A resilient city is one that has developed capacities to help absorb future shocks and stresses, so as to maintain the same functions, structures, systems, and identity.

Climate-resilient cities have the capability to reduce and manage the negative impacts of climate change because these cities have planned and factored these changes in their development goals and planning by:

  • Utilizing climate information (of past and future) to identify climate stressors typical to their cities/regions.
  • Preparing and implementing strategies to reduce the vulnerability of population and city systems.
  • Adapting to change, preparing, and responding to disasters, mitigating GHG emissions.

Source(s): TERI

Wikipedia

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Unraveling Latent Aspects of Urban Expansion: Desertification Risk Reveals More — DESERTIFICATION

Posted on August 3, 2020 by

Egidi, G.; Zambon, I.; Tombolin, I.; Salvati, L.; Cividino, S.; Seifollahi-Aghmiuni, S.; Kalantari, Z. Unraveling Latent Aspects of Urban Expansion: Desertification Risk Reveals More. Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2020, 17, 4001. by Gianluca Egidi 1,Ilaria Zambon 1,Ilaria Tombolin 2,Luca Salvati 3,*,Sirio Cividino 4,Samaneh Seifollahi-Aghmiuni 5,* andZahra Kalantari 5 1Department of Agricultural and Forestry Sciences (DAFNE), University of Tuscia, 01100 Viterbo, Italy 2Department of Architecture […]

via Unraveling Latent Aspects of Urban Expansion: Desertification Risk Reveals More — DESERTIFICATION

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Changing Urban scenario in the Nineteenth Century in Ottoman Urban Space

Posted on July 31, 2020 by

In nineteenth-century, urban space in the Balkans underwent a drastic change. The urban population constantly expanded, with Christians especially increasing in number. Owing to energetic activity on the part of non-Muslim merchants and artisans, the urban economy as a whole flourished in many parts of the peninsula; and the very scenery of the cities was changed substantially as well. Alongside centuries-old mosques and hammams (public baths), the city centre was now furnished with European-style buildings, such as city halls, community houses, clock towers, schools and the elegant residences of wealthy merchants.

Traditional Balkan historiography has posited that the basic driving force underlying these changes was the emergence of a national bourgeoisie.1 Such a view regards the changes in the urban space as a prelude to national independence. The same period, however, was the time when reform-minded Ottoman bureaucrats attempted to introduce a European-style rule to wide-ranging fields of administration, with particular concern for the renovation of the urban space. In this chapter, There were significant effects of Ottoman municipal reform on the modernisation of Balkan urban space.

The once prosperous ancient urban civilization of the Balkans had almost died out by the time of the Ottoman conquest. The Ottomans brought with them a new flavour of urban culture from the Middle Eastern Islamic civilization. Towns were initially built for the Ottoman administrative authorities and for the army garrisons. Gradually, in many towns, there began to appear Islamic foundations that provided the infrastructure for the various economic activities of Muslim merchants and artisans, who quickly took over from local Christian mercantile classes, and dominated the urban space.

Source: The City in the Ottoman Empire: Migration and the Making of Urban Modernity

Edited by Ulrike Freitag, Malte Fuhrmann, Nora Lafi and Florian Riedler

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Why herd immunity to COVID-19 is reached much earlier than thought – update

Posted on July 28, 2020 by

Iowa Climate Science Education

Reposted from Dr. Judith Curry?s Climate Etc.

Posted on July 27, 2020 by niclewis

By Nic Lewis

I showed in my May 10th article Why herd immunity to COVID-19 is reached much earlier thanthought that inhomogeneity within a population in the susceptibility and in the social-connectivity related infectivity of individuals would reduce, in my view probably very substantially, the herd immunity threshold (HIT), beyond which an epidemic goes into retreat. I opined, based on my modelling, that the HIT probably lay somewhere between 7% and 24%, and that evidence from Stockholm County suggested it was around 17% there, and had been reached. Mounting evidence supports my reasoning.[1]

I particularly want to highlight an important paper published on July 24th ?Herd immunity thresholds estimated from unfolding epidemics? (Aguas et al.).[2] The author team is much the same as that of the earlier theoretical paper (Gomes et al.[3])…

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