Automated Detection of Missing Links in Bicycle Networks

Cycling is an effective solution for making urban transport more sustainable. However, bicycle networks are typically developed in a slow, piecewise process that leaves open a large number of gaps, even in well-developed cycling cities like Copenhagen. Here, we develop the IPDC procedure (Identify, Prioritize, Decluster, Classify) for finding the most important missing links in urban bicycle networks, using data from OpenStreetMap. In this procedure we first identify all possible gaps following a multiplex network approach, prioritize them according to a flow-based metric, decluster emerging gap clusters, and manually classify the types of gaps. We apply the IPDC procedure to Copenhagen and report the 105 top priority gaps. For evaluation, we compare these gaps with the city’s most recent Cycle Path Prioritization Plan and find considerable overlaps. Our results show how network analysis with minimal data requirements can serve as a cost-efficient support tool for bicycle network planning. By taking into account the whole city network for consolidating urban bicycle infrastructure, our data-driven framework can complement localized, manual planning processes for more effective, city-wide decision-making.     

‘Highway to Heaven’: the creation of a multicultural,religious landscape in suburban Richmond,British Columbia

We analyse the emergence of the ‘Highway to Heaven’, a distinctive landscape of more than 20 diverse religious buildings, in the suburban municipality of Richmond, outside Vancouver, to explore the intersections of immigration, planning, multiculturalism, religion and suburban space. In the context of wider contested planning disputes for new places of worship for immigrant communities, the creation of a designated ‘Assembly District’ in Richmond emerged as a creative response to multicultural planning. However, it is also a contradictory policy, co-opting religious communities to municipal requirements to safeguard agricultural land and prevent suburban sprawl, but with limited success. The unanticipated outcomes of a designated planning zone for religious buildings include production of an agglomeration of increasingly spectacular religious facilities that exceed municipal planning regulations. Such developments are accommodated through a celebratory narrative of municipal multiculturalism, but one that fails to engage with the communal narratives of the faith communities themselves and may exoticize or commodify religious identity.     

The Politics of Policy Circulation: Unpacking the Relationship Between South African and South American Cities in the Adoption of Bus Rapid Transit

This paper utilizes the introduction of bus rapid transit (BRT) in South Africa to unravel the role of South–South connections in local policymaking. While the South African systems are unmistakably modeled after Bogotá's Transmilenio, whose accomplishments have been touted as the low‐cost, high‐quality transport solution, the process through which other Southern cities influenced the circulation of BRT remains underexplored. In so doing, this paper asks how and why certain cities are brought into conversation with one another and what happens as a result? This analysis suggests that policy circulation is never a rational survey of best practices but a political process through which policymakers select their sites of learning in accordance with wider aspirations, ideologies and positioning. Illustrating the way in which policymakers deploy different meanings of the global South and their position within this construct to justify local policy decisions adds a critical dimension to understandings of policy mobilities.     

“Middling” Chinese Returnees or Immigrants from Canada? The Ambiguity of Return Migration and Claims to Modernity

This paper investigates the conceptual overlaps between transnational return migration and immigration by drawing on a qualitative study of Mainland Chinese return migration from Canada. The paper argues that reframing return migration as a distinct type of immigration draws attention to the citizenship vulnerabilities experienced by “middling” returnees who are not privy to the preferential treatment given to highly skilled returnees. They come to be considered as “foreigners” in their homeland because they have naturalised elsewhere. The paper also explores the double diasporic identifications of Mainland Chinese returnees from Canada; it highlights the tensions and fissures manifested in secondary diasporas, particularly in light of China’s growing prominence in international business, foreign diplomacy and cultural exchanges. The paper suggests that social encounters that marginalise such migrants in Canada are reproduced in China. The returnees navigate such encounters by mobilising their transnational affiliations to different national contexts.     

古代近东小雕像的彩绘和彩绘工艺，公元前3000年到古波斯阿契美尼德王朝（公元前330年）

青铜时代的公元前3000年到希腊文化占统治地位的古波斯阿契美尼德王朝末期（公元前330年）。本文关注于人体的三维表现。同时会展示一些相关的动物形象。不同于古代希腊雕像,还没有开展对古代美索布达米亚雕塑彩绘颜料的化学分析工作。因此我将工作重点放在至今可见的彩色上。不同于秦俑,还没有古代美索布达米亚雕塑重建的例子。你可以看到大约公元2世纪女神伊施塔形象,这不是雕像,只是两维形象,在文中介绍了其彩绘重构工作。这将给你古代近东艺术彩绘的初始印象。     

Housing Vancouver, 1972–2017: A personal urban geography and a professional response

The forum includes a research paper, preceded by a brief introduction and followed by five short responses from Pablo Mendez, Loretta Lees, Margaret Walton-Roberts, Ilse Helbrecht, and Alison Mountz. Mountz's introduction sets the context for the paper and makes some framing remarks on David Ley's career. The main paper examines the housing question in Vancouver, in the period from 1972 to 2017. Re-examining a number of Ley's research projects over this period, three broader themes are explored: the continuity of the housing crisis, and its reconfiguration over the period under study; the contrast between innovative and interventionist housing policy in the 1970s, with the later withdrawal of the state from significant intervention while endorsing market solutions; and the new centrality of housing as an empirical and analytical category in current human geography. This period saw upscaling from the 1970s welfare state to neoliberal globalization, including wealth immigration and off-shore property investment that accelerated serious metropolitan affordability problems. Following this research paper, colleagues and former students respond to the paper and locate the contributions in David Ley's broader career. Their commentaries address Ley's key contributions to debates in human geography, including his work on gentrification, urbanism, urban activism, global migration, art, aesthetics, and ethnography.