On both sides of the Atlantic, downtown shops need to stick together to survive

Downtowns on both sides of the Atlantic have been under threat for decades: first from the rise of suburban malls, and now from the growing popularity of internet shopping. In new research which studies a century of retail change in Detroit and The Hague, Conrad Kickert and Rainer vom Hofe find that the closer shops are to each other, the ..

Active Centers - Interactive Edges.

This dissertation explores the deteriorating relationship between architecture and public space plaguing many Western urban cores as a result of economic, cultural, political and social forces. It investigates the question of how and why ground floor frontages have been transformed, by comparing the urban cores of The Hague (Netherlands) and Detroit (United States) over the past century. Frontage interactivity is defined as the combination of physical transparency, functional permeability and perceptual hospitality, and is mapped in both urban cores over the span of a century in 10 to 25 year intervals. Interactivity is categorized into four tiers, based on fourteen functional frontage types, ranging from highly interactive retail businesses to dwellings and less interactive offices, parking structures and warehouses. Patterns of physical and functional fringe belt formation and urban erosion are found in the maps and statistical analyses. These analyses demonstrate a pattern of fringe interactivity decline, amplified by an acceleration of decline at the level of the street segment – pointing to the contagion of vacancy and inactive land uses. This interactivity erosion is usually followed and amplified by a rapid morphological change, often fueled by large-scale urban renewal interventions – a pattern that is surprisingly similar in both cities. The forces behind frontage transformation are illustrated by separate histories of The Hague and Detroit. The demonstrated forces and patterns of change are integrated into a set of conclusions, finding significant similarities between both case studies. From an economic, social and cultural perspective both cities have faced and still face similar challenges, albeit amplified in Detroit. The relationship between buildings and public space has deteriorated significantly in downtown Detroit as a result of socio-economic decline, amplified by a culture favoring progress over sustaining a collective memory. The Hague’s inner city has benefited from a somewhat finer balance between progress and permanence, often due to fierce public and political debates. The conclusions are followed by a set of recommendations for how to counter frontage deactivation, focusing on the role of economics, diversity, curbing fear and auto-mobility, and critical mass in reshaping the architecture of public life.PhDArchitectureUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/110405/1/kickert_1.pd

Infrastructure landscapes : automobility and granularity in São Paulo and Detroit

This paper presents a cross-cultural comparison of the social, cultural, institutional and physical context and impacts of automobility and urban granularity in two global automotive capitals: Detroit and São Paulo. It uses a combination of descriptive history and comparative mapping to describe and measure urban change due to automobile intervenions. It finds that both cities, under quite similar forces, have actually taken divergent pathways toward infrastructure landscapes

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Pro-cyclisch ontwerpen

Steden vormen zich al eeuwen rondom hun vervoersnetwerken. De eeuw van de auto heeft echter een haast onomkeerbare cyclus in gang gezet door de grote ruimtelijke opgave die groeiend autogebruik met zich meebrengt. De fiets zou wel eens een anticyclus in gang kunnen zetten. </jats:p

The Past of Our Storefront Future: A Century of Post-Transactional Storefront Transformations in The Hague's Urban Core

The transformation of storefronts to post-transactional functions has a much longer history than contemporary debates may suggest. Especially in urban environments, the number of physical retail establishments has declined almost constantly since records began nearly a century ago, allowing us to learn from the transformation of the storefronts this decline has left behind. This article explores how storefronts have transformed into post-transactional functions over the past century in the urban core of The Hague, one of the largest cities in The Netherlands and the country's seat of government. Firstly, it explores, through archival study, the forces behind The Hague's storefront retail decline, from legislation meant to curb independent retailers to urban renewal eff orts. Similarly, archival research illustrates that The Hague has a decades-long tradition of acknowledging and proactively planning for post-transactional storefront futures. Secondly, a comparison between a 1911 storefront database with that of 2017 demonstrates that about a fifth of storefronts have changed to a post-transactional use. The majority of transformations yielded dwellings, followed by offices, parking, vacancy and medical and wellness uses. Many of these new uses have spurred the creative economy of The Hague, illustrating the resilient urban value of storefronts beyond merely hosting consumer transactions.</jats:p