Systems Concepts

A new tool for analyzing urban land cover that integrates design practices and ecological knowledge for understanding cities as complex, patchy, and dynamic systems

This atlas is a unique conceptual tool to describe and analyze cities as complex systems, using a new, hybrid approach to urban land cover classification. As an impetus to bring ecologists and urban designers together, it builds on over a decade of shared knowledge from the Baltimore Ecosystem Study to inspire ecologically motivated design practice.

Rather than separating human-constructed environments from predominantly biological and geological ones, this book integrates built and ecological structures and shows how this integration can contribute to the scholarship of ecology and the practice of design. The atlas displays maps and tables depicting these hybrid land cover classes and the relationships between them; information on how the specific patch arrangements evolved over time; and speculations on how cover might change through design, disturbance, or succession. Interdisciplinary and strikingly illustrated, the atlas is a new way to study, measure, and view cities with a more effective interaction of scientific understanding and design practice.

The guaranteed cost control problem for multiparameter singularly perturbed systems (MSPS) with uncertainties is investigated. The main contribution of this paper is that an ε-independent controller is newly derived by solving the reduced-order ε-independent slow and fast algebraic Riccati equations (AREs) which is extremely smaller than the dimension of full-order ARE. It is shown that if these AREs have positive definite stabilizing solution then the uncertain closed-loop system with the new ε-independent controller is quadratically stable and has the cost bound. As another important feature, our new results can be applied to the standard and the nonstandard MSPS because the nonsingularity assumption of the fast state matrices are not needed compared with the existing result.

In this paper, we study the infinite horizon zerosum differential games for both standard and nonstandard multiparameter singularly perturbed systems. A composite approximation of the full-order linear feedback saddle-point solution is obtained by decomposing the full-order game problem into a slow game and two fast control problems. It is proven that such a composite approximation forms an O(||µ||) (near) saddle-point equilibrium of the full-order game, and the resulting value is O(||µ|| 2) over or below the exact value of the full-order game depending on the given game parameters.

In a 2016 review article, American urban ecologist Steward Pickett and his coauthor colleagues note that before "the ecology of the city" was identified as a second paradigm of urban ecological science in the late 1990s, there had been "venerable and important precedents". In this communication, the author substantiates their remark with a revelation of such a precedent set by American ecological scholar-practitioner and educator Ian L. McHarg in the 1960s.

In a paper that David Rousseau has given at CSER conference 2017 he describes three Systems Concepts (Systems Principles). The paper has the title " Three General Systems Principles and their Derivation: Insights from Philosophy of Science applied to Systems Concepts ". In this paper we endeavor to understand and based on that rewrite those Systems Concepts as best we can and also to give an example of them as well as extending them to use in Schemas Theory. And reading the paper confirms my suspicion that these are holonomic principles that complement the ideas that I have developed in Special Systems Theory. Here we will use the term 'System Concepts' for his three principles.

In the last 20 years satellite images has been used in geography works due to their availability and free access. There are really used in physics geography (vegetation analyze, hydrological studies, geology works, among others) and in urban climate, the modification of regional climate cause by a city, there are really important in comparative and historical urban heat island (UHI) studies. There are a few works in Argentina of UHI with satellite images and the most known one where made in San Miguel del Tucuman. This kind of works are recently in Tandil, that by this paper objective is to analyze the urban thermal island evolution (1989-2011). Spring satellite images from Landsat 5 TM Path/Row 225-86 where used. There were processed in ArcGis 10.1® to obtain surface temperature and construction density maps. The results show a modification in the temperature behavior during the last 20 years. The change of an urban heat island into an urban heat sink was detected and it was as a c...

RESUMEN
En las últimas décadas, olas de calor urbano, sequías extremas e incendios forestales se han reportado cada vez con mayor frecuencia, perturbando la dinámica ambiental y la calidad de vida de los habitantes localizados en las ciudades. La intensidad de estos eventos climáticos en las áreas urbanas está relacionada, con la substitución de la cobertura vegetal por superficies secas no evapotranspirativas que alteran el balance radiativo superficial, produciendo en consecuencia, un aumento de la temperatura en las zonas urbanas. Este fenómeno se conoce como islas térmicas urbanas, y su intensidad y extensión depende no solo de las propiedades físicas de las coberturas naturales y artificiales presentes en los espacios urbanos, sino también de la estacionalidad, y otros fenómenos climáticos. Mediante el uso de geotecnologias, en particular utilizando la banda térmica (6-2) del sensor LANDSAT 7 ETM +, es posible observar las variaciones en los patrones de la temperatura superficial y determinar la variabilidad, intensidad y extensión del fenómeno de isla térmica en la ciudad. La ventaja de este tipo de técnicas, respecto a las métodos convencionales (estacionales analógicas, muestreo puntual o por transectas), es la posibilidad de cubrir grandes superficies y adicionalmente, integrar datos digitales y vectoriales en un sistema de información geográfica. A los efectos de este trabajo seleccionaron un set de imágenes comprendidas en el periodo Marzo 2001- Enero 2011, tanto para temporada de sequia como de lluvia, para analizar los efectos de la estacionalidad sobre el fenómeno de isla térmica, en la ciudad de Caracas. Los resultados obtenidos mostraron importantes diferencias en la temperatura superficial entre las áreas urbanas y la zona peri-urbana, así como entre el periodo húmedo y el periodo de sequia. Se espera a partir de este estudio poder contribuir con el diseño de estrategias ambientales de mitigación, y/o de atención a la población.

Palabras clave: islas térmicas, geotecnologias, espacios urbanos.