No abstract

In order to reduce the urban heat island effect and increase cooling insulation, certain innovative cities rely on the benefits of vertical greening system. However, finding the space in a highlydeveloped city such as Hong Kong and Taiwan is a significant challenge. Facing the same challenge, cities like New York, Tokyo and Singapore, develop vertical greening system such as green walls, green roof, or urban agriculture to maximize the greening capacity. However, the green-roof development in Taiwan faces the challenge of the unique culture of architectural additions, known as sheet metal housing. The roof-top sheet metal housing is commonly used in most of the Taiwanese communities and occupies the roof space. Moreover, this sheet metal not only limits the scale of greening development, it also increases the indoor temperature and energy consumption with its heat-transfer nature. According to the research, the Living Green Shell functions as shelter, cooling insulation, air purifier and helps improve cooling efficiency in conjunction with the concept of vertical farm. Through the BIM simulation evaluations, the research focuses on how the cooling insulation of the Living Green Shell (LGS) over the sheet metal buildings could give a better energy-saving efficiency. The micro-vertical farm system is evolving from LGS 1.0 to the final version, LGS 3.0 to improve related functions. The LGS also provides edible vegetables and produces solar energy via the mini-solar bites. With the sheet metal housing's easily fabricated nature, the housing could be integrated with the LGS devices and led to a broad implementation in Taiwan with proper promoting.

Traditional approaches to human mobility analysis in Geography often rely on census or survey data that is resource-intensive to collect and often has a limited spatio-temporal scope. The advent of new technologies (e.g. geosocial media platforms) provides opportunities to overcome these limitations and, if properly leveraged, can yield more granular insights about human mobility. In this paper, we use an anonymized Twitter dataset collected in Singapore from 2012 to 2016 to investigate this potential to help understand the footprints of urban neighbourhoods from both a spatial and a relational perspective.We construct home-to-destination networks of individual users based on their inferred home locations. In aggregated form, these networks allow us to analyze three specific mobility indicators at the neighbourhood level, namely the distance, diversity, and direction of urban interactions. By mapping these three indicators of the spatial footprint of each neighbourhood, we can capture the nuances in the position of individual neighbourhoods within the larger urban network. An exploratory spatial regression reveals that socio-economic characteristics (e.g. share of rental housing) and the built environment (i.e. land use) only partially explain these three indicators and a residual analysis points to the need to explicitly include each neighbourhood's position within the transportation network in future work.

As the urban development continues, different parts of a city can grow or decay by varying degrees due to natural deterioration or changes in governmental policies. City is the center for business, culture, and social activities; is the place that reflects geography, commerce, society, and culture context; is a complex whole that is woven by “people,” “activity,” and “space” “People” in the “space” can process “activities,” therefore, activities and space can influence each other. In this research, we aim to obtain insights on urban morphology by analyzing the changes in urban spaces’ “activity” patterns. We aim to explore the relationship between urban spatial configuration and functionality. Space syntax methodology is applied to investigate the urban spatial structure concurrently with the analytic hierarchy process method for evaluating experts’ survey responses to attain urban functionality index. Subsequently, the analytical data are compared and categorized to reveal the city districts’ spatial characteristics and their correlation. This research has proven that the analysis findings are consistent with the actual urban conditions, and thus affirms our analytical framework of having a creditable comprehension of the advantage and disadvantage of urban spatial integrations and its functionality. Therefore, our research methodology can be applied as an efficient preliminary evaluation tool for conceiving the merits of city districts. Based on the findings of our research, authorities will be able to discuss the urban development agendas in greater detail with higher efficiency.

No abstract