Mohsen Sanei

Urban Snow and Ice Removal and Storage (USIRS) presents an intricate challenge for cold-climate cities, impacting mobility, environmental quality, public safety, and confidence in municipal services. Prior research frequently isolates operational elements like plow routing, snow disposal, or de-icing environmental impacts. Consequently, less attention has been paid to the structural interplay of these aspects within an integrated system. This study maps the diverse factors influencing USIRS and evaluates how their cross-domain interdependence might facilitate a shift to system-based urban winter management. A comprehensive review of 81 peer-reviewed articles was performed utilizing structured coding, text analysis, and network visualization techniques. The findings indicated that snow management outcomes depended less on isolated factors and more on the interplay of resource availability, operational procedures, urban design, environmental limitations, and community effects. By employing a structured methodological approach that integrates structured coding with network analysis, the research identified potential leverage points where specific interventions suggest advantages across several dimensions and indicated that USIRS operations are likely most successful when integrated into comprehensive urban plans, including resilience, smart-city technologies, and circular economy initiatives. The results offer a conceptual framework to aid academics, policymakers, and practitioners in developing more efficient, sustainable, and resilient winter city operations, transitioning from reactive operations to system-based management.

Green infrastructure (GI) has been increasingly associated with urban flood resilience as it provides benefits in protecting communities from flood dangers and improving socio-economic capabilities. In order to optimize the GI advantages, it is necessary to engage in strategic prioritizing of implementation areas, considering local conditions. Despite a growing interest in connecting GI and flood resilience, there is still a lack of strategic-oriented GI planning models aimed at enhancing urban flood resilience. This study has introduced the Flood Resilience-based Urban Green Infrastructure Site Priority (FRUGISP) model, which employs a GIS-based multi-criteria assessment to determine the urban regions that should be prioritized for the implementation of GI systems, based on their flood resilience levels. The model was used to map the priority areas in Monterrey, Mexico, and Brussels, Belgium. Despite their distinct features, both cities face flood challenges. The results showed regions of utmost importance based on the flood resilience index and land availability for GI implementation. The model has the potential to be applied to other urban areas grappling with flood issues, providing guidance to decision-makers in selecting high-priority locations for GI projects. This approach can effectively address the difficulties posed by urban floods, ensuring the resilience of urban areas.

Green infrastructure (GI) is increasingly linked to urban water management and can contribute to achieving water security in communities. This research uses a variation-finding comparative approach to recognize how far GI solutions are currently used to address water security in the urban developments of Monterrey City, Mexico, and Brussels-Capital Region, Belgium. A comparative content analysis of seven related urban development/sectoral plans is conducted using ATLAS.ti 9 software. The results depict the overall distribution of GI implementations, their typologies and spatial scales, water-security aspects that are addressed by GI, and the related definitions in the plans. In general, our analysis does not present a promising situation for the Monterrey case, although it reveals that policymakers have started to use GI in urban plans to address water security. Considering Brussels’ conditions, although GI solutions are much more frequent and advanced than in Monterrey plans, the region cannot be considered a frontrunner of GI policies. Comparing these two remarkably diverse areas is beneficial to illuminate universal aspects of planning, as the method provides an opportunity to gain insight from a multi-city perspective, whether developed or developing, showing the potential areas to advance urban policies.

Housing is always crucial for the sustainable development of communities, specifically in urban areas, due to the population density of cities. The present study constructs its own structure on the basis of the recent papers investigating various sustainability factors for the urban housing sector. By doing a comprehensive systematic literature review, one of the most extensive lists of urban housing sustainability factors is gathered from 118 recent related papers. The factors are prioritized by their frequency of investigation and categorized by their scale(s) and sector(s) of influence. According to the results, the top three significant factors affecting urban housing sustainability are “natural resource or energy consumption/efficiency of the building/equipment (during the construction, operation, etc.)”, “materials performance (durability, cost, thermal capacity, permeability, ability to re-use, recycled, eco-friendly materials)”, and “access to public services/infrastructure: availability/quality of services and/or distance/time of travel time to the services (public transport, education/health/shopping/leisure facilities, parks, etc.)”. By analyzing the results with an integrative approach, it is understood that environmental factors are the most considered ones (more considered than the factors with influence on all sustainability sectors) where institutional factors received the least attention. Also, the most significant measures are the ones that have impacts on both ‘building’ and ‘neighborhood/community’ scales. It should be noticed that the neighborhood/community scale indicators are seen, almost, as important as the measures that affect the building itself. The results of this study can be helpful in establishing future housing-related policies, and also in having more efficient housing sustainability assessment tools.

Numerous regions across the globe are facing water shortage challenges, and domestic water demands are predicted to grow vastly by 2050. In this regard, household water-saving measures are critical to adapt to future risks. Few studies have evaluated the association between climate change-related threats and their impacts on water-saving activities and intentions. However, a limitation in this line of research is the assumption that only the hazards that directly affect water shortages, such as drought, can influence water conservation behaviors. Our study takes a step forward to examine the possible association between other types of extreme climate events (in addition to drought) and household water-saving behavioral willingness. Mexico is used as a case study. The information from the most recent versions of two Mexican national surveys is employed. The potential roles of three demographic characteristics (age, gender, and education) are also investigated. We found that recent experience of harsh climatic events positively affects willingness to adopt water-saving measures (although this is a small effect). The results validate the significance of experiential knowledge as a driver to increase the willingness to act responsibly regarding water challenges. The lessons we derive are of significance for Mexico and other settings facing water crises and natural hazards.