An official website of the United States government
Abstract Understanding changes in the built environment is vital for sustainable urban development and disaster preparedness. Recent years have seen the emergence of a variety of global, continent-level, and nation-wide datasets related to the current state and the evolution of the built environment, human settlements or building stocks. However, such datasets may face limitations like incomplete coverage, sparse building information, coarse resolution, and limited timeframes. This study addresses these challenges by integrating three spatial datasets to create an extensive, attribute-rich sequence of settlement layers spanning 200 years for the contiguous U.S. This integration process involves complex data processing, merging property-level real estate, parcel, and remote sensing-based building footprint data, and creating gridded multi-temporal settlement layers. This effort unveils the latest edition (Version 2) of the Historical Settlement Data Compilation for the U.S. (HISDAC-US), which includes the latest land use and structural information as of the year 2021. It enables detailed research on urban form and structure, helps assess and map the built environment’s risk to natural hazards, assists in population modeling, supports land use analysis, and aids health studies.
more »
« less
The persistence of ancient settlements and urban sustainability
We propose a dedicated research effort on the determinants of settlement persistence in the ancient world, with the potential to significantly advance the scientific understanding of urban sustainability today. Settlements (cities, towns, villages) are locations with two key attributes: They frame human interactions and activities in space, and they are where people dwell or live. Sustainability, in this case, focuses on the capacity of structures and functions of a settlement system (geography, demography, institutions) to provide for continuity of safe habitation. The 7,000-y-old experience of urbanism, as revealed by archaeology and history, includes many instances of settlements and settlement systems enduring, adapting to, or generating environmental, institutional, and technological changes. The field of urban sustainability lacks a firm scientific foundation for understanding the long durée, relying instead on narratives of collapse informed by limited case studies. We argue for the development of a new interdisciplinary research effort to establish scientific understanding of settlement and settlement system persistence. Such an effort would build upon the many fields that study human settlements to develop new theories and databases from the extensive documentation of ancient and premodern urban systems. A scientific foundation will generate novel insights to advance the field of urban sustainability.
more »
« less
- PAR ID:
- 10300611
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
- Volume:
- 118
- Issue:
- 20
- ISSN:
- 0027-8424
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- e2018155118
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
Abstract Cities are concentrators of complex, multi‐sectoral interactions. As keystones in the interconnected human‐Earth system, cities have an outsized impact on the Earth system. We describe a multi‐lens framework for organizing our understanding of the complexity of urban systems and scientific research on urban systems, which may be useful for natural system scientists exploring the ways their work can be made more actionable. We then describe four critical dimensions along which improvements are needed to advance the urban research that addresses urgent climate challenges: (a) solutions‐oriented research, (b) equity‐centered assessments which rely on fine‐scale human and ecological data, (c) co‐production of knowledge, and (d) better integration of human and natural systems occurring through theory, observation, and modeling.more » « less
-
Landscapes and human settlements evolve over long periods of time. Land change, as one of the drivers of the ecological crisis in the Anthropocene, therefore, needs to be studied with a long-term perspective. Over the past decades, a substantial body of research has accumulated in the field of land change science. The quantitative geospatial analysis of land change, however, still faces many challenges; be that methodological or data accessibility related. This editorial introduces several scientific contributions to an open-access Special Issue on historical settlement and landscape analysis. The featured articles cover all phases of the analysis process in this field: from the exploration and geocoding of data sources and the acquisition and processing of data to the adequate visualization and application of the retrieved historical geoinformation for knowledge generation. The data used in this research include archival maps, cadastral and master plans, crowdsourced data, airborne LiDAR and satellite-based data products. From a geographical perspective, the issue covers urban and rural regions in Central Europe and North America as well as regions subject to highly dynamic urbanization in East Asia. In the view of global environmental challenges, both the need for long-term studies on land change within Earth system research and the current advancement in AI methods for the retrieval, processing and integration of historical geoinformation will further fuel this field of research.more » « less
-
Many communities in southwestern Madagascar rely on a mix of foraging, fishing, farming, and herding, with cattle central to local cultures, rituals, and intergenerational wealth transfer. Today these livelihoods are critically threatened by the intensifying effects of climate change and biodiversity loss. Improved understanding of ancient community-environment dynamics can help identify pathways to livelihood sustainability. Multidisciplinary approaches have great potential to improve our understanding of human-environment interactions across spatio-temporal scales. We combine archaeological survey data, oral history interviews, and high-resolution multispectral PlanetScope imagery to explore 400 years of human-environment interaction in the Namonte Basin. Our analysis reveals that settlement and land-use led to significant changes in the region’s ecology, both during periods of occupation and after settlement abandonment. Human activity over this period may have stabilized vegetative systems, whereby seasonal changes in vegetative health were reduced compared to surrounding locations. These ecological legacies may have buffered communities against unpredictable climate challenges.more » « less
-
null (Ed.)Abstract There are urgent calls for developing a comprehensive and globally-relevant urban science that emphasizes convergence among disciplines and practice. Advancing theory and conceptual frameworks is critical to developing a new urban systems science. We synthesize five frameworks that address features identified in calls for global urban science. The frameworks address the overarching urban conditions of complexity, diffuseness, connectivity, and diversity of cities across the globe. The frameworks also help evaluate how a project or study may advance sustainability. The metacity concept, a spatially scalable representation of mosaic change in urban systems, demonstrates how the frameworks apply to increasingly extensive, spatially heterogeneous, and dynamic urban regions. The metacity concept helps avoid static and isolated plans and management approaches and provides a conceptual foundation for an interdisciplinary urban systems science. The frameworks suggest a practical checklist that may help interventions, strategies, and research better align with goals for transforming urban systems toward sustainability.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2018155118
