Kongjian Yu

Historic centers tend to be appreciated due to symbolism and architecture; meanwhile, their regular users interact with them through effort, heat, surface, seating, signposting, landscaping maintenance, and opportunity to stop during the trip. Bursa’s historic center is studied as an open corridor combining heritage, business, arrival via transport, and urban routine of Green Tomb, Setbaşı, Heykel, Historical Hans District, Tophane, National Garden, Reşat Oyal Culture Park, and adjacent streets. The data includes 250 users and four indices: Need-Conversion Ordering, Affordance–Demand Imbalance, Neutrality Retention Screening, and Adequacy–Satisfaction Divergence. Satisfaction, adequacy, demand, reliability, demographic, access-mode, duration of stay, and activity data are used in combination to rank public realm support. The prolonged and transit-related nature of use makes the interpretation of results different from planning one. In total, 69.20% of respondents were staying for more than two hours and 44.40% arrived by bus or minibus; therefore, the corridor should be seen in terms of pedestrian connectivity after arrival. The maximum need conversion is provided by green connectivity and rest in the shade (58.28), followed by connectivity and universally available route (52.18). The biggest gap between afforded and demanded features is green connectivity (61.53), followed by accessibility (57.34), and tourism interpretation (50.32). The equipment and maintenance is the index with the highest neutrality retention weight (3.67); meanwhile, comfort and image are indices with the highest adequacy-satisfaction divergence (26.69). Therefore, the historic center of Bursa should be developed first in terms of long-term, walkable, shady, and accessible public realm corridor; meanwhile, interpretive and identity-related efforts will work once this framework is set up.

The 2024 Climate Design Summit, held on October 29, 2024, emphasized the importance of interdisciplinary approaches in tackling climate change challenges. Experts from architecture, engineering, and environmental science gathered to discuss sustainable solutions for mitigating climate disasters like floods, wildfires, and droughts. The summit advocated for cross-disciplinary solutions that integrate Nature-based Solutions as catalysts for climate resilience and are essential for long-term sustainability, and stressed that no single technical solution can address the complexity of climate issues. Successful case studies were highlighted as examples of how design can address both climate resilience and socio-economic challenges. The gathered insights and discussions on this summit reinforced that achieving climate resilience requires a holistic approach that blends scientific innovation, sustainable design, and community empowerment, and underlined the need for collaboration across disciplines and sectors to build resilient cities and infrastructures.

During every summer and winter vacation, the entrances of Peking University and Tsinghua University in China are always crowded with visitors. Although it is not yet possible to fully open and share campus facilities with the public, a reasonable solution would be allocating part of the entrance space to create a shared public square, with trees planted and seating arranged. This would offer shade and rest areas for the young visitors and their parents who travel from across the country. Such improvements would not only benefit visitors and reduce security burdens, but also enhance the universities’ image and reflect their spirit of inclusiveness. Moreover, it would offer these prestigious institutions an opportunity to showcase their culture, disseminate knowledge, and promote enlightenment, while embodying the humanistic care and social commitment that universities should uphold.

The Vatican Climate Summit, titled “From Climate Crisis to Climate Resilience”, was successfully held in May 2024. A landmark achievement of the Summit was the introduction and adoption of the Planetary Protocol for Climate Change Resilience. This comprehensive framework calls for global cooperation to enhance climate resilience through the implementation of the MAST principles—mitigation, adaptation, and societal transformation, laying the groundwork for a strategic approach to climate action. Facing the current climate challenge, it is also crucial to understand the complexity of climate change, conduct climate design, and promote educational paradigm change for future global leadership in planet stewardship.

High-resolution overhead imagery captures building arrangement, street structure, vegetation cover, industrial land use, water surfaces, and outdoor activity space in a resolution appropriate for neighborhood analysis. However, semantic classification of such imagery is reduced to an ordinal score by counting favorable criteria, despite the difference in recognition reliability between visual cues and the possibility of moving from one class to another by changing one indicator alone. An Evidence-Calibrated Urban Scene Quality Index (ECUSQI) was devised to convert five semantically identifiable visual indicators into a reliability-based five-point scale. We analyzed a test set of 3038 labeled samples of urban imagery patches extracted from central Changsha (China) among 3874 RGB patches of 250 × 250 pixels with 0.5 m ground sampling distance (GSD). Recognition reliability of 615 test scenes with respect to open building layout, grid-like street structure, vegetation coverage, lack of industrial areas, and presence of activity space was estimated in the training procedure. Jeffreys smoothing of recognition reliability normalizes each indicator increase, the posterior uncertainty component identifies scores based on less reliable semantic information, and the threshold margin term points out classes determined by a less confident inference. The test dataset includes 527 scenes with five correct decisions, 77 with four, 9 with three, and 2 with two, implying an average of 4.836 correct and 0.164 incorrect indicator interpretations per scene. The accuracies of indicators range from 93.17% for buildings to 98.86% for industrial areas. Co-attention reduces the expectation of indicator mistakes by 58.0% and decreases the multi-mistake probability by 8.48% to 1.79%. In the spatial interpretation, ECUSQI is lower in more densely populated districts of older construction and higher in green residential areas with open structure and activity space. Our index serves a concrete measuring purpose, since reliable overhead semantic information can inform fine-grained environmental evaluation, along with its threshold sensitivity.

In the bustling heart of Bangkok, Thailand, the design team transformed a former tobacco factory into a vibrant new cultural landmark—Benjakitti Forest Park. The project faced a number of challenges including seasonal floods and droughts on the site, severe water pollution in the surroundings, poor accessibility, limited construction funds, and a compressed timeframe (only 18 months). The design has restored the site into an urban park with a resilient ecosystem that intercepts and reduces the destructive force of storm water, filters contaminated water, and provides much-needed wildlife habitat. Benjakitti Forest Park has not only become the largest public recreational venue for residents of downtown Bangkok and its environs, but also offers a low-maintenance, modular approach for worldwide urban public green space design practice.