			Home About us Contact

Urban Core (urban + core)

Distribution by Scientific Domains

Engineering	50%

Selected Abstracts

Urban disaster recovery: a measurement framework and its application to the 1995 Kobe earthquake

DISASTERS, Issue 2 2010
Stephanie E. Chang
This paper provides a framework for assessing empirical patterns of urban disaster recovery through the use of statistical indicators. Such a framework is needed to develop systematic knowledge on how cities recover from disasters. The proposed framework addresses such issues as defining recovery, filtering out exogenous influences unrelated to the disaster, and making comparisons across disparate areas or events. It is applied to document how Kobe City, Japan, recovered from the catastrophic 1995 earthquake. Findings indicate that while aggregate population regained pre-disaster levels in ten years, population had shifted away from the older urban core. Economic recovery was characterised by a three to four year temporary boost in reconstruction activities, followed by settlement at a level some ten per cent below pre-disaster levels. Other long-term effects included substantial losses of port activity and sectoral shifts toward services and large businesses. These patterns of change and disparity generally accelerated pre-disaster trends. [source]

Small Built Works Project

JOURNAL OF ARCHITECTURAL EDUCATION, Issue 2 2006
Energizing the Public Realm in Buffalo
The Small Built Works Project is an experimental design-build program that uses the city as its laboratory. Work is primarily initiated by a senior undergraduate option studio offered in the Spring then augmented by a construction techniques elective open to both graduate and undergraduate students. Small Built Works has completed twenty-seven streetscape projects in Buffalo's urban core since 2001 under the management construct of six conceptual projects that have generated four approved building permits. These six projects are the Community Transformation Project (2001,2004), the Bus Shelter Project (2002,2005), the Gateway Project (Kiosk and Planter 2003,2005), the Totem Project (Mardi Gras float and the Connecticut Street Sculpture Park 2004,2006), the El Museo Gallery (2005,2006), and the Greening Collaborative Project (2006). In 2005, the Small Built Works Project won the National Council of Architecture Registration Boards Grand Prize for the creative integration of education and practice. This presentation is broken down into three aspects of the concept of 1:1 inherent in the work. [source]

Lagrangian simulation of wind transport in the urban environment

THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL METEOROLOGICAL SOCIETY, Issue 643 2009
Dr J. D. Wilson
Abstract Fluid element trajectories are computed in inhomogeneous urban-like flows, the needed wind statistics being furnished by a Reynolds-averaged Navier,Stokes (RANS) model that explicitly resolves obstacles. Performance is assessed against pre-existing measurements in flows ranging from the horizontally uniform atmospheric surface layer (no buildings), through regular obstacle arrays in a water-channel wall shear layer, to full-scale observations at street scale in an urban core (the Oklahoma City tracer dispersion experiment Joint Urban 2003). Agreement with observations is encouraging, e.g. for an Oklahoma City tracer trial in which sixteen detectors reported non-zero concentration, modelled concentration lies within a factor of two of the corresponding observation in nine cases (FAC2 = 56%). Although forward and backward simulations offer comparable fidelity relative to the data, interestingly they differ (by a margin far exceeding statistical uncertainty) wherever trajectories from source to receptor traverse regions of abrupt change in the Reynolds stress tensor. Copyright © 2009 Royal Meteorological Society [source]

Analysis of work trips made by taxi in canadian cities

JOURNAL OF ADVANCED TRANSPORTATION, Issue 1 2010
Lina Kattan
Abstract This paper presents two regression models for work trips made by taxi for the year 1996 and the year 2001, respectively for 25 Canadian cities. These regression models indicates the primary factors that influence work commuting by taxi. Two major factors are identified: the total number of work trips made by public transit and the total number of low-income households. The 2001 regression model indicates an increase of the value of the transit commuter's coefficient from its 1996 figure. These results highlight the important role that taxis play in: (i) decreasing the demand for parking especially in urban cores and (ii) serving the transportation disadvantaged population especially in outlying areas poorly served by public transport. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]