Publications related to Urban and Regional Planning Community

Quartiers rhodaniens en transition

Over the course of history, the relationship between cities and their waters has shown different gradients of interweaving, marked by cycles of bonding and distancing. Following a period of complete neglect of urban watercourses, the versatile, multifacete ...

EPFL2024

Urban sustainability assessment through spatial lenses: turning the spotlight on the local neighbourhood unit

Melissa Pang

With global environmental change and quality of life issues at the forefront of international discussions today, urban development strategies and policies are often framed around various sustainability or liveability goals. Regardless of the sustainability ...

EPFL2023

Visual Capital: Evaluating building-level visual landscape quality at scale

Adam Robert Swietek

Evaluating visual landscape quality provides valuable information for urban development and spatial planning. In practice however, obtaining high resolution view-metrics and outcome data with sufficient geographic coverage has remained challenging. To over ...

2023

China’s extended urbanization driven by the 'consumption city' in the context of financialized ecological civilization

Florence Graezer Bideau, Thierry Marcel Theurillat

This article seeks to address current debates on ongoing China’s urban development and makes a theoretical proposal that links financialization and ecological civilization through the perspective of the increasing role of consumption in today’s transition ...

2022

Urban sustainability assessment in Geneva: Relevance of the local neighbourhood unit

Claudia Rebeca Binder Signer, François Golay, Melissa Pang

The physical characteristics of an urban system are typically heterogeneously expressed, creating distinct neighbourhoods shaped by specific local features. Hence, spatially explicit expression of sustainability across the urban system is expected and shou ...

Sage2022

The Horizontal Metropolis. The Anthology

Paola Viganò, Martina Barcelloni Corte

This book draws together classic and contemporary texts on the “Horizontal Metropolis” concept. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, it explores various theoretical, methodological and political implications of the Horizontal Metropolis hypothesis. Assemb ...

Springer2022

Reviewing the application of machine learning methods to model urban form indicators in planning decision support systems : potential, issues and challenges

Jérôme Chenal, Rémi Jaligot

Modern cities dynamically face several challenges including digitalization, sustainability, resilience and economic development. Urban planners and designers must develop urban forms that address these challenges. With the integration of new communication ...

2022

OUR COMMON SOILS: West Lausanne Urbanization as Anthropedogenesis, A Section through the Spaces and Times of Urban Soils

Antoine Vialle

Motivated by ever-increasing soil degradation and artificialization due to past and present urban growth dynamics, the current trend of spatial planning policies at the European and Swiss levels is promoting increased soil protection, by avoiding new devel ...

EPFL2021

Unraveling how the concept of circularity relates to sustainability: An indicator-based meta-analysis applied at the urban scale

Claudia Rebeca Binder Signer, Albert Merino, Valeria Superti

Cities account for 75% of resource consumption and 80% of CO2 emissions. With rising urbanization, achieving urban sustainability becomes crucial. The Circular Economy (CE) concept has been proposed to reduce resource consumption, although its link to sust ...

2021

Spatiotemporal patterns of urbanization during the last four decades in Switzerland and their impacts on urban heat islands

Martí Bosch Padrós

Urbanization is nowadays a global phenomenon which is increasingly concentrating the world's population in cities. In Switzerland, recent decades have seen an unprecedented loss of arable land due to urbanization, which has triggered amendments in the spat ...

EPFL2021