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1. Urban Rhapsody: Large‐scale exploration of urban soundscapes

   https://doi.org/10.1111/cgf.14534  

   Rulff, Joao ; Miranda, Fabio ; Hosseini, Maryam ; Lage, Marcos ; Cartwright, Mark ; Dove, Graham ; Bello, Juan ; Silva, Claudio T. ( June 2022 , Computer Graphics Forum)
2. Urban Brush: Intuitive and Controllable Urban Layout Editing

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3472749.3474787  

   Benes, Bedrich ; Zhou, Xiaochen ; Chang, Pascal ; Cani, Marie-Paule R. ( October 2021 , UIST '21: The 34th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology)

   Efficient urban layout generation is an interesting and important problem in many applications dealing with computer graphics and entertainment. We introduce a novel framework for intuitive and controllable small and large-scale urban layout editing. The key inspiration comes from the observation that cities develop in small incremental changes e.g., a building is replaced, or a new road is created. We introduce a set of atomic operations that consistently modify the city. For example, two buildings are merged, a block is split in two, etc. Our second inspiration comes from volumetric editings, such as clay manipulation, where the manipulated material is preserved. The atomic operations are used in interactive brushes that consistently modify the urban layout. The city is populated with agents. Like volume transfer, the brushes attract or repulse the agents, and blocks can be merged and populated with smaller buildings. We also introduce a large-scale brush that repairs a part of the city by learning style as distributions of orientations and intersections. 

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3. Urban-Rural Surface Temperature Deviation and Intra-Urban Variations Contained by an Urban Growth Boundary

   https://doi.org/10.3390/rs11222683  

   Moffett, Kevan B. ; Makido, Yasuyo ; Shandas, Vivek ( November 2019 , Remote Sensing)

   The urban heat island (UHI) concept describes heat trapping that elevates urban temperatures relative to rural temperatures, at least in temperate/humid regions. In drylands, urban irrigation can instead produce an urban cool island (UCI) effect. However, the UHI/UCI characterization suffers from uncertainty in choosing representative urban/rural endmembers, an artificial dichotomy between UHIs and UCIs, and lack of consistent terminology for other patterns of thermal variation at nested scales. We use the case of a historically well-enforced urban growth boundary (UGB) around Portland (Oregon, USA): to explore the representativeness of the surface temperature UHI (SUHI) as derived from Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) land surface temperature data, to test common assumptions of characteristically “warm” or “cool” land covers (LCs), and to name other common urban thermal features of interest. We find that the UGB contains heat as well as sprawl, inducing a sharp surface temperature contrast across the urban/rural boundary. The contrast ranges widely depending on the end-members chosen, across a spectrum from positive (SUHI) to negative (SUCI) values. We propose a new, inclusive “urban thermal deviation” (UTD) term to span the spectrum of possible UHI-zero-UCI conditions. We also distinguish at finer scales “microthermal extremes” (MTEs), discrete areas tending in the same thermal direction as their LC or surroundings but to extreme (hot or cold) values, and microthermal anomalies (MTAs), that run counter to thermal expectations or tendencies for their LC or surroundings. The distinction is important because MTEs suggest a need for moderation in the local thermal landscape, whereas MTAs may suggest solutions. 

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4. Reconceptualizing urban heat island: Beyond the urban-rural dichotomy

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   Wang, Zhi-Hua ( February 2022 , Sustainable Cities and Society)
5. Investigating the Impact of Urban Layout Geometry on Urban Flooding

   A. Mustafa, M. Bruwier ( February 2019 , GEOProcessing 2019 : The Eleventh International Conference on Advanced Geographic Information Systems, Applications, and Services)

   In this paper, we use a procedural generation system to design urban layouts that passively reduce water depth during urban floods. The tool enables designing cities that passively lower flood depth everywhere or in chosen key areas. Our approach integrates a porosity-based hydraulic model and a parameterized urban generation system with an optimization engine so as to find the least cost modification to an initial urban layout. In order to investigate the relationship between urban layout design parameters and flood inundation depth, correlation coefficient method is used. This paper concludes that the most influential urban layout parameters are average road length and the mean parcel area. 

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