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Single-family houses are a common form of housing in Europe. Most were built in the context of the suburbanization after World War II and are now facing challenges arising from generational changes as well as increasing living and energy standards. According to the hypothesis of this paper, in several EU regions, single-family houses may face future challenges arising from oversupply and lack of adaptation to current demand. To examine this, the paper analyses the present situation and discusses the prognosis for the challenges described above regarding the three neighbouring north-western European countries Belgium, Germany, and the Netherlands, based on available data and a review of country-specific characteristics of housing markets as well as national policies. Despite an impending mismatch between demand and supply, planning policies still support the emergence of new single-family houses. The comparison of Belgium, Germany, and the Netherlands shows the growing polarization between shrinking and growing regions and central and peripheral sites apparent at different stages in the three countries. While a high rate of vacancies is already registered for some regions in Germany, in the Netherlands this phenomenon can only be seen near the borders and in villages within the Randstad conurbation. In Belgium also, this phenomenon is not yet widespread, but in some suburban neighbourhoods dating from the 1950's and 1960's more and more single-family houses are becoming more difficult to sell, indicating an emerging mismatch between supply and demand. This article proposes some instruments which enable municipalities to intervene in single family housing neighbourhoods which are largely dominated by private ownership. These instruments are not yet widely established in single-family housing neighbourhoods but that may become important in the future.

In smart cities pervasive systems are deployed by enterprises and stakeholders in municipalities to provide digital services to citizens. But cities are faced with the challenge of achieving system pluggability, mainly service integration due to numerous actors and systems needed for smart urban transformation. Hence, there is need to employ a comprehensive and holistic approach to help achieve service integration of pervasive platforms. Therefore, this study presents an Enterprise Architecture Framework (EAF) to support smart urban transformation.

In this study the design science research methodology is adopted based on a multi-case studies of two organizations and data is collected using semi-structured interview from an organizations and municipality in Norway to validate how service integration can be achieved by the developed EAF to address pluggability challenges faced in urban environment.

Findings suggest that the presented EAF provides the structure to manage changes and maintain urban transformation and aims to align the business with the underlying information systems from the perspective of the stakeholders. Additionally, findings from the case studies modelled in ArchiMate language depict how service integration of different pervasive platforms provide digital services for smart urban transformation.

This research only employed semi-structured interviews to validate service integration of digital platforms, other identified dimensions of pluggability were not fully addressed in this study.

Findings from the case studies provides insights on how pervasive platforms can be integrated to achieve a pluggable digital service from different stakeholders and data sources in practice. The developed EAF presented in this study provide a model that supports collection and exchange of data from different data sources in smart urban environment to enable the provision and consumption of digital services.

The developed EAF aids system pluggability of actors and systems in providing digital service such as smart urban transformation that contributes to sustainable use of electric mobility in cities.

As cities increasingly deploy pervasive platforms to support urban innovation, researchers are seeking to explore how these platforms shape urban transformation. Presently, prior studies do not offer important insights into pervasive platform management from urban perspective. Against this backdrop, this study employs the information systems perspective of digital platforms literature roots in software development and physical product development to depict how the EAF can be employed to describe specific cases that integrate different pervasive platforms deployed by different stakeholders communicating to co-create collective digital services to citizens.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the actual walking distance to public transport (PuT) stations and to report passenger perceptions on route choice.

A systematic case study has been conducted after administrating a tailor-made paper-based intercept survey in a German city (Munich). It can determine the interrelation between the accessibility of the transit service and evaluation on walking distance acceptance. Statistical analysis and geo-spatial approach were completed for obtaining major findings.

Statistical and geo-spatial analysis shows that respondents living in low-density areas walk longer than residents living in nearby inner city areas. In terms of PuT modes, residents walk longer for suburban train and subway/metro (U-Bahn) than for bus/tram services. Transit users accept a longer walking distance to reach a train station than other PuT modes and they choose the most direct and quickest route to reach PuT stations.

Findings of this study would help to formulate future strategies and standards for the sustainable planning of public transportation systems in the context of Munich and many other cities around the globe with similar conditions. However, future research should be conducted using a large-scale survey for evaluating the comprehensive picture of walking patterns to PuT stations. Accessibility to PuT stations can also be modeled and evaluated by adopting open data and voluntary social media information. Unfortunately, this study only presents a partial evaluation of walking focused on accessibility at selected PuT stations in different settings of the urban fabric.

This empirical study can be considered as an initial finding in the favor of the city transport authority to provide a design scale for improved accessibility of transit users; however, further investigation should be conducted using a large-scale survey for evaluating the comprehensive walking patterns.

A systematic case study has been conducted after administrating a tailor-made paper-based intercept survey in a German city (Munich). Findings of this study would help to formulate future strategies and standard for the sustainable planning of the public transportation system in the context of Munich and many other cities in the globe with similar conditions.

The analogy of the city as an evolving system is an enduring one that is both universally acknowledged and greatly researched in equal measure. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the potential for urban characterization studies, emerging from the fields of cultural heritage and landscape, to provide a rich source of data for exploring the characteristics of spatial adaptation and innovation over time.

An analysis of commercial organizational space in the city of Sheffield, UK is provided here as the subject of study which employs English Heritage's Historic Landscape Characterization dataset to explore temporal characteristics of commercial space within a broader context of change, at the city‐wide scale.

It is proposed here that to achieve culturally sustainable development against a context of urban “deterritorialization” and homogenization the very character and distinctiveness of innovation and change needs to be explicitly acknowledged. An evolutionary approach to organizational space is suggested here as a means to locate such adaptation and spatial change in “place”.

It is hoped that the approach presented may provide an important stage in thinking about the spatial relationships between business and society over time and particularly their interdependence within a city ecology. The scope is therefore to explore multi‐level evolutionary characteristics of socio‐cultural space, appreciating multi‐scale temporal change through a broad lens of Darwinism.

Smart city services are supported by information and communication technologies (ICT) referred to as digital technologies which increasingly promise huge opportunities for growth but are faced with system alignment and data integration issues when providing digital services. Therefore, this study aims to use enterprise architecture (EA) in digital transformation of cities by developing an architecture to address system alignment and data integration in digital transformation of cities.

Qualitative method is applied to evaluate the presented architecture based on electric-mobility (e-mobility) scenario, and data was collected using case study via interviews from a municipality in Norway to validate the applicability of EA for digital transformation of city services.

Findings from the interviews were represented in ArchiMate language to model the digital transformation of e-mobility in smart cities. Findings suggest that the architecture serves as a guide to recommend urban administrators of the potential of EA and digital transformation in addressing system alignment and data integration issues in smart cities.

Data used in this study is from a single case, hence there is a need to evaluate the application of EA for digital transformation of city services with data collected from multi-cases.

This study adopts enterprise architecture approach to support city transformation as it has been widely applied by institutions to align business and ICT components.

This study provides implication on how municipalities can use EA and digital transformations towards a sustainable smart city.

An architecture is presented that can be used as a guide to help urban developers and designers in deploying sustainable transport policies for smart cities. Additionally, EA is used to foster digitalization towards achieving system alignment and data integration in cities to support urban environment as they digitally transform services provided to citizens.

Urban development in fast‐growing cities is one of the huge challenges of our time, and several projects of technical cooperation are dedicated to this issue. The aim of this paper is to help project managers to enhance their capability of dealing effectively with the formidable complexities inherent in this kind of project. For this purpose, we explore the potential of Organizational Cybernetics and Social Systems Theory in a relatively new area of application. We have developed a set of conceptual tools that are helpful in coping with dynamic complexity in change and development projects. These tools have in common an inherent logic deriving to a great extent from Stafford Beer's Viable System Model and the St Gall framework for systemic management. The application of the tools is illustrated by a state‐of‐the‐art case study from the realm of Technical Co‐operation – the revision of the Urban Master Plan for the City of Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia. However, the toolkit is in principle also applicable to any complex project of change or development.

The failure of conventional, post-war development to bring about the housing-led regeneration of much of Glasgow’s vacant and derelict inner-city land has exacerbated the loss of middle-income households to car-dominated suburbs built on green-field sites. Plot-based urbanism offers an innovative approach to development, based on an urban structure made up of fine-grained elements, in the form of plots, capable of incremental development by a range of agencies. The historical and morphological study of traditional, pre-war masterplanning methods in Glasgow suggests that a typically disaggregated pattern of land subdivision remains of great relevance for development, and that the physical form and organisation of urban land may relate to the capacity for neighbourhood self-organisation. This study assists future masterplanning and investment in the regeneration of inner-city neighbourhoods by suggesting ways of making investment more informed, and the development process more responsive to urban change. We argue that the publicly-funded sector could take on the role of lead provider of development opportunity through the adoption of methods derived from traditional masterplanning processes, providing opportunities for small-scale house building, and thereby supporting resilient and adaptable communities in the sustainable reuse of vacant inner-city land.

The purpose of this paper is to reflect upon how encountering trauma unexpectedly in the field informs the doing of fieldwork.

A reflexive essay approach was adopted to explore traumatic incidents in extreme contexts. Written vignettes, interviews, field notes and information conversations served as the bases for reflections.

Four themes arose from the reflections (Bracketing, Institutional Pressure, Impact on Research and Unresolvedness). It was suggested that researchers engaged in extreme context research, and management and organization studies scholars engaged in dangerous fieldwork more broadly, are under institutional pressure to continue work that may put themselves in harm's way. Traumatic experiences also shape and reflect the researcher's identity, which informs choices about current and future research projects.

It was suggested that scholars will benefit from reading the accounts of others to reduce the burden of isolation that can accompany traumatic field experiences.

Exploring single traumatic events enabled in engaging with trauma encountered unexpectedly and directly in the field. The reflections reveal the effects of psychological and physical trauma on researchers, and highlight how trauma impacts the research process.