The last two decades have witnessed a growing trend towards transit-oriented development (TOD) as a critical approach for achieving sustainable mobility. However, some analysts and community activists have expressed concerns that TOD could induce gentrification and potential concomitant low-income group displacements. This paper presents a systematic review of 35 quantitative research-based studies presenting evidence on gentrification outcomes resulting from transit-based interventions, published between 2000 and 2018. To our knowledge, this is the first systematic review on this topic and thus provides a useful synthesis of current empirical evidence on transit-induced gentrification. Although there is some evidence supporting the transit-induced gentrification hypothesis, methodological flaws render many of the studies' conclusions highly questionable. The findings suggest that gentrification is more closely associated with existing local dynamics, built environment attributes, and accompanying policies than transit-oriented development. In its critical analysis of research approaches, this paper warns that the incorporation of several sources of bias into study designs may engender a number of misinterpretations, thus ultimately leading to misguided conclusions and policies.

The conceptual and methodological debate on urban form has grown in the last decades to recognize that social, economic, demographic and political processes can contribute to the development of new urban forms, especially those related to urban sprawl, as well as to find alternative methodologies for measuring them. Spatial metrics derived from landscape ecology arise as principal indicators to measure urban form. This paper proposes a typology of the urban occupation of Portuguese municipalities. It uses land use/cover data from 1990 and 2006 to extract built-up areas, and it presents five spatial metrics alongside seventeen statistical indicators from 1991 to 2011 most commonly used in the literature to characterize urban occupation. It uses a self-organising map as a visual tool to identify trends and relationships among variables and to cluster municipalities. Based on the self-organising map’s visual clustering, six types of urban occupation of Portuguese municipalities are proposed. In addition, the paper discusses the added value of using indicators that describe both the patterns and the characteristics of the municipalities for making spatial planning decisions in Portugal. The observed results show that spatial metrics are particularly adequate for measuring peri-urban municipalities (urban sprawl areas). These results represent the first multidimensional and systematic analysis of Portuguese urban occupation and they can be the first step in the integration of spatial metrics as indicators that are suitable for the analysis of spatial planning, and also for comparative purposes at a broader geographical scale.

The historical accounts of the 1755 earthquake and tsunami in Lisbon are quite vast providing a general overview of the disaster in the city. However, the details remain unknown. Therefore, the objective of this research is to understand and reconstruct the impact of the 1755 event (earthquake, tsunami, and fire) in downtown Lisbon. Thus, the historical data has been compiled and analyzed, to complement tsunami modeling and a field survey. Although census data are not very accurate, before the disaster there were about 5500 buildings and about 26,200 residents in downtown Lisbon; after the disaster, no records of the buildings were found and there were about 6000–8800 residents. There were about 1000 deaths in the study area. The results also show that the earthquake did not cause significant damage to most of the study area, which contradicts general knowledge. After the earthquake, a fire started that quickly spread throughout the city causing most damage to property. The tsunami hit mostly the west and central parts of the study area. The numerical model results show the tsunami hit the studied area about 60 min after the earthquake, inundating the seafront streets and squares up to 200 m inland. In addition, two major waves were calculated, which are in agreement with the historical accounts.

Sustainable development has become the basis of several worldwide policies over the last few decades, and its role will continue to shape policies for decades to come, especially those that are focused on urban mobility. At the same time, urban mobility is included in the framework of the Healthy Cities movement. In this context, using the Lisbon Metropolitan Area (LMA), Portugal, as the study area, this article intends to answer the following research question: are sustainable urban mobility policies contributing to healthy cities? Urban mobility planning and public health instruments were compared with the discourses and practices of those responsible for the implementation of urban mobility policies and Healthy Cities projects. The results reveal that a large number of responses proposed in the mobility planning instruments are, to some extent, related to the principles of healthy cities. Also, while municipal agents tend not to consider the inclusion of those principles, they instead incorporate the concepts of sustainable development. Nevertheless, we found that both approaches overlap the policy directions of healthy cities. On the other hand, public health policies and Healthy Cities projects presented a scarce number of references to its interventions in the urban mobility domain and mainly focused on the promotion of soft modes. It is concluded that, in the case of the observed municipalities of the LMA, the healthy cities framework is greatly benefited by the inclusion of sustainable development principles in all policies, especially those for urban mobility.