Urban Currents

2026-07-23

7 arXiv categories· 96 journals· 397 candidates — 13 worth your time· 19 without an open abstract

No headline

a quiet day in urban data science

Today, together

tag shift
no tag ran above its 30-day average
canon
no foundational work is cited twice today
coupling
Quantitative assessment and prevention for car-following risk on foggy bridge based on field theory shares 15 references with Performance Analysis of Active Prevention and Control Strategy for Driving Risk Before, On, and After Foggy Bridges Considering Crash and Noncrash Conditions (2026-07-04)
3 of them
  • Experimental research on the effectiveness and adaptability of speed reduction markings in downhill sections on urban roads: A driving simulation study
  • Car following decisions under three visibility conditions and two speeds tested with a driving simulator
  • Study design in clinical research: sample size estimation and power analysis
; Gentrification in African cities: a critical review shares 4 references with Rent gap thinking beyond gentrification: rent gap deflation in Havana, Cuba (2026-07-15)
3 of them
  • Why gentrification theory fails in ‘much of the world’
  • Planetary Rent Gaps
  • The changing state of gentrification
institutions
Tongji University on 32 papers in 30 days; Hong Kong Polytechnic University on 24 papers in 30 days; Peking University on 19 papers in 30 days; Tsinghua University on 18 papers in 30 days

published: Journal of Housing and the Built Environment

Robert Boyer, Aemiro Melkamu Daniel, Andrea Armstrong, et al.
Journal of Housing and the Built Environment

RISE Research Institutes of Sweden

Collaborative and Sustainable Housing Initiatives · Place Attachment and Urban Studies · Facilities and Workplace Management · survey · Netherlands · RISE Research Institutes of Sweden

Sharing residential spaces: a comparative study of willingness to share in the Netherlands, Slovenia, and Sweden

This study analyzed survey responses from 3,077 individuals across the Netherlands, Slovenia, and Sweden to evaluate willingness to share three residential spaces: kitchen-and-dining areas, work-from-home spaces, and workshops. Using ordered logit models, the analysis linked sharing preferences to socio-demographic traits, prior sharing experience, environmental attitudes, and national context.

Why it matters — It establishes that openness to shared housing facilities is highly variable across demographic groups and countries, but consistently correlates with prior sharing experience, extraversion, and environmental efficacy.

Caveat: The findings reflect self-reported preferences under hypothetical conditions rather than actual market demand.

Journal of Housing and the Built Environment · pdf · doi

published: Transportation Research Part D Transport and Environment

Daniel Cassidy, Kelly de Bruin
Transportation Research Part D Transport and Environment

Economic and Social Research Institute

Energy, Environment, and Transportation Policies · Electric Vehicles and Infrastructure · Vehicle emissions and performance · simulation · Economic and Social Research Institute · Trinity College Dublin

Policy pathways for low-carbon transport in Ireland: Carbon taxes and ICE bans

The study introduces I3E-Transport, a passenger transport model linked to a computable general equilibrium framework, to simulate Irish transport emissions, vehicle stock, and energy demand from 2024 to 2050. The simulations reveal that while a carbon tax achieves minimal emission reductions, a complete ban on internal combustion engine vehicles (including hybrids) starting in 2035 cuts CO2 emissions by over five million tonnes relative to the baseline by 2050.

Why it matters — It demonstrates that standard carbon taxation is insufficient for deep decarbonization in passenger transit, proving that only an immediate and comprehensive ban on fossil-fuel vehicles can align the sector with national carbon budget targets.

Caveat: The findings are based on a simulation model for a single country, and the projected emission reductions depend on the assumption that the ban is implemented early and comprehensively.

Transportation Research Part D Transport and Environment · pdf · doi

published: Transportation Research Interdisciplinary Perspectives

Shahir Masri, Yiqiao Li, Luyi Gui, et al.
Transportation Research Interdisciplinary Perspectives

Faculty of Public Health

Transport Systems and Technology · Urban and Freight Transport Logistics · Traffic Prediction and Management Techniques · regression · satellite imagery · census data

Satellite-based detection of heavy-duty trucks: distribution and health impacts in southern California

This study mapped the spatial distribution of heavy-duty trucks and containers across 746 census tracts in southern California using a satellite-based truck-counting method that fuses satellite imagery with public GIS data. The researchers analyzed how truck and container density relates to warehouse density, PM2.5 concentrations, environmental burdens, and sociodemographic factors. They found that warehouse density, PM2.5 levels, and the presence of hazardous waste facilities are strongly and positively associated with truck density (p < 0.0001), while population density and the proportion of White residents are inversely associated.

Why it matters — It demonstrates a new satellite-based data source for mapping freight traffic at a census-tract scale, proving that warehouse siting directly correlates with localized truck density and compounding environmental injustices for minority populations.

Caveat: The study relies on a newly developed satellite-based counting method as a proxy for actual ground-level truck traffic, which may introduce unmeasured detection errors across different built environments.

Transportation Research Interdisciplinary Perspectives · pdf · doi

published: Journal of Urban Planning and Development

Farhan Asim, P. S. Chani, Venu Shree, et al.
Journal of Urban Planning and Development

Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee

Urban Green Space and Health · Building Energy and Comfort Optimization · Urban Heat Island Mitigation · Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee · National Institute of Technology Hamirpur

Greenery Alone Is Not Enough: Developing a Quantified Model of the Built Environment for Restorative Campuses Using AI-Driven VR and EEG

This study evaluated how different combinations of built and natural elements affect cognitive restoration by measuring the normalized alpha brainwave activity of participants in virtual reality environments. Using generative AI to render 360-degree panoramic scenes, the researchers tested how varying the visual percentages of buildings, greenery, water, and sky influenced relaxation. Stepwise multiple regression models showed that physical environmental variables explained 64.5% of brainwave variance, with greenery having the strongest positive effect before plateauing, while higher-order spatial constructs like environmental novelty and prospect-refuge dynamics explained 67.7% of the variance.

Why it matters — The findings challenge the binary assumption that green spaces are inherently restorative and built structures are detrimental, demonstrating instead that built elements can enhance mental recovery when balanced with sky openness, water, and perceptual novelty.

Caveat: The study relies on simulated virtual reality environments and brainwave proxies for restoration rather than measuring long-term cognitive performance in actual physical campus settings.

Journal of Urban Planning and Development · doi

published: Planning Perspectives

Miles Glendinning
Planning Perspectives

University of Edinburgh

Political and Economic history of UK and US · Urban Design and Spatial Analysis · Urbanization and City Planning · United Kingdom · University of Edinburgh

The Modern British City 1945–2000

This collection of historical essays synthesizes research on the built environment of British cities between 1945 and 2000. It brings together diverse sub-disciplinary perspectives to document the physical and architectural evolution of urban spaces across the United Kingdom during the post-war era.

Why it matters — It provides a multi-faceted historical record of late-twentieth-century British urbanism, offering a consolidated reference for how post-war planning and architectural shifts physically reshaped the nation's cities.

Caveat: The overview of the built environment is presented as a series of individual essays, which may result in a fragmented rather than a fully unified historical narrative.

Planning Perspectives · doi

published: Urban Geography

Alessia Frescura, Marco Spada
Urban Geography

University of Suffolk

Urban Planning and Governance · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Urban Design and Spatial Analysis · University of Suffolk

The transitional sensorium of Taranto Tamburi: navigating urban space through serial visions, sounds, and smells

This pilot fieldwork maps the multisensorial characteristics of the Tamburi neighborhood in Taranto, Italy, a district adjacent to a major steel plant undergoing a post-industrial transition. The researchers combined serial visions, soundwalks, and smellscape notation to document the area's sensory landscape, identifying a distinct dissonance between a quiet post-industrial acoustic environment and a dominant industrial visual presence.

Why it matters — It demonstrates how combining visual, auditory, and olfactory mapping can capture the complex, suspended identity of neighborhoods transitioning away from heavy industry, offering a methodology to document urban change beyond standard spatial metrics.

Caveat: The study is a pilot fieldwork project, meaning the findings are highly localized to a single neighborhood and may not represent a fully scaled sensory inventory.

Urban Geography · doi

published: City

Lewis Abedi Asante, Richmond Juvenile Ehwi, Mary Amoah, et al.
City

Stellenbosch University

Urban Planning and Governance · Urban and Rural Development Challenges · Local Economic Development and Planning · Stellenbosch University · Kumasi Technical University · Oxford Brookes University

Gentrification in African cities: a critical review

This paper synthesizes 45 peer-reviewed studies on gentrification in African cities, analyzing how land commodification, rent gap dynamics, gentrification actors, and displacement manifest in these contexts. It identifies that land commodification is propelled by rapid urbanization, foreign capital, and shifting land tenure, while rent gaps frequently arise from under-utilized state lands and ecological commodification rather than classic urban disinvestment.

Why it matters — It challenges the universal applicability of Global North gentrification theories by demonstrating that African gentrification relies on heterogeneous multi-actor coalitions rather than standard developer-led models, and involves displacement that is ecological and socio-economic rather than just physical.

Caveat: The findings are based on a literature review of 45 existing peer-reviewed studies rather than new empirical fieldwork.

City · doi

published: Social & Cultural Geography

Mary Gilmartin
Social & Cultural Geography

National University of Ireland, Maynooth

American Sports and Literature · Oral History, Memory, Narrative Analysis · Themes in Literature Analysis · National University of Ireland, Maynooth

Turning over new leaves: books that made me

This reflective essay traces the intellectual development of a geographer through four key texts read across different career stages and locations: Feminism & Geography in Dublin, The Wretched of the Earth in Kentucky, Even in Sweden in Nottingham, and Imperial Intimacies in Maynooth. The analysis explores how these works address feminism, colonialism, racism, and epistemology while offering frameworks for academic belonging and hope.

Why it matters — It documents the personal and emotional dimensions of geographic scholarship, demonstrating how foundational texts shape a researcher's identity and political commitment over time.

Caveat: The text is a personal, autobiographical essay rather than an empirical research study.

Social & Cultural Geography · doi

published: International Journal of Sustainable Transportation

Yu Rao
International Journal of Sustainable Transportation

Tsinghua Sichuan Energy Internet Research Institute

Railway Systems and Energy Efficiency · Thermal Analysis in Power Transmission · Railway Engineering and Dynamics · Tsinghua Sichuan Energy Internet Research Institute · Tsinghua University

What is the ideal underground metro vertical alignment for energy-efficient train control?

This study formulates a coupled optimal control problem that integrates train control with underground metro vertical alignment (UMVA) using Pontryagin's Maximum Principle to derive six optimal control structures. Using real-world data from the Wuxi Metro, the researchers developed a mixed-integer quadratic programming model to calculate the ideal vertical alignment and corresponding train control strategies.

Why it matters — It quantifies the theoretical upper limit of energy savings from vertical alignment optimization, showing that while an ideal unconstrained alignment can reduce energy consumption by up to 42.05%, real-world engineering constraints reduce this maximum energy-saving rate to 27.08%.

Caveat: The empirical validation and energy-saving rates are based on data from a single transit system, the Wuxi Metro.

International Journal of Sustainable Transportation · doi

published: Transportmetrica A Transport Science

Yibo Dai, Xiaohua Zhao, Sen Luan, et al.
Transportmetrica A Transport Science

Beijing University of Technology

Traffic and Road Safety · Transportation Safety and Impact Analysis · Occupational Health and Safety Research · Beijing University of Technology · Shanxi Science and Technology Department

Quantitative assessment and prevention for car-following risk on foggy bridge based on field theory

The study developed a risk-field-guided quantitative framework to assess and mitigate car-following risks on foggy bridges using driving simulation experiments across three scenarios: ordinary roads, ordinary bridges, and foggy bridges. Risk field force models were constructed to quantify driver behavior, revealing that foggy bridges induce excessive following tendencies with insufficient behavioral compensation, leading to the highest risk levels among the tested environments. A targeted prevention strategy was also designed and validated to reduce these risks.

Why it matters — It quantifies how the combined environmental stressors of bridge infrastructure and fog impair driver cognition and destabilize car-following behavior, providing a validated intervention strategy for active bridge safety management.

Caveat: The findings and prevention strategies are based on driving simulator experiments rather than real-world highway driving data.

Transportmetrica A Transport Science · doi

datapreprint

Hakan Calim, Anamaria Dumitrescu, Adarsh Bhandary Panambur, et al.
arXiv cs.CV

remote sensing classification

Safety-oriented sidewalk and road segmentation for smartphone-based assistive navigation

The study introduces SENSATION-DS, a chest-height pedestrian-view dataset containing 2,752 image-mask pairs categorized into a nine-class navigation taxonomy. It evaluates five semantic segmentation architectures on Android devices using staged target-domain adaptation with synthetic images and Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2) pseudo-labels. DeepLabV3Plus-MobileNetV3 achieved the lowest Road-as-Sidewalk Error Rate of 0.079 and the fastest Android runtime of 7.383 frames per second at a 512x384 resolution, while UPerNet-MobileNetV3 reached the highest offline mean Intersection over Union of 0.715.

Why it matters — It establishes a multi-metric evaluation framework for assistive navigation that balances standard segmentation accuracy with safety-critical false-safe error rates and real-time mobile hardware performance.

Caveat: The real-world utility and safety of the models have not yet been validated through testing with blind and visually impaired users.

arXiv · pdf

preprint

Gefei Zhao, Jiahe Ling, Yuelong Su
arXiv stat.AP

smart card data

Transit Destination Inference from Tap-In-Only Bus Smart-Card Data: A Hierarchical Bayesian Approach

The researchers developed a Hierarchical Bayesian Latent-Destination model to infer bus passenger alightings from tap-in-only smart card data. The model was tested on 838,305 bus tap-ins from Changzhou in May 2025, incorporating stop networks, hourly weather, and passenger card histories to estimate destination distributions. Fitted using stochastic variational inference, the model successfully resolved destinations for trips that deterministic trip-chaining methods could not resolve.

Why it matters — It provides a probabilistic framework that propagates destination uncertainty directly into origin-destination matrices, allowing transit agencies with entry-only fare systems to generate reliable planning data even for passengers without historical card records.

Caveat: Because actual alighting data was unavailable, the model's performance was evaluated based on its agreement with reconstructed trip-chain outputs rather than direct ground-truth destinations.

arXiv · pdf

preprint

Elderly People with Frailty or Dementia Azul Debenedetti, David Gamez, Franco Such, et al.
arXiv cs.AI

machine learning

SafeStep: AI-powered Travel Assistance for Elderly People with Frailty or Dementia

Researchers developed SafeStep, an AI-driven travel assistance system that uses a novel travel graph representation to integrate route planning with predictive modeling for elderly users with frailty or dementia. The system generates personalized journey failure scenarios using Large Language Models combined with the Anticip8 behavioral prediction engine, proposes interventions, and selects the options most likely to ensure a successful trip. The technology was evaluated through travel graph generation experiments and a field study tracking 26 real-world journeys.

Why it matters — It introduces a predictive, personalized routing capability that anticipates specific cognitive and physical travel failures for vulnerable pedestrians, rather than relying on standard static routing algorithms.

Caveat: The field evaluation was limited to 26 journeys, and user feedback highlighted that the interface usability requires further refinement to be fully accessible to the target demographic.

arXiv · pdf

Also published today

These appeared today in journals we track. Their abstracts are not openly available, so we cannot summarise them.