scholarly journals Researching Migration in a Superdiverse Society: Challenges, Methods, Concerns and Promises

2017 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Goodson ◽  
Aleksandra Grzymala-Kazlowska
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Structural Characteristics ◽  
Fundamental Rights ◽  
Migrant Populations ◽  
Community Stakeholders ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Socio Economic Variables ◽  
Conducting Research ◽  
The Uk

The arrival of superdiversity raises a wide range of methodological issues that warrant further consideration by social researchers conducting research in superdiverse contexts. The complex multi-layering of population settlement that has emerged due to successive waves of migration means that identities, lived experience and access to services including welfare are played out in a plethora of different ways, often determined by the interplay of a range of socio-economic variables alongside structural characteristics, which influence the fundamental rights and entitlements of individuals living in the UK and in turn their settlement and adaptation experiences. This paper reflects on the limitations of ethno-centric research designs, which concentrate on ethnicity as the most important unit of analysis, and calls for more participatory and multidimensional methodologies that engage diverse participants and reflect the levels of socio-demographic complexity experienced in urban areas of society. It then moves on to discuss a number of specific methodological challenges associated with complex populations. In particular sampling and access issues associated with diverse migrant populations will be considered. The latter part of this paper discusses the adoption of a range of research approaches that offer promising potential in terms of better capturing and understanding the heterogeneity, complexity and fluidity concomitant with superdiversity as well as engaging a range of community stakeholders in the production of knowledge.

25. Equal Treatment and Non-Discrimination

EU Law ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 929-994
Author(s):  
Paul Craig ◽  
Gráinne de Búrca
Keyword(s):  
European Union ◽  
Ethnic Origin ◽  
Fundamental Rights ◽  
Equal Treatment ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Charter Of Fundamental Rights ◽  
The Uk ◽  
The Eu

All books in this flagship series contain carefully selected substantial extracts from key cases, legislation, and academic debate, providing students with a stand-alone resource. This chapter discusses EU anti-discrimination law, which, over the past decade and a half, has expanded significantly to cover a wide range of grounds and contexts. In addition to requiring equal treatment for women and men, the Treaty provides legislative competence to combat discrimination on a range of grounds. The Charter of Fundamental Rights, which has a chapter devoted to equality, has been incorporated into the EU Treaties. Article 21 of the Charter prohibits discrimination on any ground. Articles 8 and 10 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) contain horizontal clauses requiring the EU to promote equality between men and women, and to combat discrimination based on certain grounds, namely sex, racial or ethnic origin, religion or belief, disability, age, or sexual orientation in all of its policies and activities. The UK version contains a further section analysing issues concerning EU discrimination law and the UK post-Brexit.

scholarly journals City-wide building height determination using light detection and ranging data

2018 ◽  
Vol 46 (9) ◽  
pp. 1741-1755 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yue Wu ◽  
Luke S Blunden ◽  
AbuBakr S Bahaj
Keyword(s):  
Urban Areas ◽  
Light Detection And Ranging ◽  
Light Detection ◽  
Building Height ◽  
Height Determination ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Building Geometry ◽  
Building Characteristics ◽  
Regional Housing Market ◽  
The Uk

The research presented in this paper addresses a current gap in the availability of building geometry data and provides estimates of individual building characteristics at city scale. Such data are crucial for a wide range of subjects such as modelling building energy consumption as well as regional housing market studies. However, such data are currently not available in the UK. In this work, a new approach was developed to automatically estimate the geometric characteristics of buildings, including height and floor count. A wide range of datasets have been brought together including high-resolution light detection and ranging data to accurately estimate building elevation and to obtain the external dimension of buildings. In the UK, most of the datasets required for this model are available for urban areas, allowing the model to be widely applied both in cities and beyond. The paper presents the results of building height and floor count determined from this model and compares these with the actual data obtained from a survey of 108 representative buildings in the city of Southampton. The results show good accuracy of the model with 97% of the estimates having an error under ±1 floor and an absolute mean error of 0.3 floors. These results provide confidence in utilising this model for future building studies at a city scale.

25. Equal Treatment and Non-Discrimination

EU Law ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 963-1030
Author(s):  
Paul Craig ◽  
Gráinne de Búrca
Keyword(s):  
European Union ◽  
Ethnic Origin ◽  
Fundamental Rights ◽  
Equal Treatment ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Charter Of Fundamental Rights ◽  
The Uk ◽  
The Eu

All books in this flagship series contain carefully selected substantial extracts from key cases, legislation, and academic debate, providing students with a stand-alone resource. This chapter discusses EU anti-discrimination law, which, over the past decade and a half, has expanded significantly to cover a wide range of grounds and contexts. In addition to requiring equal treatment for women and men, the Treaty provides legislative competence to combat discrimination on a range of grounds. The Charter of Fundamental Rights, which has a chapter devoted to equality, has been incorporated into the EU Treaties. Article 21 of the Charter prohibits discrimination on any ground. Articles 8 and 10 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) contain horizontal clauses requiring the EU to promote equality between men and women, and to combat discrimination based on certain grounds, namely sex, racial or ethnic origin, religion or belief, disability, age, or sexual orientation in all of its policies and activities. The UK version contains a further section analysing issues concerning EU discrimination law and the UK post-Brexit.

scholarly journals National Green Infrastructure Facility – a specialised ‘living laboratory’ to assess the value of urban green infrastructure

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Green ◽  
Ross Stirling ◽  
Claire Walsh ◽  
Eleanor Starkey ◽  
Alethea Walker ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Green Infrastructure ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Evidence Base ◽  
Environmental Data ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Surface Water Management ◽  
Research Activities ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Newcastle Upon Tyne

<p>Green Infrastructure (GI) offers multiple and integrated benefits to urban areas, including relieving pressure on ‘grey’ infrastructure systems by locally managing surface runoff within cities to reduce the risk of urban flooding. Although the use of GI has been shown to attenuate flooding, monitored and quantifiable data determining the effectiveness of GI is imperative for supporting widespread adoption of GI within cities and to provide an evidence-base to inform the design and maintenance procedures of such systems and ultimately influence key decision makers .</p><p>The National Green Infrastructure Facility (NGIF) based in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK, is a purpose-built, publicly accessible, ‘living laboratory’ and demonstration site established in 2017, funded by the UK Collaboratorium for Research on Infrastructure and Cities. The NGIF explores how a wide range of green features such as trees, shrubs and soils can help reduce flooding in cities and make them more resilient and sustainable to future changes in climate and urban pressures. The facility hosts a number of novel GI features of varying scale, monitored with dense sensor networks to allow the in-situ measurement of key hydrological, climatic and biophysical variables (e.g. precipitation, temperature, soil moisture, water depth, runoff and outflow rates) which are able to provide quantified evidence of the hydrological performance of sustainable drainage systems (SuDS). Such systems generate detailed insights into how SuDS and nature-based solutions can be used to improve surface water management, optimise geo-energy for building heating/cooling and how systems can be used for urban water treatment.</p><p>GI features across the NGIF include an experimental  and fully functional swale, providing protection to the area of Newcastle-upon-Tyne in which the feature is located, 10 lysimeter bioretention cells, a series of rain-garden ‘ensembles’ and a monitored green roof system. All experimental features are subjected to prevalent environmental conditions and act as fully functional GI systems, but conditions can also be augmented and simulated to ensure that the GI features act as semi-controlled experimental systems to determine responses outside of the natural instrumented record. All environmental data is recorded at high temporal (< 5 minutes) and spatial resolution and is publicly accessible in real-time via the NGIF API.</p><p>This presentation provides an overview of the NGIF and discusses the current research activities taking place across the site. Data is presented from each of the GI systems to demonstrate and discuss their performance and responses during natural and simulated events, including extremes, and to assess their effectiveness in responding to localised changes in climate. Future research directions and collaborative opportunities are also highlighted.</p>

scholarly journals Most ornamental plants on sale in garden centres are unattractive to flower-visiting insects

PeerJ ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. e3066 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mihail Garbuzov ◽  
Karin Alton ◽  
Francis L.W. Ratnieks
Keyword(s):  
Consumer Choice ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Plant Cover ◽  
Ornamental Plants ◽  
Absolute Number ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Flower Visiting ◽  
One Year ◽  
The Uk ◽  
The Right

Background Gardeners and park managers seeking to support biodiversity in urban areas often plant ornamentals attractive to flower-visiting insects. There is a huge diversity of garden plant varieties, and some recommendations are available as to which are attractive to insects. However, these are largely not based on rigorous empirical data. An important factor in consumer choice is the range of varieties available for purchase. In the UK, garden centres are a key link in the supply chain between growers and private gardens. This study is the first to determine the proportions of flowering ornamentals being sold that are attractive to flower-visiting insects. Methods We surveyed six garden centres in Sussex, UK, each over two days in 2015, by making 12 counts of insects visiting patches of each ornamental plant on display for sale that was in bloom. To provide a consistent baseline among different locations, we brought with us and surveyed marjoram (Origanum vulgare) plants in pots, which are known to be attractive to a wide range of flower-visiting insects. The attractiveness of plant varieties to insects was then expressed in two ways: the absolute number and relative to that on marjoram (‘marjoram score’), both per unit area of plant cover. In addition, we noted whether each variety was recommended as pollinator-friendly either via a symbol on the label, or by being included in the Royal Horticultural Society’s ‘Perfect for Pollinators’ list. Furthermore, we compared the attractiveness of plants that are typically grown for more than one year versus only one year. Results We surveyed 59–74 plant varieties in bloom across the six garden centres. In each garden centre, the distributions of variety attractiveness were highly skewed to the right, with most varieties being relatively unattractive, and few varieties highly attractive to flower-visiting insects. The median attractiveness of varieties with a recommendation was 4.2× higher than that of varieties without. But, due to the large variation there was a substantial number of both poor varieties that had a recommendation and good varieties that did not. Median attractiveness of multi-year plants was 1.6× that of single-year plants, with a similar overlap in distributions. Discussion Our study demonstrates the practicality of carrying out plant surveys in garden centres. Garden centres display large numbers of varieties for sale, most of which are in bloom. Furthermore, data gathered in garden centres appear to correlate well with data gathered in two previous studies in Sussex for plants established in gardens. Although it is unclear whether the varieties being sold in garden centres are a fair representation of varieties that are actually grown by gardeners, our results suggest that there might be considerable scope for making parks and gardens considerably more insect-friendly through judicious variety choices.

scholarly journals Modelling human mobility patterns using photographic data shared online

2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (8) ◽  
pp. 150046 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniele Barchiesi ◽  
Tobias Preis ◽  
Steven Bishop ◽  
Helen Susannah Moat
Keyword(s):  
Urban Areas ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Learning Algorithm ◽  
Human Mobility ◽  
Transportation Systems ◽  
Mobility Patterns ◽  
Online Data ◽  
Photo Sharing ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Uk

Humans are inherently mobile creatures. The way we move around our environment has consequences for a wide range of problems, including the design of efficient transportation systems and the planning of urban areas. Here, we gather data about the position in space and time of about 16 000 individuals who uploaded geo-tagged images from locations within the UK to the Flickr photo-sharing website. Inspired by the theory of Lévy flights, which has previously been used to describe the statistical properties of human mobility, we design a machine learning algorithm to infer the probability of finding people in geographical locations and the probability of movement between pairs of locations. Our findings are in general agreement with official figures in the UK and on travel flows between pairs of major cities, suggesting that online data sources may be used to quantify and model large-scale human mobility patterns.

scholarly journals How Is COVID-19 Shaping Families’ Relationships With Food and the Food Environment in England? A Qualitative Research Protocol

2021 ◽  
Vol 20 ◽  
pp. 160940692199137
Author(s):  
Anna Isaacs ◽  
Charlotte Gallagher Squires ◽  
Corinna Hawkes
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Food Environment ◽  
Overweight And Obesity ◽  
Food Environments ◽  
Obesity Prevalence ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Childhood Overweight And Obesity ◽  
Conducting Research ◽  
Study Sites ◽  
The Uk

Rates of childhood overweight and obesity continue to rise in England, along with a growing gap in obesity prevalence between children in the most and least deprived areas. To address child obesity, the UK government is increasingly considering how to intervene in the (food) environments that shape people’s purchases, rather than focusing solely on individual health behaviors. With the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdowns having rapidly reconfigured life in the UK, it is important to understand how these changes may have impacted food practices and engagement with food environments. This remote, longitudinal qualitative study seeks to explore how the COVID-19 pandemic and its impacts are shaping families relationships with the food and the food environment. A sample of 60–80 parents/carers of school or nursery-aged children will be recruited from across three case study sites in England to take part in semi-structured interviews and set of flexible creative activities at three time points over the course of a year. Findings will provide practical policy insights for England’s obesity prevention strategy as well as methodological insights in terms of conducting research into lived experience remotely.

Biscogniauxia (Hypoxylon) Canker or Dieback in Trees

EDIS ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 2017 (6) ◽  
Author(s):  
Claudia Paez ◽  
Jason A. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Water Stress ◽  
Tree Species ◽  
Soil Compaction ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Root Disease ◽  
Poor Health ◽  
Green Spaces ◽  
Opportunistic Pathogens ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Quercus Spp

Biscogniauxia canker or dieback (formerly called Hypoxylon canker or dieback) is a common contributor to poor health and decay in a wide range of tree species (Balbalian & Henn 2014). This disease is caused by several species of fungi in the genus Biscogniauxia (formerly Hypoxylon). B. atropunctata or B. mediterranea are usually the species found on Quercus spp. and other hosts in Florida, affecting trees growing in many different habitats, such as forests, parks, green spaces and urban areas (McBride & Appel, 2009).  Typically, species of Biscogniauxia are opportunistic pathogens that do not affect healthy and vigorous trees; some species are more virulent than others. However, once they infect trees under stress (water stress, root disease, soil compaction, construction damage etc.) they can quickly colonize the host. Once a tree is infected and fruiting structures of the fungus are evident, the tree is not likely to survive especially if the infection is in the tree's trunk (Anderson et al., 1995).

URBAN FACADE GEOMETRY ON OUTDOOR COMFORT CONDITIONS: A REVIEW

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 45
Author(s):  
Elahe Mirabi ◽  
Nasrollahi Nazanin
Keyword(s):  
Thermal Comfort ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Natural Ventilation ◽  
Flow Behavior ◽  
Air Flow ◽  
Urban Geometry ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Low Energy Buildings ◽  
Outdoor Comfort ◽  
Solar Access

<p>Designing urban facades is considered as a major factor influencing issues<br />such as natural ventilation of buildings and urban areas, radiations in the<br />urban canyon for designing low-energy buildings, cooling demand for<br />buildings in urban area, and thermal comfort in urban streets. However, so<br />far, most studies on urban topics have been focused on flat facades<br />without details of urban layouts. Hence, the effect of urban facades with<br />details such as the balcony and corbelling on thermal comfort conditions<br />and air flow behavior are discussed in this literature review. <strong>Aim</strong>: This<br />study was carried out to investigate the effective factors of urban facades,<br />including the effects of building configuration, geometry and urban<br />canyon’s orientation. <strong>Methodology and Results</strong>: According to the results,<br />the air flow behavior is affected by a wide range of factors such as wind<br />conditions, urban geometry and wind direction. Urban façade geometry<br />can change outdoor air flow pattern, thermal comfort and solar access.<br /><strong>Conclusion, significance and impact study</strong>: In particular, the geometry of<br />the facade, such as indentation and protrusion, has a significant effect on<br />the air flow and thermal behavior in urban facades and can enhance<br />outdoor comfort conditions. Also, Alternation in façade geometry can<br />affect pedestrians' comfort and buildings energy demands.</p>

Design Intervention Assessment of Urban Public Park for Physical Activity Promotion in Bangkok, Thailand

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 4-4
Author(s):  
Sigit Arifwidodo ◽  
Orana Chandrasiri
Keyword(s):  
Physical Activity ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Urban Landscape ◽  
Physical Activity Promotion ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Pilot Project ◽  
Public Park ◽  
Activity Promotion ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Design Intervention

Public Park is considered one of the essential settings for physical activity, especially in urban areas. Parks support physical activity through their accessibility, their provision to facilitate active pursuits; their capacity to provide opportunities to a wide range of users; and their semi-permanent nature. The paper explores the design intervention assessment of Benchakitti Park, which serves as the pilot project for active park and showcase during the past ISPAH 2016 conference. The objective of the paper is to understand the health and well-being benefits of an urban park in increasing PA levels of urban population and promoting a healthy and active lifestyle. Keywords: Public park; physical activity; urban landscape design; public health; SOPARC

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