Uniquely focused on the contributions smart cities can make to climate change resilience, Urban Climate Adaptation and Mitigation offers evidence-based scientific solutions for improving cities' abilities to prepare for, recover from, and adapt to global climate-related events. Beginning with the observation of global environmental change, this book explores what sustainable smart projects are, how they are adopted and evaluated, and how they can address climate change challenges. It brings together a wide variety of disciplines such as planning, transportation, and waste management to address issues related to climate change adaptation and mitigation in cities.In general, many social science researchers lack cohesive, broad-based literature knowledge; Urban Climate Adaptation and Mitigation bridges this gap and informs different types of stakeholders on how they can enhance their preparation abilities to enable real-time responses and actions. Therefore, it is a valuable reference for researchers, professors, graduate students, city planners, and policy makers. Application-focused throughout, this book explores the complexities of urban systems and subsystems to support researchers, planners, and decision makers in their efforts toward developing more climate-resilient smart cities. - Provides a structured in-depth analysis of smart city cases from around the world - Introduces evidence-based toolkits and frameworks for assessing actual and/or potential contributions of smart city solutions to climate resilience - Includes state-of-the-art literature review and glossary

This book provides the reader with an understanding of the impact that different morphologies, construction materials and green coverage solutions have on the urban microclimate, thus affecting the comfort conditions of urban inhabitants and the energy needs of buildings in urban areas. The book covers the latest approaches to energy and outdoor comfort measurement and modelling on an urban scale, and describes possible measures and strategies to mitigate the effects of the mutual interaction between urban settlements and local microclimate. Despite its relevance, only limited literature is currently devoted to appraising—from an engineering perspective—the intertwining relationships between urban geometry and fabrics, energy fluxes between buildings and their surroundings, outdoor microclimate conditions and building energy demands in urban areas. This book fills this gap by first discussing the physical processes that govern heat and mass transfer at an urban scale, while emphasizing the role played by different spatial arrangements, manmade materials and green infrastructures on the outdoor microclimate. The first chapters also address the implications of these factors on the outdoor comfort conditions experienced by pedestrians, and on the buildings’ energy demand for space heating and cooling. Then, based upon cutting-edge experimental activities and simulation work, this book demonstrates current and forthcoming adaptation and mitigation strategies to improve the urban microclimate and its impact on the built environment, such as cool materials, thermochromic and retroreflective finishing materials, and green infrastructures applied either at a building scale or at the urban scale. The effect of these solutions is demonstrated for different cities worldwide under a range of climate conditions. Finally, the book opens a wider perspective by introducing the basic elements that allow fuel poverty, raw materials consumption, and the principles of circular economy in the definition of a resilient urban settlement.

This book forms a selection of chapters submitted for the CUPUM (Computational Urban Planning and Urban Management) conference, held in the second week of June 2021 at Aalto University in Helsinki, Finland. Chapters were selected from a double-blind review process by the conference's scientific committee. The chapters in the book cover developments and applications with big data and urban analytics, collaborative urban planning, applications of geodesign and innovations, and planning support science.

This book provides a theoretical framework and related technical skills for investigating climate change and its public health consequences and responses with a focus on urban settings, and in particular Hong Kong, a subtropical metropolis in Asia. Specifically, the book examines the impact of climate change on health in terms of mortality, hospital admissions and help-seeking, as well as key response strategies of adaptation and mitigation. Many existing books tend to consider the relationship of climate change and public health as two connected issues divided into various discrete topics. Conversely, this book explicitly applies public health concepts to study the human impact of climate change, for example, by conceptualising climate change impact and its alleviation, mitigation and adaptation in a public health framework. Overall, this volume summarises what is known about climate change and health and ignites further debates in the area, especially for urban subtropical communities from within a wider global perspective. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of environmental health, public health, climate change, urban studies and Asian studies.

Advances in Machine Learning and Image Analysis for GeoAI provides state-of-the-art machine learning and signal processing techniques for a comprehensive collection of geospatial sensors and sensing platforms. The book covers supervised, semi-supervised and unsupervised geospatial image analysis, sensor fusion across modalities, image super-resolution, transfer learning across sensors and time-points, and spectral unmixing among other topics. The chapters in these thematic areas cover a variety of algorithmic frameworks such as variants of convolutional neural networks, graph convolutional networks, multi-stream networks, Bayesian networks, generative adversarial networks, transformers and more.Advances in Machine Learning and Image Analysis for GeoAI provides graduate students, researchers and practitioners in the area of signal processing and geospatial image analysis with the latest techniques to implement deep learning strategies in their research. - Covers the latest machine learning and signal processing techniques that can effectively leverage multimodal geospatial imagery at scale - Chapters cover a variety of algorithmic frameworks pertaining to GeoAI, including superresolution, self-supervised learning, data fusion, explainable AI, among others - Presents cutting-edge deep learning architectures optimized for a wide array of geospatial imagery

Sustainable Cities in a Changing Climate Build and manage the sustainable cities of the future with this comprehensive guide Climate change is among the biggest challenges facing today’s cities, which are in turn a major factor in driving or mitigating climate change. It is no surprise then that urban planning authorities are under mounting pressure to create cityscapes suited to the 21st century. Sustainable Cities in a Changing Climate offers a systematic overview of the environmental and sustainability challenges facing urban planners and policymakers, and how to meet those challenges. Beginning with an analysis of how climate change impacts built environments, it proceeds to offer quantitative analysis and practical solutions for strengthening urban resilience. Sustainable Cities in a Changing Climate readers will also find: A future-oriented approach that accounts for both known and unknown threats Detailed discussion of threats including environmental changes, global pandemics, natural disasters, and more Case studies from around the globe, including biofuel generation in China and the 2022 World Cup in Qatar Sustainable Cities in a Changing Climate is indispensable for environmental engineers, urban planners and policymakers, and advanced students in environmental planning and architecture.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is presented as a solution to the greatest challenges of our time, from global pandemics and chronic diseases to cybersecurity threats and the climate crisis. But AI also contributes to the climate crisis by running on technology that depletes scarce resources and by relying on data centres that demand excessive energy use. Is AI Good for the Planet? brings the climate crisis to the centre of debates around AI, exposing its environmental costs and forcing us to reconsider our understanding of the technology. It reveals why we should no longer ignore the environmental problems generated by AI. Embracing a green agenda for AI that puts the climate crisis at centre stage is our urgent priority. Engaging and passionately written, this book is essential reading for scholars and students of AI, environmental studies, politics, and media studies and for anyone interested in the connections between technology and the environment.

This open access book is the first to systematically introduce the principles of urban informatics and its application to every aspect of the city that involves its functioning, control, management, and future planning. It introduces new models and tools being developed to understand and implement these technologies that enable cities to function more efficiently – to become ‘smart’ and ‘sustainable’. The smart city has quickly emerged as computers have become ever smaller to the point where they can be embedded into the very fabric of the city, as well as being central to new ways in which the population can communicate and act. When cities are wired in this way, they have the potential to become sentient and responsive, generating massive streams of ‘big’ data in real time as well as providing immense opportunities for extracting new forms of urban data through crowdsourcing. This book offers a comprehensive review of the methods that form the core of urban informatics from various kinds of urban remote sensing to new approaches to machine learning and statistical modelling. It provides a detailed technical introduction to the wide array of tools information scientists need to develop the key urban analytics that are fundamental to learning about the smart city, and it outlines ways in which these tools can be used to inform design and policy so that cities can become more efficient with a greater concern for environment and equity.