During the period of rapid urbanization, the urban fringe area is the area where urban expansion occurs first, and land use change is the most active. Studying its evolution laws and characteristics is of great significance to urban planning and urban expansion, and the primary task of fringe area research is the spatial recognition and boundary division of urban fringe area. The previous methods for defining urban fringe areas are mainly divided into qualitative division based on experience and quantitative division based on indicators constructing. This research avoids the construction of index systems and the selection of mathematical models and improves the objectivity of the experiment. Based on the existing methods, this research considers the correlation between the difference of industrial distribution within cities and the urban spatial structure and spatial distribution of urban elements and considers the distance decay law of urban density. The urban fringe area in this research is defined as the distinction region of the service and manufacturing industry extending outward from the inside of the city. First, calculate the POI density of service industry and manufacturing industry. Then look for the inflection point where its density value drops sharply and get the isoline of that point. The range within the isoline is that the industry extends outward from the inner city and has reached the saturation state. Two types of industries can determine two isolines, and the belt region between those isolines is the urban fringe area. We use the urban fringe area identified from the impervious surface data to verify the result. The comparative results show that the identification method of urban fringe area based on POI works effectively, and it can successfully identify the multi-center urban core area. The method mentioned in this paper provides a new idea from the perspective of industrial activities in identifying and defining the belt region of urban fringe area. Full article

The layout of public service facilities and their accessibility are important factors affecting spatial justice. Previous studies have verified the positive influence of public facilities accessibility on house prices; however, the spatial scale of the impact of various public facilities accessibility on house prices is not yet clear. This study takes transportation analysis zone of Wuhan city as the spatial unit, measure the public facilities accessibility of schools, hospitals, green space, and public transit stations with four kinds of accessibility models such as the nearest distance, real time travel cost, kernel density, and two step floating catchment area (2SFCA), and explores the multiscale effect of public services accessibility on house prices with multiscale geographically weighted regression model. The results show that the differentiated scale effect not only exists among different public facility accessibilities, but also exists in different accessibility models of the same sort of facility. The article also suggests that different facilities should adopt its appropriate accessibility model. This study provides insights into spatial heterogeneity of urban public service facilities accessibility, which will benefit decision making in equal accessibility planning and policy formulation for the layout of urban service facilities. Full article

This study proposes a new model for land suitability for educational facilities based on spatial product development to determine the optimal locations for achieving education targets in West Java, Indonesia. Single-aspect approaches, such as accessibility and spatial hazard analyses, have not been widely applied in suitability assessments on the location of educational facilities. Model development was performed based on analyses of the economic value of the land and on the integration of various parameters across three main aspects: accessibility, comfort, and a multi-natural/biohazard (disaster) risk index. Based on the maps of disaster hazards, higher flood-prone areas are found to be in gentle slopes and located in large cities. Higher risks of landslides are spread throughout the study area, while higher levels of earthquake risk are predominantly in the south, close to the active faults and megathrusts present. Presently, many schools are located in very high vulnerability zones (2057 elementary, 572 junior high, 157 senior high, and 313 vocational high schools). The comfort-level map revealed 13,459 schools located in areas with very low and low comfort levels, whereas only 2377 schools are in locations of high or very high comfort levels. Based on the school accessibility map, higher levels are located in the larger cities of West Java, whereas schools with lower accessibility are documented far from these urban areas. In particular, senior high school accessibility is predominant in areas of lower accessibility levels, as there are comparatively fewer facilities available in West Java. Overall, higher levels of suitability are spread throughout West Java. These distribution results revealed an expansion of the availability of schools by area: senior high schools, 303,973.1 ha; vocational high schools, 94,170.51 ha; and junior high schools, 12,981.78 ha. Changes in elementary schools (3936.69 ha) were insignificant, as the current number of elementary schools is relatively much higher. This study represents the first to attempt to integrate these four parameters—accessibility, multi natural hazard, biohazard, comfort index, and land value—to determine potential areas for new schools to achieve educational equity targets. Full article

The expansion of the rail transit network has a positive impact on travel characteristics under spatial and temporal constraints by changing accessibility. However, few empirical studies have examined the longitudinal evolution of the impact of accessibility and travel characteristics. In this paper, a model of the Wuhan rail transit network is constructed and the evolution of the spatial pattern of accessibility over different periods is analyzed. The correlation of accessibility with rail transit travel characteristics is studied longitudinally to provide theoretical support for rail transit construction and traffic demand management. The study shows that: (1) Wuhan’s rail transit network has evolved from a tree to a ring, improving the operational efficiency. (2) The accessibility of Wuhan’s rail transit network has evolved into a circular structure, showing a decreasing trend away from the city center. (3) The change of accessibility greatly affects travel characteristics. The higher the accessibility, the higher the traffic volume, and the lower the travel frequency, the more residents travel during peak hours, and the shorter the travel distance. These findings are useful for gaining insight into public transportation demand in large cities, and thus for developing reasonable transportation demand management policies. Full article

Accessibility analyses are an essential step in the evaluation and planning of urban infrastructures such as transport or pipeline networks. However, these studies generally produce sharply defined lines (called isovarones) or areas (called isovarone areas) that represent the same or similar accessibility. Uncertainties in the input data are usually not taken into account. The aim of this contribution is, therefore, to set up a structured framework that describes the integration of uncertainty information for accessibility analyses. This framework takes uncertainties in the input data, in the processing step, in the target variables, and in the final visualization into account. Particular attention is paid, on the one hand, to the impact of the uncertainties in the target values, as these are key factors for reasoning and decision making. On the other hand, the visualization component is emphasized by applying a dichotomous classification of uncertainty visualization methods. This framework leads to a large set of possible combinations of uncertainty categories. Five selected examples that have been generated with a new software tool and that cover important combinations are presented and discussed. Full article

More than half of the world’s populations now live in rapidly expanding urban and its surrounding areas. The consequences for Land Use/Land Cover (LULC) dynamics and Surface Urban Heat Island (SUHI) phenomena are poorly understood for many new cities. We explore this issue and their inter-relationship in the Kathmandu Valley, an area of roughly 694 km², at decadal intervals using April (summer) Landsat images of 1988, 1998, 2008, and 2018. LULC assessment was made using the Support Vector Machine algorithm. In the Kathmandu Valley, most land is either natural vegetation or agricultural land but in the study period there was a rapid expansion of impervious surfaces in urban areas. Impervious surfaces (IL) grew by 113.44 km² (16.34% of total area), natural vegetation (VL) by 6.07 km² (0.87% of total area), resulting in the loss of 118.29 km² area from agricultural land (17.03% of total area) during 1988–2018. At the same time, the average land surface temperature (LST) increased by nearly 5–7 °C in the city and nearly 3–5 °C at the city boundary. For different LULC classes, the highest mean LST increase during 1988–2018 was 7.11 °C for IL with the lowest being 3.18 °C for VL although there were some fluctuations during this time period. While open land only occupies a small proportion of the landscape, it usually had higher mean LST than all other LULC classes. There was a negative relationship both between LST and Normal Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and LST and Normal Difference Moisture Index (NDMI), respectively, and a positive relationship between LST and Normal Difference Built-up Index (NDBI). The result of an urban–rural gradient analysis showed there was sharp decrease of mean LST from the city center outwards to about 15 kms because the NDVI also sharply increased, especially in 2008 and 2018, which clearly shows a surface urban heat island effect. Further from the city center, around 20–25 kms, mean LST increased due to increased agriculture activity. The population of Kathmandu Valley was 2.88 million in 2016 and if the growth trend continues then it is predicted to reach 3.85 million by 2035. Consequently, to avoid the critical effects of increasing SUHI in Kathmandu it is essential to improve urban planning including the implementation of green city technologies. Full article

Hemeroby is an integrated indicator used to measure the impact and degree of all human interventions on ecological components or ecosystems. The constant exploitation of resources is a strong interference of human beings to the natural environment. With the depletion of non-renewable resources, some cities with resource exploitation as their main industry—“resource-based cities”—are facing great development pressure. In order to quantify the impact of human disturbance on the natural environment and provide some scientific support for policy makers of the resource-based city, we used remote sensing images and landscape pattern metrics, introduced the synthetic hemeroby index model and analyzed the relationship between human disturbance and landscape pattern during 1990–2017. The results showed that: (1) The hemeroby in Daqing continued to rise during 1990–2017, and the main factor was the continuous expansion of the construction land and the reclamation of farmland. (2) In the areas with different hemeroby, there were significant differences in landscape pattern. In the areas with high-level hemeroby, the heterogeneity of landscape pattern was low, the aggregation among patches was high, and the shape of patches was regular, whereas the landscape pattern in the areas with medium-level hemeroby was just opposite. Although the heterogeneity of landscape pattern and the aggregation among patches were high in the areas with low-level hemeroby, the complexity of landscape was low and the shape of patches was regular. (3) In the temporal dimension, the increase of hemeroby contributed to the complexity of patch shape, the decrease of the aggregation among patches, and the fragmentation of landscape pattern. In the spatial dimension, the response in landscape pattern to human disturbance was relatively insensitive in the areas with low-level hemeroby, and this response was basically same in the high-level hemeroby and the whole study areas. Full article

Globally, fire causes considerable losses that can be alleviated by taking appropriate actions facilitated by systems supported by geo-information technologies. This research focuses upon the development of an approach for planning urban infrastructures, and particularly in the accessibility of fire hydrants. Accessibility of fire hydrants’ infrastructure in urban territories is one of the key elements in fire risk management and public safety. The main result of the research is a comprehensive and structured Geographic Information Systems (GISs)-based dataset for the fast and more efficient planning of fire hydrants in urban territories. The proposed framework for data collection and processing was used to determine the distribution of hydrants, location of fire brigade stations and areas and to demonstrate the capabilities of the existing municipal fire extinguishing systems in Vilnius City, Lithuania. Later on, research on fire hydrants’ accessibility, analysis of the location of protected and unprotected urban territories and marking of unprotected buildings, was carried out. The resulting map of unprotected urban territories can be of great benefit for understanding fire risks and offering more effective ways for fire risk management. Full article