Department of City and Regional Planning

The purpose of this study is to define the geographic boundaries of commercial areas by creating a consistent definition, combining various commercial area types, including downtowns, retail centres, financial districts, and other employment subcentres. Our research involved the collection of office, retail and job density data from 69 metropolitan regions across USA and Canada. Using this data, we conducted an unsupervised image segmentation model and clustering methods to identify distinctive commercial geographic boundaries. As a result, we identified 23,751 commercial areas, providing a detailed perspective on the commercial landscape of metropolitan areas in the USA and Canada. In addition, the generated boundaries were successfully validated through comparison with previously established commerce-related boundaries. The output of this study has implications for urban and regional planning and economic development, delivering valuable insights into the overall commercial geography in the region. The commercial boundary and used codes are freely available on the School of Cities Github, and users can reuse, reproduce and modify the boundaries.

Rising temperatures have profound impacts on the well-being of urban residents. However, factors explaining the temporal variability of urban thermal environment, or urban warming, remain insufficiently understood, especially in the Global South. Addressing this gap, we studied the relationship between city-level economic conditions and urban warming, and how urban green space mediated this relationship, focusing on 359 major Latin American cities between 2001 and 2022. While effect sizes varied by economic and temperature measures used, we found that better economic conditions were associated with lower baseline greenness in 2011, which contributed to faster warming. There was modest evidence that this faster warming associated with lower baseline greenness and improved economic conditions was partially offset by cooling from recent greening (2001-2022) in cities of better economic conditions. This offset was more evident in arid cities. Together, these findings provide insights into the urban warming mechanism manifested through the effect of economic conditions on urban green space, for Latin American cities and other high-density cities transforming in a similar context.

Green vegetation may protect against heat-related death by improving thermal comfort. Few studies have investigated associations of green vegetation with heat-related mortality in Latin America or whether associations are modified by the spatial configuration of green vegetation. We used data from 323 Latin American cities and meta-regression models to estimate associations between city-level greenness, quantified using population-weighted normalized difference vegetation index values and modeled as three-level categorical terms, and excess deaths from heat (heat excess death fractions [heat EDFs]). Models were adjusted for city-level fine particulate matter concentration (PM2.5), social environment, and country group. In addition to estimating overall associations, we derived estimates of association stratified by green space clustering by including an interaction term between a green space clustering measure (dichotomized at the median of the distribution) and the three-level greenness variable. We stratified analyses by climate zone (arid vs. temperate and tropical combined). Among the 79 arid climate zone cities, those with moderate and high greenness levels had modestly lower heat EDFs compared to cities with the lowest greenness, although protective associations were more substantial in cities with moderate versus high greenness levels and confidence intervals (CI) crossed the null (Beta: -0.41, 95% CI: -1.06, 0.25; Beta -0.23, 95% CI: -0.95, 0.49, respectively). In 244 non-arid climate zone cities, associations were approximately null. We did not observe evidence of effect modification by green space clustering. Our results suggest that greenness may offer modest protection against heat-related mortality in arid climate zone Latin American cities.

The increase of wildfire disasters globally has highlighted the need to understand and mitigate human vulnerability to wildfire. In response, there has been a substantial uptick in efforts to characterize and quantify wildfire vulnerability. Such efforts have largely focused on quantifying potential wildfire exposure and frequently overlooked the individual and community vulnerability to wildfire. Here, we review the emergent literature on social vulnerability to wildfire by synthesizing factors related to exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity that contribute to a population's or community's overall vulnerability to wildfires. We identify how those factors subsequently affect an individual's or community's agency to enact change, and highlight that many of the current paradigms for reducing wildfire vulnerability fail to acknowledge and address the importance of inequalities that create differential vulnerability. We suggest that paying attention to the systems and conditions that give rise to such vulnerability can ameliorate these shortcomings by centering solutions which address adaptation equity rather than landscape outcomes.

Drinking water and sanitation services in high-income countries typically bring widespread health and other benefits to their populations. Yet gaps in this essential public health infrastructure persist, driven by structural inequalities, racism, poverty, housing instability, migration, climate change, insufficient continued investment, and poor planning. Although the burden of disease attributable to these gaps is mostly uncharacterised in high-income settings, case studies from marginalised communities and data from targeted studies of microbial and chemical contaminants underscore the need for continued investment to realise the human rights to water and sanitation. Delivering on these rights requires: applying a systems approach to the problems; accessible, disaggregated data; new approaches to service provision that centre communities and groups without consistent access; and actionable policies that recognise safe water and sanitation provision as an obligation of government, regardless of factors such as race, ethnicity, gender, ability to pay, citizenship status, disability, land tenure, or property rights.

The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated three trends that were already transforming economic development theory and practice. A backlash to economic restructuring and inequality, driven by globalization and technology, is now manifesting in reshoring and union movements. The resurgence of small and midsized cities, originally driven by increasing housing costs in coastal cities, has been reinforced by a rise in remote work. The uncertainty of today's complex economy is exacerbating long-term challenges of tracking economic change, making “shoot anything that flies” more important than ever. These trends highlight the need to focus economic development on building and supporting the workforce.

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We investigated the association of urban landscape profiles with health and environmental outcomes, and whether those profiles are linked to environmental and health co-benefits. In this ecological study, we used data from 208 cities in 8 Latin American countries of the SALud URBana en América Latina (SALURBAL) project. Four urban landscape profiles were defined with metrics for the fragmentation, isolation, and shape of patches (contiguous area of urban development). Four environmental measures (lack of greenness, PM2.5, NO2, and carbon footprint), two cause-specific mortality rates (non-communicable diseases and unintentional injury mortality), and prevalence of three risk factors (hypertension, diabetes, and obesity) for adults were used as the main outcomes. We used linear regression models to evaluate the association of urban landscape profiles with environmental and health outcomes. In addition, we used finite mixture modeling to create co-benefit classes. Cities with the scattered pixels profile (low fragmentation, high isolation, and compact shaped patches) were most likely to have positive co-benefits. Profiles described as proximate stones (moderate fragmentation, moderate isolation, and irregular shape) and proximate inkblots (moderate-high fragmentation, moderate isolation, and complex shape) were most likely to have negative co-benefits. The contiguous large inkblots profile (low fragmentation, low isolation, and complex shape) was most likely to have mixed benefits.