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Several typologies of urban surface properties have been proposed, in recent years, for urban heat island studies and climate modeling. Some were specifically developed for cities and urban climate issues, like the Urban Climate Zones, and the more recent Local Climate Zones. The initial objective of this paper is to evaluate the capacity of these two typologies to identify thermal environments in and around cities, and to determine which typology best captures the daily spatio-temporal patterns of surface and urban canopy heat islands. To simulate urban climate with a model, LULC data based on a given typology are required. To avoid circularity, we combined the Corine Land Cover database, with data for the whole of Europe, and the BD TOPO database, for France, to form a new tool, CLC_USGS, which we used as input for the WRF limitedarea model, with a 150-m grid resolution. The capacity of each typology to identify coherent thermal zones was estimated for Dijon, a medium-sized French city, during a three-week heat wave, over a 24-hour period, in conditions favorable to urban heat island development. The comparison was based on hourly air temperatures directly output from the WRF model, those obtained from the purpose-built MUSTARDijon 47-sensor meteorological network, and NDVI values and land surface temperatures estimated from Landsat images for 11 July 2015 at 1030 UTC. Typical diurnal variations and spatial contrasts of surface and air temperatures were identified in both simulations and observations. As both typologies show significant capacity for identifying thermally coherent intra-urban areas, this study suggests that they could both be useful for urban climate applications. The typology that is most generally applicable in worldwide contexts is Local Climate Zones. 1. Introduction Urbanization and urban expansion linked to demographic growth produce diverse mosaics of built and non-built surfaces. This diversity results in very different surface energy budgets and Urban Heat Island (UHI) effects, induced by impermeable, heat-storing

A comparative spatial history combining historical narrative, geographical thinking, and spatial analysis of historical data offers new perspectives on railway expansion and its effects in France and Great Britain during the long nineteenth century. Accessible rail transport in the rural regions of both countries opened new economic opportunities in agriculture, extractive industries, and service trades, helping to revitalize rural communities and decrease their rates of out-migration. In France, long-standing economic disparities between the developed north and the less-productive south gradually reduced. These conclusions are based, in part, on the use of historical geographical information systems (hgis) and spatial statistics, illustrating a component of spatial history.

International audienceIn this work we address the issue of sustainable cities by focusing on one of their verycentral components: daily mobility. Indeed, if cities can be interpreted as spatial organizationsallowing social interactions, the number of daily movements needed to reach this goal iscontinuously increasing. Therefore, improving urban accessibility merely results in increasingtraffic and its negative externalities (congestion, accidents, pollution, noise, etc.), while eventuallyreducing the quality of life of people in the city. This is why several urban-transport policies areimplemented in order to reduce individual mobility impacts while maintaining equitable access tothe city. This challenge is however non-trivial and therefore we propose to investigate this issuefrom the complex systems point of view. The real spatial-temporal urban accessibility of citizenscannot be approximated just by focusing on space and implies taking into account the space-timeactivity patterns of individuals, in a more dynamic way. Thus, given the importance of localinteractions in such a perspective, an agent based approach seems to be a relevant solution. Thiskind of individual based and “interactionist” approach allows us to explore the possible impactof individual behaviors on the overall dynamics of the city but also the possible impact of globalmeasures on individual behaviors. In this paper, we give an overview of the Miro Project andthen focus on the GaMiroD model design from real data analysis to model exploration tunedby transportation-oriented scenarios. Among them, we start with the the impact of a LEZ (LowEmission Zone) in the city center