With volunteered geographic information (VGI) platforms such as OpenStreetMap (OSM) becoming increasingly popular, we are faced with the challenge of assessing the quality of their content, in order to better understand its place relative to the authoritative content of more traditional sources....

Over 1 billion people currently live in slums, with the number of slum dwellers only expected to grow in the coming decades. the vast majority of slums are located in and around urban centres in the less economically developed countries, which are also experiencing greater rates of urbanization...

Slums are a global urban challenge, with less developed countries being particularly impacted. To adequately detect and map them, data is needed on their location, spatial extent and evolution. High- and very high-resolution remote sensing imagery has emerged as an important source of data in...

Disaster events and their economic impacts are trending, and climate projection studies suggest that the risks of disaster will continue to increase in the near future. Despite the broad and increasing social effects of these events, the empirical basis of disaster research is often weak,...

In this paper, we propose a class of models for generating spatial versions of three classic networks: Erdös-Rényi (ER), Watts-Strogatz (WS), and Barabási-Albert (BA). We assume that nodes have geographical coordinates, are uniformly distributed over an m × m Cartesian space, and...

Empirical findings from social psychology show that sometimes people show favoritism toward in-group members in order to reach a global consensus, even against individuals' own preferences (e.g., altruistically or deontically). Here we integrate ideas and findings on in-group favoritism, opinion...

Scholars and urban planners have suggested that the key characteristic of leading world cities is that they attract the highest quality human talent through educational and professional opportunities. They offer enabling environments for productive human interactions and the growth of...

Scholars and urban planners have suggested that the key characteristic of leading world cities is that they attract the best and brightest minds. As home to the creative classes, which consist of professionals working in knowledge based industries, they are the bedrocks of prosperity and drivers...