Carmelo Maria Torre

Computational Science and Its Applications – ICCSA 2013

The smart phone usage and multimedia devices have been increasing yearly and predictions indicate drastic increase in the upcoming years. Recently, various wireless technologies have been introduced to add flexibility to these gadgets. As data plans offered by the network service providers are expensive, users are inclined to utilize freely accessible and commonly available Wi-Fi networks indoors. LTE (Long Term Evolution) has been a topic of discussion in providing high data rates outdoors and various service providers are planning to roll out LTE networks all over the world. The objective of this presentation is to compare usefulness of these two leading wireless schemes based on LTE and Wireless Mesh Networks (WMN) and bring forward their advantages for indoor and outdoor environments. We also investigate to see if a hybrid LTE-WMN network may be feasible. Both these networks are heterogeneous in nature, employ cognitive approach and support multi hop communication. The main motivation behind this work is to utilize similarities in these networks, explore their capability of offering high data rates and generally have large coverage areas. In this work, we compare both these networks in terms of their data rates, range, cost, throughput, and power consumption. We also compare 802.11n based WMN with Femto cell in an indoor coverage scenario, while for outdoors; 802.16 based WMN is compared with LTE. The main objective is to help users select a network that could provide enhanced performance in a cost effective manner. More information can be found at http://www.iccsa.org/invited-speakers Neoclassical Growth Theory, Regions and Spatial Externalities

The Evidence of Links between Landscape and Economy in a Rural Park

This paper verifies the existence of relationships between specific features of the agrarian landscape of ancient olive trees in the park territory of six municipalities in the Region of Puglia, Italy, and the economic activity of the areas concerned. This has the scope of exploring developmental opportunities, whether already put into place, or potentially active. It develops and verifies theoretical approaches and empirical experiences which propose processes of territorial exploitation and local development as pathways for the identification and utilization of both the differences and distinctive characteristics of the territory itself, toward the creation of a “value added territory†as the basis for development. Agriculture tends to be presented in terms of the “care and culture†of the territory: not only the appropriate production of primary goods, ecological and locally characterized but also the contextualized production of land and environment. In this paper, the authors use the concept of the park from the perspective of innovation: no longer referring to the concept of environmental protection and preservation as a defensive action, but creating a synthesis between the productive enhancement of open spaces alongside the upgrading of environmental systems, the built environment and environmental, and cultural development.

Identification of “Hot Spots” of Social and Housing Difficulty in Urban Areas: Scan Statistics for Housing Market and Urban Planning Policies

The objective of the present work is to use statistical data to identify territorial zones characterized by the presence of urban poverty related to property ownership and the availability of residential services. Poverty clusters have a high concentration of poor people, but that does not mean that everyone living in them is poor. While poverty is widely accepted to be an inherently multi-dimensional concept, it has proved very difficult to develop measures that both capture this multidimensionality and make comparisons over time and space easy. With this in mind, we attempt to apply a Total Fuzzy and Relative (TFR) approach, based on a fuzzy measure of the degree of association of an individual to the totality of the poor and an approach of semantic distance (Munda 1995), based on the definition of a “fuzzy distance” as a discriminating multidimensional reference to rank the availability to property in real estate market, as complement of urban poverty, in the specific case of the City of Bari. These approaches have been improved using the SaTScan methodology, a circle-based spatial-scan statistical method (Kulldorff 1997; Patil and Taille 2004; Aldstat and Getis 2006). It concerns geoinformatic surveillance for poverty hot-spot detection, used as a scientific base to lead urban regeneration policies.

Geographic Information Analysis for Sustainable Development and Economic Planning: New Technologies

A GIS implementation of a model of systemic vulnerability assessment in urbanized areas exposed to combined risk of landslide and flood

Analysis of positional aspects in the variation of real estate values in an italian southern metropolitan area

The paper show the use of a fuzzy weighting system to identify the correspondence of real estate value with main socio-physical characters of the urban tissue. The descriptor of the relationship with the real estate value is represented by a set of indicators of the urban decay of housing property and the analysis is tested on a real application of a case study. The study gives support to the development of new approach for localizing cadastral values at a more detailed scale, compared to the current scale used in the Italian Cadastre. The utilized statistical approach has been based on the SaTScan application, as a techniques of fuzzy clustering, and on a test of stability based on the comparison of a “fuzzy semantic distance” among the average real estate values of urban quarters, with the expected crisp distance among the same quarters.

Spatial Multicrierial Evaluation of Soil Consumption as a Tool for SEA

The paper represent a check of the use of multicriteria evaluation in order to add a qualitative evaluation to the traditional quantitative measure of the sustainability of soil consumption. The experiment starts analysing all deriving measure from measures of different typology of soil consumption and land use as criteria to evaluate which part of urbanised land is more expendable for land transformation.

Social Balance and Economic Effectiveness in Historic Centers Rehabilitation

The growing need to support financially the processes of urban regeneration of city centers clashes with the limited availability of public resources. Administrations are therefore forced to evaluate the priority areas of intervention, on the one hand trying to pursue goals of social equity, other actions to promote efficient financial plan. Consequently the reference institutional policy of intervention is based on regulatory frameworks that require a closer integration of programming needs of the allocation of resources, and social needs. The chapter shows an example of conciliation among the seek for efficiency and for social equality in choosing priority of intervention in the urban make up of historic centers.

Non-compensatory composite indicators for the evaluation of urban planning policy: The Land-Use Policy Efficiency Index (LUPEI)

Abstract In this research paper, we define and test an ELECTRE III-based approach to the construction of non-compensatory composite indicators; these indicators are used for the evaluation of environmental and social performances of urban and regional planning policies. We tested the methodology for the construction of the Land-Use Policy Efficiency Index (LUPEI) on the municipal scale applied to a sample of municipalities in the Apulia Region (Southern Italy). Based on the literature review concerning composite indicators, we found that linear aggregation rules are the most widely applied aggregation procedures for composite indicators. However, their applicability depends on a set of strong theoretical and operational conditions. If these conditions do not hold, then other aggregation and weighting procedures must be applied to construct the composite indicators. We tested the ELECTRE III via a fruitful interaction with three experts who were participating in a focus group. We found that composite indicators are powerful tools when it comes to the assessment of multidimensional planning issues. Since each sub-indicator provides different information and responds to different goals, rankings and assessment based on mono-indicator frameworks can lead to incomplete or even biased results that do not consider an integrated approach to land-use policy efficiency. Moreover, both experts and decision-makers appreciated the role of composite indicators in increasing knowledge and providing deeper insights into complex phenomena in the domains of urban and regional planning.

Countryside vs City: A User-Centered Approach to Open Spatial Indicators of Urban Sprawl

The interplay between land take and climate change is reviving the debate on the environmental impacts of urbanization. Monitoring and evaluation of land-cover and land-use changes have secured political commitment worldwide, and in the European Union in particular – following the agreement on a “no net land take by 2050” target. This paper addresses the ensuing challenges by investigating how open data services and spatial indicators may help manage urban sprawl more effectively. Experts, scholars, students and local government officials were engaged in a living lab exercise centered around the uptake of geospatial data in planning, policy making and design processes. Main findings point to a great potential, and pressing need, for open spatial data services in mainstreaming sustainable land use practices. However, urban sprawl’s elusiveness calls for interactive approaches, since the actual usability of proposed tools needs to be carefully investigated and planned for.

“Scrapping” of Quarters and Urban Renewal: A Geostatistic-Based Evaluation

The environmental and social costs of the extensive and intensive development of new areas not yet built are increasingly relevant . For this reason land use decisions are increasingly oriented to consider the development of the city from its existing perimeter , giving up models that generate urban sprawl.