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Despite city authorities in Bangladesh being concerned about urban sustainability, they often face difficulties in addressing predominant urban challenges threatening urban sustainability, due to limited relevant literature. To reduce this gap, this study aims to address the predominant urban challenges and assess their severity levels in four city corporations of Bangladesh, e.g. Rajshahi, Sylhet, Barishal, and Gazipur.

Using a mixed-method approach, this study rigorously analyzed field-level data obtained from 1,200 residents across selected cities using diverse statistical techniques. The quantitative analysis included descriptive analysis, exploratory factor analysis, and chi-square tests, whereas qualitative insights were derived through thematic analysis.

The study uncovered nine predominant urban challenges under two crucial factors “Feeble Urban Management” and “Illicit Activities” that collectively explain 62.20% variance. “Feeble Urban Management” explains 44.17% variance, whereas “Illicit Activities” accounts for 18.13%. Within these challenges, uncontrolled urban sprawl, inadequate disaster management, congested roads, and shabby drainage and waste management pose significant threats to urban sustainability. Illicit activities, manifested by encroachment on water sources, grabbing roadside, destruction of natural properties, and activities undermining social security, compound the urban sustainability issue. Severity analysis reveals Sylhet (54.5%), Rajshahi (46.4%), and Barishal (31.2%) as highly impacted, whereas Gazipur exhibits moderate severity (66.7%).

The findings of this study reveal intrinsic insights into urban challenges in Bangladesh that will provide valuable guidance to city authorities, equipping them to implement integrated and effective initiatives and programs that overcome these predominant urban challenges, with a specific focus on Rajshahi, Sylhet, and Barishal city corporations.

In an increasingly interconnected world, transportation infrastructure has emerged as a critical determinant of economic growth and global competitiveness. High-speed rail (HSR), characterized by its exceptional speed and efficiency, has garnered widespread attention as a transformative mode of transportation that transcends borders and fosters economic development. The Kuala Lumpur – Singapore (KL-SG) HSR project stands as a prominent exemplar of this paradigm, symbolizing the potential of HSR to serve as a catalyst for national economic advancement.

This paper is prepared to provide an insight into the benefits and advantages of HSR based on proven case studies and references from global HSRs, including China, Spain, France and Japan.

The findings that have been obtained focus on enhanced connectivity and accessibility, attracting foreign direct investment, revitalizing regional economies, urban development and city regeneration, boosting tourism and cultural exchange, human capital development, regional integration and environmental and sustainability benefits.

The KL-SG HSR, linking Kuala Lumpur and Singapore, epitomizes the potential for HSR to be a transformative agent in the realm of economic development. This project encapsulates the aspirations of two dynamic Southeast Asian economies, united in their pursuit of sustainable growth, enhanced connectivity and global competitiveness. By scrutinizing the KL-SG High-Speed Rail through the lens of economic benchmarking, a deeper understanding emerges of how such projects can drive progress in areas such as cross-border trade, tourism, urban development and technological innovation.

Integrating and advancing social sustainability is foundational to achieving the urban sustainable development goals. Given the rapid transformation of cities in the Mediterranean region, this study sought to assess residents' evaluation of social sustainability in two socio-spatially diverse neighbourhoods of metropolitan Istanbul.

A questionnaire survey, adapted from an empirically well-tested and robust social sustainability framework, was used to collect data from 197 residents from Balat and Rasimpasa neighbourhoods in Metropolitan Istanbul. The study then employed quantitative analytical techniques such as independent sample t-tests and Pearson correlation to analyse the sample data.

In both neighbourhoods, accessibility and participation were ranked the highest and lowest dimensions of social sustainability, respectively. However, the t-test analysis revealed a statistically significant difference between the two neighbourhoods regarding social networking and interaction, safety and security and participation. The differences align with emerging studies on urban social sustainability in the Mediterranean and European cities that when considered from urban spatial contexts, significant differences emerge from a social network and safety perspective.

Our study invites urban planners and policy makers attention to and emphasise on lowly evaluated social sustainability dimensions such as participation in their efforts to promote sustainable urban development at the neighbourhood level. We reason that opening the decision-making process to include diverse voices and experiences of residents through participatory workshops might offer opportunities for context-specific, citizen-led urban planning and design strategies that are socially sustainable.

Previous studies have not fully accounted for how various socio-spatial contexts at the neighbourhood level shape differential evaluation of social sustainability. This paper extends the emerging work on urban social sustainability by situating residents’ evaluation of social sustainability indicators across two unique neighbourhoods with gridded and organic spatial characteristics in Istanbul. This paper is an important addition to ongoing work on how spatial organisation of neighbourhoods can influence experiences of social sustainability from an urban planning and design perspective.

The analytical framework proposed in this study aims to link the capital portfolio approach to sustaining human well-being, 2015 sustainable development goals and development action ARC-D concepts. Nepal case study is a “tribrid” power generation system that combines distributed solar, hydro and wind power generation capacities for the resilience of a community of around 500 people in a remote village with a total installed capacity of 28 kW. The second case study is about the solarization of 900 health centres in Chhattisgarh, India, with off-grid solar PV with a cumulative capacity of 3 MW.

Critical infrastructure at the community scale needs to be resilient to maintain community-level functionality in the face of adverse impacts. The present study provides two case study sites from Nepal and India to demonstrate various elements of resilience building for critical infrastructures, especially for the energy sector.

Granular technology and distributed generation in Nepal and India can act as critical infrastructure in providing on-demand electricity service to enhance community-level resilience along with future opportunities of scale up.

The analytical framework for evaluating community-scale resilience through critical infrastructure design and application of the framework using evidence based on case studies are the original contributions.

The New Zealand city of Christchurch provides a leading example of post-disaster rebuilding in a Central Business District (CBD) area. In its rebuilding programme, the city has given emphasis to the greening of hospitality and traditional retail space through a combination of development of shared pedestrian spaces (with traffic exclusion and calming) and the integration of greening within the streetscape design. This paper aims to assess whether the development of greened pedestrian areas leads to higher retail spending and, thus, retail rental rates.

This study uses pedestrian movement data collected from several CBD locations, as well as spending data on retail and hospitality, to assess relationships between pedestrian movements and spending. This study explores retail spending in greened pedestrian shared spaces, and explores how this differs from retail spending in traditional street areas within the Christchurch CBD.

Spending patterns are location-related, depending on the characteristics of pedestrian space in the selected area. Greened shared pedestrian areas have the highest spending per measured pedestrian for retail and hospitality, whereas traditional street areas have lower spending for retail and hospitality per measured pedestrian, demonstrating the benefits in redeveloped central city areas.

The scope of smart data continues to develop as a research area within urban studies to develop an open and connected city. This research demonstrates the use of innovative technologies for data collection, use and sharing. The results support commercial benefits of greening and pedestrianisation of retail and hospitality areas for CBDs and providing an example for other cities to follow.

The present study is performed to identify the propagation mechanism of the ripple effect as well as examine the simultaneous impact of risks on supply chain (SC) performance.

A theoretical framework with many hypotheses regarding the relationships between SC risk types and performance is established. The data are collected from a large-scale survey supported by a project of the Japanese government to promote sustainable socioeconomic development for the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) region, with the participation of 207 firms. Structural equation modeling (SEM) is used to test the hypotheses of the theoretical framework.

It is indicated that human-made risk causes operational risk, while natural risk causes both supply risk and operational risk. Furthermore, the impacts of human-made risk and natural risk on performance are amplified through operational risk.

This study is one of the first attempts that identifies the propagation mechanism of the ripple effect and examines the simultaneous impact of risks on performance in construction SCs.

Although many studies on risk management in construction SCs have been carried out, they mainly focus on risk identification or quantification of risk impact. It is observed that research on the ripple effect of disruptions has been very scarce.

Recycling is associated with positive social and environmental impact, but previous studies have overlooked the cost of recycling operations. Based on the dynamic capability view, the purpose of this study was to identify and evaluate risk factors and resilience strategies within the recycling industry, prioritize these factors and identify the optimal combination of resilience strategies and risk factors to improve market performance.

The research questions were addressed in three subsequent studies. In Study 1, qualitative interviews were conducted to identify risk factors and strategies to mitigate those risks. In Study 2, quality function deployment methodologies were implemented via case studies derived from three different companies. Based on the results of Studies 1 and 2, in addition to the use of fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis, Study 3 aimed to determine the optimal combination of risk factors and strategies impacting market performance.

The results across the three studies revealed a number of risk factors as well as which risk factors and resilience strategies have the greatest impact on market performance. Specifically, it was found that higher levels of readiness, response and recovery strategies lead to greater market performance, whereas weak readiness, response and recovery strategies, along with low societal, environmental and health and safety risk factors, significantly inhibit performance.

This research extends current understandings of market performance in relation to recycling industry management and offers insight for decision-makers toward combating significant risk factors in business-to-business settings.

Implementing the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) unarguably demands huge financial investments. However, the United Nations has acknowledged the huge financial gap militating against the implementation of the SDGs worldwide, leading experts to question the possibility of complete implementation of the goals by their terminal dateline of 2030. While the bulk of the finance currently outlaid on the SDGs comes from traditional sources including foreign direct investments (FDIs), there is the need to focus more attention on developing and exploiting impact investments that are more suitable for financing development programmes and projects. In this chapter, the SDG implementation profiles of the 12 Arab West Asia countries concerning the five most targeted SDGs were evaluated and sustainable finance issues were discussed. Secondary data were retrieved from World Bank's DataBank. The data were descriptively analyzed. Based on the profiles generated, debt relief is put forward as a possible impact investment mechanism suitable for funding the SDGs. Specifically, this chapter recommends that outright cancellation of debts based on the debt-for-SGD swap could serve as some of the impact investments needed to boost the global drive for a developed, peaceful, and just world.

Decentralised administrative arrangements and the active function of local government organisations are essential to tackle crisis effectively. Using Bangladesh as a case study, this paper examines the central and local government administrative arrangements during COVID-19 pandemic.

This study applies qualitative content analysis and interviews to explore the local government’s role in Bangladesh’s COVID-19 management by interviews of 18 participants including government officials, experts, non-government organisations (NGOs) representatives, and the general public. This paper also analysed academic papers, policy documents and other publicly available documents, including newspaper reports.

The Constitution of Bangladesh intensified the active participation of local government in each administrative unit through decentralised administrative management. This paper however reveals that the administrative arrangement during the COVID-19 pandemic in Bangladesh was primarily a centrally led system. The local government was not sufficiently involved, nor had it integrated into the planning and coordination process. This indicated the absence of active decentralised administration.

This study fills the research gap of the administrative pattern and local relations in COVID-19 management by exploring the local government’s role during the catastrophic situation and highlights the importance of decentralised administrative actions in managing the crisis.

Supply chain (SC) management is more challenging than ever. Significantly, the pandemic has provoked global and economic destruction that appeared in the manufacturing industry as a “black swan.” Therefore, the purpose of this study was to examine the role of information processing and digital supply chain in supply chain resilience through supply chain risk management.

This study examines SC risk management and resilience from an information processing theory perspective. The authors used data collected from 251 SC professionals in the manufacturing industry, and the authors used a quantitative method to analyze the data. The data was analyzed using partial least squares-structural equation modeling. To confirm the higher-order measurement model, the authors used SmartPLS version 4 software.

This study found that information processing capability (disruptive orientation and visibility in high-order) and digital SC significantly and positively affect SC risk management and resilience. Similarly, SC risk management positively mediates the relationship between information processing capability and digital SC. However, information processing capability was found to have a more substantial effect on SC risk management than the digital SC.

This study has both academic and practical contributions. It contributed to existing information processing theory, and manufacturing firms can improve their performance by proactively responding to SC disruptions by recognizing the pivotal role of study variables in risk management for a resilient SC.

The conceptual model of this study is based on information processing theory, which asserts that synchronizing information processing capabilities and digital SCs allows a firm to deal with unplanned events. SC disruption orientation and visibility are considered risk controllers as they allow the firms to be more proactive. An integrated model of conceptualizing the disruption orientation, visibility (higher-order) and digital SC with information processing theory makes this research novel.