Hayub Song

The aim of this paper is to investigate the correlation between gender and urban space. The tropes of Korean women illustrated by media and the changing urban structures influenced by women were examined, focusing on the Gangnam District of Seoul from the 1970s to the 1990s. We draw on insights from social-geographic theories to conceptualize the city as a social space formed by the experiences and relationships between individuals and to indicate how women have been excluded and represented through the gendered segregation of space since the modernization of Korea in the 1960s. My study argues about the tropes of “Gangnam-themed Women” who are portrayed as “speculators,” “influential customers,” “oversolicitous mothers,” and “women crazy about their appearance.” Gangnam women were framed as ideal females became they were the very first women to broaden their area of activity into public space with their financial powers. As they played a role in improving the social status of women and fostering Gangnam as a prospective area, an illusion was created that women’s rights had been fully achieved. This paper closes by exploring how present-day Korean women struggle against the fantasy of their social position to gain authentic women’s rights and space for women.

Urban vegetation is an essential element of the urban city pedestrian walkway. Despite city forest regulations and urban planning best practices, vegetation planning lacks clear comprehension and compatibility with other urban elements surrounding it. Urban planners and academic researchers currently devote vital attention to include most of the urban elements and their impact on the occupants and the environment in the planning stage of urban development. With the advancement in computational design, they have developed various algorithms to generate design alternatives and measure their impact on the environment that meets occupants’ needs and perceptions of their city. In particular, multi-agent-based simulations show great promise in developing rule compliance with urban vegetation design tools. This paper proposed an automatic urban vegetation city rule compliance approach for pedestrian pathway vegetation, leveraging multi-agent system and algorithmic modeling tools. This approach comprises three modules: rule compliance (T-Rule), street vegetation design tool (T-Design), and multi-agent alternative generation (T-Agent). Notably, the scope of the paper is limited to trees, shrubbery, and seating area configurations in the urban pathway context. To validate the developed design tool, a case study was tested, and the vegetation design tool generated the expected results successfully. A questionnaire was conducted to give feedback on the use of the developed tool for enhancing positive experience of the developed tool. It is anticipated that the proposed tool has the potential to aid urban planners in decision-making and develop more practical vegetation planting plans compared with the conventional Two-Dimensional (2D) plans, and give the city occupants the chance to take part in shaping their city by merely selecting from predefined parameters in a user interface to generate their neighborhood pathway vegetation plans. Moreover, this approach can be extended to be embedded in an interactive map where city occupants can shape their neighborhood greenery and give feedback to urban planners for decision-making.

The aim of this study was to develop an artificial neural network (ANN) prediction model for controlling building heating systems. This model was used to calculate the ascent time of indoor temperature from the setback period (when a building was not occupied) to a target setpoint temperature (when a building was occupied). The calculated ascent time was applied to determine the proper moment to start increasing the temperature from the setback temperature to reach the target temperature at an appropriate time. Three major steps were conducted: (1) model development; (2) model optimization; and (3) performance evaluation. Two software programs—Matrix Laboratory (MATLAB) and Transient Systems Simulation (TRNSYS)—were used for model development, performance tests, and numerical simulation methods. Correlation analysis between input variables and the output variable of the ANN model revealed that two input variables (current indoor air temperature and temperature difference from the target setpoint temperature), presented relatively strong relationships with the ascent time to the target setpoint temperature. These two variables were used as input neurons. Analyzing the difference between the simulated and predicted values from the ANN model provided the optimal number of hidden neurons (9), hidden layers (3), moment (0.9), and learning rate (0.9). At the study’s conclusion, the optimized model proved its prediction accuracy with acceptable errors.