Search results

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 inscription of Yazd historical fabric in United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) world heritage list has provided the city with the opportunity of international competence and to achieve a global identity. Fahadan is one of the nine historical quarters and the core of formation of the Yazd city. Fahadan is one of the nine historical quarters and the core of formation of Yazd city. The article intends to provide suitable policies for converting it into a sample creative quarter in Yazd historical fabric.

The article benefits from qualitative research and the strategic planning method based on a creative city approach, uses SWOT technique (a technique for finding an organization's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) for situation analysis and the Oregon model for visioning.

Two categories of hard and soft factors play a role in transitioning Fahadan quarter into a creative quarter. By expanding the scope of jobs related to jewelry, and creating its supporting activities in the food and leisure sector, a creative economy can be discovered in Fahadan quarter which alongside reinforcement of unique physical features of the area, forms a creative place. Its goal will be viewed as the place where artisans pave their way for reaching a creative quarter with new management.

The research presents policies to realize soft and hard factors required for creativity in the quarter, and shows step by step a small-scale pattern in the context of urban creativity planning, that can be used in historical fabrics with similar situation.

This study takes an “entrepreneurship as emancipation” perspective to study entrepreneurs defined as “others” on multiple categories: women entrepreneurs whose ventures are necessity-based, bootstrapped and located in economically impoverished areas (neighborhoods) in two Latin-American countries: Chile and Peru.

The study takes an interpretivist research approach and analyses inductively interviews with women entrepreneurs.

The findings reveal how everyday practices in pursuit of emancipation – while conducted within the existing patriarchal social structure – push the boundaries and contribute to changes in the social system via a variety of outcomes such as intergenerational social mobility, personal fulfilment and strengthening the communities in which the women entrepreneurs operate. Furthermore, while the authors find that in the particular Latin-American context under study, entrepreneuring activities become an emancipatory possibility for the everyday women entrepreneurs, they also highlight a “dark side” of their emancipatory projects.

The study contributes to recent critical studies in entrepreneurship by demonstrating the diversity and importance of the “mundane” activities undertaken by “necessity-based” entrepreneurs, and the significant – yet underappreciated – reach of their ventures’ impact on issues well beyond economic considerations.

The goal is to illuminate the requisites for the implementation of performance management reforms in a public bureaucracy.

The paper employs a configurational approach, qualitative comparative analysis, that identifies combinations of political and organizational conditions necessary and/or sufficient for success. The analysis applies the success factor identified in the literature in analyzing the experience of departments involved in a city-wide reform in Los Angeles. The analysis utilizes two rounds of survey data combined with case observations to evaluate the presence of these conditions. Cross-case comparisons employ Boolean logic to identify configurations associated with successful system implementation.

The analysis identifies several distinct configurations of conditions that appear in departments that implemented the reform. One emphasizes mayoral support, while others emphasize leadership in combination with other organizational capacities.

The analysis yields several insights for managers. First, no silver bullet such as strong leadership assures reform implementation. Second, there are multiple avenues to reform. An organization that lacks some prerequisites – such as leadership or metrics – may succeed in the presence of other features such as an innovative culture or external political support. Finally, the study provides a bracing council that even under favorable conditions, performance management reforms may fail to take root, for reasons that can be difficult to predict.

The paper highlights the importance of considering configurations of conditions rather than focusing on conditions independently. Also, it highlights the importance of equifinality, the notion that observed outcomes can have multiple causes, a perspective typically missing in correlational analyses.

In response to water scarcity in Sri Lanka, the government is implementing strategies such as rainwater harvesting, efficient irrigation, wastewater treatment and desalination. Initial efforts include the establishment of a desalination plant in Jaffna, with additional plans for the dry zones (DZ). The study aims to comprehensively identify the barriers to establishing desalination plants in the DZ and provide recommendations to mitigate these barriers. Additionally, this research provides valuable insights aimed at minimizing barriers to the construction of future desalination plants within Sri Lanka.

The study used qualitative methods, using an expert survey to identify current and future barriers, along with strategies for overcoming them. The collected data were analysed using the template analysis technique.

Regarding desalination plant establishment, various barriers such as high capital costs, high energy expenses, brine discharge, pollution, emissions, technical challenges, health concerns and waste disposal have been identified. However, specific strategies exist to address and mitigate each of these obstacles.

The study offers recommendations to environmental experts and government on expediting the approval procedures for desalination plants in Sri Lanka’s DZ. Adapted to Sri Lanka’s specific challenges, it highlights strategies and barriers essential for upcoming desalination projects. Furthermore, it emphasizes the financial advantages such as increased production and job creation resulting from establishing desalination facilities.

Through this study, promoting sustainable practices and fostering community involvement, it aims to enhance livelihoods, accelerate economic development and improve overall well-being through reliable access to water. Additionally, the study aims to enhance understanding of the importance of desalination in alleviating water scarcity, promoting community engagement and ultimately facilitating improved living conditions, health outcomes and economic opportunities in Sri Lanka’s DZs.

This study provides crucial direction for decision-makers by highlighting the main barriers to the establishment of desalination plants in Sri Lanka and outlining practical solutions. Implementing these strategies helps meet the region’s increasing water demands, advance sustainable water management, improve the standard of living for nearby communities and promote the socioeconomic development of desalination plants in Sri Lanka’s DZ.

To explore the project-specific information-seeking pathways of Chinese parents of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and understand the information seeking in their daily lives.

This study utilized the interview, critical incident technique and information horizon mapping to gather data from 27 Chinese parents of children with ASD during project-specific information seeking. These data were then examined using content analysis and descriptive statistics methods.

First, the information-seeking pathways of parents of children with ASD show the significant importance of both interpersonal and online sources, characterized by the combined use of multiple types of information sources. Second, information-seeking pathways considerably vary across project contexts. For diagnosis and school selection, parents had fewer pathways and primarily relied on interpersonal sources. Meanwhile, they utilized interpersonal and online sources combined for selecting rehabilitation institutions and methods, with the most information-seeking pathways for rehabilitation methods.

This study presents novel insights into the information-seeking pathways of Chinese parents of children with ASD in seeking project-specific information. It provides valuable references for relevant governments and rehabilitation institutions in building information service platforms, strengthening information quality regulation and providing information resources for parents of children with ASD.

While urban farming is advocated as a contributor to urban sustainability and resilience, the “informal” household-practiced urban agriculture activities are taking place within urban spaces in most Emirati neighbourhoods but unfortunately without investigating their potential as participatory processes that could efficiently help attain urban sustainability and resilience on the neighbourhood level. So, this research is a humble attempt to bridge the gap of the lack of official recognition of informal residents-led processes and their products in a way that help understand them and their impacts and to explore the possibility of developing them further into wider community shared urban agriculture activities.

The research adopted the case study method and selected a representative neighbourhood to investigate informal residents-led urban agriculture practices. The utilized qualitative–quantitative investigation tools included map analysis, field observation and in-depth interviews with the residents of the selected neighbourhood.

The results of the research have revealed that the residents managed to successfully pursue informal urban farming processes that have led to significant environmental, social and economic sustainability and resilience outcomes. While these informal urban farming activities are performed individually by each household, the interviewed residents have shown enthusiasm to take part in larger-scale collective community urban farming activities, especially in the deserted public and semi-public spaces in their neighbourhood.

The research outcomes significantly contribute to the growing worldwide discourse about urban agriculture/farming, especially in a country like the UAE where such activities are almost overlooked. Based on its findings, the research concludes by proposing a set of recommended actions to legitimatize these informal urban agriculture processes in the urban development regulations and to build on them to encourage the local communities towards more collective urban farming activities.

This study aims to investigate the relationships between the perceived neighborhood walkable environment (PNWE), neighborhood interaction (NI) and residents’ mental health, with a focus on examining differences among residents of different age groups.

Using an electronic survey questionnaire, data on PNWE, NI and mental health were collected from 1,159 residents across 205 communities in Shanghai, China. Our study utilized a structural equation modeling (SEM), employing the maximum likelihood estimation method. The structural equation model was fitted using the MPLUS software.

The mental health of young and middle-aged adults is generally poor, and they are at higher risk of depression than children and older adults. The effects of PNWE and NI on the mental health of residents varied among different age groups. As residents get older, their mental health is more affected by the PNWE. In addition, the influence of the PNWE on children and older adults’ mental health is direct and not mediated by NI. For young and middle-aged adults, the influence of the PNWE on their mental health needs to be mediated by NI.

This study marks the first examination of the relationship between PNWE, NI and mental health among different age groups of residents in China. The findings of this research can assist policymakers in gaining a deeper understanding of the underlying mechanisms by which PNWE affects mental health. Furthermore, it can contribute to the development of more targeted walkable environment designs aimed at enhancing mental health among various age groups.

Micro-regeneration can effectively enhance a neighborhood’s commercial vitality and serve as a viable approach to boost economic benefits. However, the small scale of micro-regeneration efforts and the fragmented nature of information currently limit the availability of strong empirical evidence demonstrating its impact on neighborhood commercial vitality. The aim of the study was to examine the link between micro-regeneration and neighborhood commercial vitality, focusing on the average, time-lag, spatial spillover, and spatial heterogeneity effects.

Using the panel data set of 1,755 neighborhoods in Chongqing from 2016 to 2021 as the research sample, the difference-in-differences (DID) method was employed in this study to explore the impact micro-regeneration has on neighborhood commercial vitality.

The results illustrate that: (1) micro-regeneration can promote neighborhood commercial vitality in terms of the number and types of local consumption amenities by 27.76 and 5.89%, respectively, with no time-lag effect; (2) the positive spillovers can exist within the range of 5,000 meters–5,500 meters of regenerated neighborhoods; and (3) the effect of micro-regeneration on neighborhood commercial vitality can be greater in peripheral areas than in core areas of the city.

The findings fill the knowledge gap on the relationship between micro-regeneration and neighborhood commercial vitality. Additionally, the results on the time-lag effect, spatial spillover effects, and spatial heterogeneity provide practical implications that can support the government and private sector in developing temporal and spatial arrangements for micro-regeneration projects.

This study aims to deal with the case adaptation problem associated with continuous data by providing a non-zero base solution for knowledge users in solving a given situation.

Firstly, the neighbourhood transformation of the initial case base and the view similarity between the problem and the existing cases will be examined. Multiple cases with perspective similarity or above a predefined threshold will be used as the adaption cases. Secondly, on the decision rule set of the decision space, the deterministic decision model of the corresponding distance between the problem and the set of lower approximate objects under each choice class of the adaptation set is applied to extract the decision rule set of the case condition space. Finally, the solution elements of the problem will be reconstructed using the rule set and the values of the problem's conditional elements.

The findings suggest that the classic knowledge matching approach reveals the user with the most similar knowledge/cases but relatively low satisfaction. This also revealed a non-zero adaptation based on human–computer interaction, which has the difficulties of solid subjectivity and low adaptation efficiency.

In this study the multi-case inductive adaptation of the problem to be solved is carried out by analyzing and extracting the law of the effect of the centralized conditions on the decision-making of the adaptation. The adaption process is more rigorous with less subjective influence better reliability and higher application value. The approach described in this research can directly change the original data set which is more beneficial to enhancing problem-solving accuracy while broadening the application area of the adaptation mechanism.

The examination of the calculation cases confirms the innovation of this study in comparison to the traditional method of matching cases with tacit knowledge extrapolation.

The algorithm models established in this study develop theoretical directions for a multi-case induction adaptation study of tacit knowledge.

This study designs a multi-case induction adaptation scheme by combining NRS and CBR for implicitly knowledgeable exogenous cases. A game-theoretic combinatorial assignment method is applied to calculate the case view and the view similarity based on the threshold screening.