ASU Scholarship Showcase

Cities in the Global South face rapid urbanization challenges and often suffer an acute lack of infrastructure and governance capacities. Smart Cities Mission, in India, launched in 2015, aims to offer a novel approach for urban renewal of 100 cities following an area‐based development approach, where the use of ICT and digital technologies is particularly emphasized. This article presents a critical review of the design and implementation framework of this new urban renewal program across selected case‐study cities. The article examines the claims of the so‐called “smart cities” against actual urban transformation on‐ground and evaluates how “inclusive” and “sustainable” these developments are. We quantify the scale and coverage of the smart city urban renewal projects in the cities to highlight who the program includes and excludes. The article also presents a statistical analysis of the sectoral focus and budgetary allocations of the projects under the Smart Cities Mission to find an inherent bias in these smart city initiatives in terms of which types of development they promote and the ones it ignores. The findings indicate that a predominant emphasis on digital urban renewal of selected precincts and enclaves, branded as “smart cities,” leads to deepening social polarization and gentrification. The article offers crucial urban planning lessons for designing ICT‐driven urban renewal projects, while addressing critical questions around inclusion and sustainability in smart city ventures.`

Attitudes and habits are extremely resistant to change, but a disruption of the magnitude of the COVID-19 pandemic has the potential to bring long-term, massive societal changes. During the pandemic, people are being compelled to experience new ways of interacting, working, learning, shopping, traveling, and eating meals. Going forward, a critical question is whether these experiences will result in changed behaviors and preferences in the long term. This paper presents initial findings on the likelihood of long-term changes in telework, daily travel, restaurant patronage, and air travel based on survey data collected from adults in the United States in Spring 2020. These data suggest that a sizable fraction of the increase in telework and decreases in both business air travel and restaurant patronage are likely here to stay. As for daily travel modes, public transit may not fully recover its pre-pandemic ridership levels, but many of our respondents are planning to bike and walk more than they used to. These data reflect the responses of a sample that is higher income and more highly educated than the US population. The response of these particular groups to the COVID-19 pandemic is perhaps especially important to understand, however, because their consumption patterns give them a large influence on many sectors of the economy.

A globally integrated carbon observation and analysis system is needed to improve the fundamental understanding of the global carbon cycle, to improve our ability to project future changes, and to verify the effectiveness of policies aiming to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and increase carbon sequestration. Building an integrated carbon observation system requires transformational advances from the existing sparse, exploratory framework towards a dense, robust, and sustained system in all components: anthropogenic emissions, the atmosphere, the ocean, and the terrestrial biosphere. The paper is addressed to scientists, policymakers, and funding agencies who need to have a global picture of the current state of the (diverse) carbon observations.

We identify the current state of carbon observations, and the needs and notional requirements for a global integrated carbon observation system that can be built in the next decade. A key conclusion is the substantial expansion of the ground-based observation networks required to reach the high spatial resolution for CO₂ and CH₄ fluxes, and for carbon stocks for addressing policy-relevant objectives, and attributing flux changes to underlying processes in each region. In order to establish flux and stock diagnostics over areas such as the southern oceans, tropical forests, and the Arctic, in situ observations will have to be complemented with remote-sensing measurements. Remote sensing offers the advantage of dense spatial coverage and frequent revisit. A key challenge is to bring remote-sensing measurements to a level of long-term consistency and accuracy so that they can be efficiently combined in models to reduce uncertainties, in synergy with ground-based data.

Bringing tight observational constraints on fossil fuel and land use change emissions will be the biggest challenge for deployment of a policy-relevant integrated carbon observation system. This will require in situ and remotely sensed data at much higher resolution and density than currently achieved for natural fluxes, although over a small land area (cities, industrial sites, power plants), as well as the inclusion of fossil fuel CO₂ proxy measurements such as radiocarbon in CO₂ and carbon-fuel combustion tracers. Additionally, a policy-relevant carbon monitoring system should also provide mechanisms for reconciling regional top-down (atmosphere-based) and bottom-up (surface-based) flux estimates across the range of spatial and temporal scales relevant to mitigation policies. In addition, uncertainties for each observation data-stream should be assessed. The success of the system will rely on long-term commitments to monitoring, on improved international collaboration to fill gaps in the current observations, on sustained efforts to improve access to the different data streams and make databases interoperable, and on the calibration of each component of the system to agreed-upon international scales.

We develop a general framework to analyze the controllability of multiplex networks using multiple-relation networks and multiple-layer networks with interlayer couplings as two classes of prototypical systems. In the former, networks associated with different physical variables share the same set of nodes and in the latter, diffusion processes take place. We find that, for a multiple-relation network, a layer exists that dominantly determines the controllability of the whole network and, for a multiple-layer network, a small fraction of the interconnections can enhance the controllability remarkably. Our theory is generally applicable to other types of multiplex networks as well, leading to significant insights into the control of complex network systems with diverse structures and interacting patterns.

Errors in the specification or utilization of fossil fuel CO₂ emissions within carbon budget or atmospheric CO₂ inverse studies can alias the estimation of biospheric and oceanic carbon exchange. A key component in the simulation of CO₂ concentrations arising from fossil fuel emissions is the spatial distribution of the emission near coastlines. Regridding of fossil fuel CO₂ emissions (FFCO₂) from fine to coarse grids to enable atmospheric transport simulations can give rise to mismatches between the emissions and simulated atmospheric dynamics which differ over land or water. For example, emissions originally emanating from the land are emitted from a grid cell for which the vertical mixing reflects the roughness and/or surface energy exchange of an ocean surface. We test this potential "dynamical inconsistency" by examining simulated global atmospheric CO₂ concentration driven by two different approaches to regridding fossil fuel CO₂ emissions. The two approaches are as follows: (1) a commonly used method that allocates emissions to grid cells with no attempt to ensure dynamical consistency with atmospheric transport and (2) an improved method that reallocates emissions to grid cells to ensure dynamically consistent results. Results show large spatial and temporal differences in the simulated CO₂ concentration when comparing these two approaches. The emissions difference ranges from −30.3 TgC grid cell^-1 yr^-1 (−3.39 kgC m^-2 yr^-1) to +30.0 TgC grid cell^-1 yr^-1 (+2.6 kgC m^-2 yr^-1) along coastal margins. Maximum simulated annual mean CO₂ concentration differences at the surface exceed ±6 ppm at various locations and times. Examination of the current CO₂ monitoring locations during the local afternoon, consistent with inversion modeling system sampling and measurement protocols, finds maximum hourly differences at 38 stations exceed ±0.10 ppm with individual station differences exceeding −32 ppm. The differences implied by not accounting for this dynamical consistency problem are largest at monitoring sites proximal to large coastal urban areas and point sources. These results suggest that studies comparing simulated to observed atmospheric CO₂ concentration, such as atmospheric CO₂ inversions, must take measures to correct for this potential problem and ensure flux and dynamical consistency.

Faced with numerous seemingly intractable social and environmental challenges, many scholars and practitioners are increasingly interested in understanding how to actively engage and transform the existing systems holding such problems in place. Although a variety of analytical models have emerged in recent years, most emphasize either the social or ecological elements of such transformations rather than their coupled nature. To address this, first we have presented a definition of the core elements of a social-ecological system (SES) that could potentially be altered in a transformation. Second, we drew on insights about transformation from three branches of literature focused on radical change, i.e., social movements, socio-technical transitions, and social innovation, and gave consideration to the similarities and differences with the current studies by resilience scholars. Drawing on these findings, we have proposed a framework that outlines the process and phases of transformative change in an SES. Future research will be able to utilize the framework as a tool for analyzing the alteration of social-ecological feedbacks, identifying critical barriers and leverage points and assessing the outcome of social-ecological transformations.

Online communities are becoming increasingly important as platforms for large-scale human cooperation. These communities allow users seeking and sharing professional skills to solve problems collaboratively. To investigate how users cooperate to complete a large number of knowledge-producing tasks, we analyze Stack Exchange, one of the largest question and answer systems in the world. We construct attention networks to model the growth of 110 communities in the Stack Exchange system and quantify individual answering strategies using the linking dynamics on attention networks. We identify two answering strategies. Strategy A aims at performing maintenance by doing simple tasks, whereas strategy B aims at investing time in doing challenging tasks. Both strategies are important: empirical evidence shows that strategy A decreases the median waiting time for answers and strategy B increases the acceptance rate of answers. In investigating the strategic persistence of users, we find that users tends to stick on the same strategy over time in a community, but switch from one strategy to the other across communities. This finding reveals the different sets of knowledge and skills between users. A balance between the population of users taking A and B strategies that approximates 2:1, is found to be optimal to the sustainable growth of communities.

Atmospheric radiocarbon (¹⁴C) represents an important observational constraint on emissions of fossil-fuel derived carbon into the atmosphere due to the absence of ¹⁴C in fossil fuel reservoirs. The high sensitivity and precision that accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) affords in atmospheric ¹⁴C analysis has greatly increased the potential for using such measurements to evaluate bottom-up emissions inventories of fossil fuel CO₂(CO₂ff), as well as those for other co-emitted species. Here we use observations of ¹⁴CO₂ and a series of primary hydrocarbons and combustion tracers from discrete air samples collected between June 2009 and September 2010 at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Boulder Atmospheric Observatory (BAO; Lat: 40.050° N, Lon: 105.004° W) to derive emission ratios of each species with respect to CO₂ff. The BAO tower is situated at the boundary of the Denver metropolitan area to the south and a large industrial and agricultural region to the north and east, making it an ideal location to study the contrasting mix of emissions from the activities in each region. The species considered in this analysis are carbon monoxide (CO), methane (CH₄), acetylene (C₂H₂), benzene (C₆H₆), and C₃–C₅ alkanes. We estimate emissions for a subset of these species by using the Vulcan high resolution CO2ff emission data product as a reference. We find that CO is overestimated in the 2008 National Emissions Inventory (NEI08) by a factor of ~2. A close evaluation of the inventory suggests that the ratio of CO emitted per unit fuel burned from on-road gasoline vehicles is likely over-estimated by a factor of 2.5. Using a wind-directional analysis of the data, we find enhanced concentrations of CH₄, relative to CO₂ff, in air influenced by emissions to the north and east of the BAO tower when compared to air influenced by emissions in the Denver metro region to the south. Along with enhanced CH₄, the strongest enhancements of the C₃–C₅ alkanes are also found in the north and east wind sector, suggesting that both the alkane and CH₄ enhancements are sourced from oil and gas fields located to the northeast, though it was not possible to rule out the contribution of non oil and gas CH₄ sources.

Many recent studies observe the increasing importance, influence, and analysis of resilience as a concept to understand the capacity of a system or individual to respond to change. The term has achieved prominence in diverse scientific fields, as well as public discourse and policy arenas. As a result, resilience has been referred to as a boundary object or a bridging concept that is able to facilitate communication and understanding across disciplines, coordinate groups of actors or stakeholders, and build consensus around particular policy issues. We present a network analysis of bibliometric data to understand the extent to which resilience can be considered as a boundary object or a bridging concept in terms of its links across disciplines and scientific fields. We analyzed 994 papers and 35,952 citations between them to reveal the connectedness and links between and within fields. We analyzed the network according to different fields, modules, and sub-fields, showing a highly clustered citation network. Analyzing betweenness allowed us to identify how particular papers bridge across fields and how different fields are linked. With the exception of a few specific papers, most papers cite exclusively within their own field. We conclude that resilience is to an extent a boundary object because there are shared understandings across diverse disciplines and fields. However, it is more limited as a bridging concept because the citations across fields are concentrated among particular disciplines and papers, so the distinct fields do not widely or routinely refer to each other. There are some signs of resilience being used as an interdisciplinary concept to bridge scientific fields, particularly in social-ecological systems, which may itself constitute an emerging sub-field.

Urban environments are the primary contributors to global anthropogenic carbon emissions. Because much of the growth in CO₂ emissions will originate from cities, there is a need to develop, assess, and improve measurement and modeling strategies for quantifying and monitoring greenhouse gas emissions from large urban centers. In this study the uncertainties in an aircraft-based mass balance approach for quantifying carbon dioxide and methane emissions from an urban environment, focusing on Indianapolis, IN, USA, are described. The relatively level terrain of Indianapolis facilitated the application of mean wind fields in the mass balance approach. We investigate the uncertainties in our aircraft-based mass balance approach by (1) assessing the sensitivity of the measured flux to important measurement and analysis parameters including wind speed, background CO₂ and CH₄, boundary layer depth, and interpolation technique, and (2) determining the flux at two or more downwind distances from a point or area source (with relatively large source strengths such as solid waste facilities and a power generating station) in rapid succession, assuming that the emission flux is constant. When we quantify the precision in the approach by comparing the estimated emissions derived from measurements at two or more downwind distances from an area or point source, we find that the minimum and maximum repeatability were 12 and 52%, with an average of 31%. We suggest that improvements in the experimental design can be achieved by careful determination of the background concentration, monitoring the evolution of the boundary layer through the measurement period, and increasing the number of downwind horizontal transect measurements at multiple altitudes within the boundary layer.