Davi Madureira Victral, Bruna Silveira de Oliveira
Climate change is placing increasing pressure on urban water and sanitation systems, particularly in cities characterized by persistent socioeconomic inequalities. As host of the 30th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP30), Belém, Brazil, became a focal point for debates on climate adaptation while simultaneously exposing longstanding deficiencies in essential urban infrastructure. This study examines how water and sanitation were represented in media coverage of COP30 through the analytical lens of the Human Rights to Water and Sanitation (HRtWS). A mixed-methods design combining quantitative descriptive analysis and qualitative thematic content analysis was applied to 143 news articles retrieved from the Google News RSS feed. Data were collected on 10 March 2026, approximately 4 months after the conclusion of COP30, allowing the complete news cycle associated with the conference to be analyzed. Articles were manually coded according to a predefined HRtWS framework to identify thematic patterns, media framings, and the visibility of normative rights dimensions. The findings indicate that media coverage predominantly framed water and sanitation through infrastructure development, urban modernization, and climate adaptation narratives. Availability and sustainability were the most frequently represented HRtWS dimensions, whereas participation, accountability, and access to information received comparatively limited attention. The analysis also revealed substantial differences among media categories: institutional and governmental outlets primarily emphasized infrastructure investments and resilience, while investigative and independent media more frequently highlighted environmental injustice and territorial inequalities. These findings suggest that the HRtWS were only partially incorporated into media narratives surrounding COP30. Although water and sanitation were visible within the analyzed corpus, they were predominantly portrayed as technical and infrastructural challenges rather than as fundamental human rights closely linked to equity, governance, and climate justice. By integrating a rights-based analytical framework with systematic media analysis, this study contributes both methodologically and substantively to research on climate communication, urban sustainability, and environmental justice.
Decentralized operations across mission-critical industries and smart city public infrastructure increasingly rely on distributed third-party contractors to execute complex infrastructure projects. However, existing literature indicates that managing this workforce through traditional oversight models, relying on periodic inspections, manual documentation, and subjective verification, creates a persistent “trust deficit,” driven by underlying principal-agent information asymmetries. This condition leads to operational inefficiencies, costly rework, payment delays, excessive Scope 3 transport emissions from physical inspection transit (“truck rolls”), and increased compliance risks, driven by subjective or missing documentation. To resolve these systemic bottlenecks, this conceptual paper introduces the Verification-as-a-Service (VaaS) framework, proposing a fundamental shift from reactive manual inspections to proactive, remote, and digitized quality control. Methodologically grounded in Tarraco's integrative conceptual review framework, this study synthesizes multidisciplinary literature across the built environment, public governance, and information systems. We outline a five-phase VaaS lifecycle that standardizes digital verification from task definition through payment readiness and performance analytics, and urban ESG impact evaluation. Demonstrating cross-industry adaptability and implementation governance, addressing spatial privacy regulations (e.g., GDPR/CCPA) and worker surveillance concerns, the proposed framework addresses common quality-control challenges across public works and smart cities, utilities, telecommunications, and construction. The cumulative impacts of this framework are theoretically modeled via a Value Proposition Pyramid and a formal Theory of Change with testable research hypotheses. Crucially, VaaS is logically distinguished as an overarching governance framework from underlying enabling technologies such as Building Information Modeling (BIM), digital twins, and blockchain. By grounding field oversight in verifiable, integrity-secured data, VaaS establishes the conceptual conditions for evidence-based procurement, regulatory standardization, and decarbonized urban asset governance. The primary limitations of this study stem from its unvalidated conceptual nature, necessitating future empirical field testing while addressing the data-entry, software infrastructure overhead, urban spatial privacy mandates (e.g., GDPR/CCPA), and worker-surveillance concerns.
Major investments in railway infrastructure and service provision are often justified by their potential to increase public transport (PT) use and induce modal shift away from private motorized transport (PMT), thereby contributing to more sustainable mobility. Yet, empirical evidence on the extent to which large-scale railway interventions affect individual mode choice remains scattered. This study evaluates the impact of the Ceneri Base Tunnel (CBT), opened in Ticino, Switzerland, in 2020, together with associated PT offer improvements, on work and study commuting mode choice. Drawing on the INDMOB travel survey, that collected data from 24,577 individuals, we analyze changes in commuting practices between 2019 and 2023 and estimate the causal effect of the CBT opening using a Difference-in-Differences (DiD) approach. We find that the CBT (and associated PT improvements) increased the probability of using PT rather than PMT as the main commuting mode by 4.2 percentage points (p.p.) among commuters along its north–south corridors, relative to the control group, after controlling for socio-demographics, mobility equipment, and PT level of service. This corresponds to a 13% relative increase compared with the baseline PT share in the treatment group. We further show that PT use is associated with individual and spatial characteristics: women and younger commuters, individuals with a PT subscription, and those living in areas with higher PT levels of service are more likely to use PT, conditional on the other covariates. Our findings contribute to the transport literature on the effects of major railway infrastructure improvements on mode choice and support rail investments as an effective component of modal shift strategies, while highlighting the importance of individual mobility resources and the broader PT service context in shaping their potential.
Khaula Alkaabi, Fatmaelzahraa Hussein, Salieu Senghore, Nour Agiel, Sarah Aljaberi
This study investigates the complementary roles of public art (PA), culturally responsive urban design (UD), and digital public art platforms (PADP) in preserving cultural identity and strengthening national identity in the UAE. Using a quantitative approach informed by postpositivist and constructivist perspectives, a survey of 543 residents (72% under 35 years) examined perceptions of national identity and cultural motifs. Structural Equation Modeling revealed that 81% viewed PA as enhancing pride, while 65% valued PADP for promoting culture. Arabic calligraphy (68%) and natural motifs (74%) were key identity anchors. Public art serves as the primary visual medium, urban design provides the physical setting, and digital platforms extend cultural engagement beyond the built environment. Integrating cultural elements into physical urban landscapes and digital public art platforms can strengthen community belonging.
Cities around the world face the difficult task of transforming their economies to decarbonize, use resources more efficiently, strengthen resilience, and broaden access to opportunity. Yet a transition that progresses in one city may stall in another, and urban economics offers limited practical guidance for explaining why. To address this gap, this Conceptual Analysis develops urban economic succession as a middle-range framework for ordered but non-deterministic change in an urban economy's portfolio of activities. It translates the causal architecture of ecological succession into six economically observable components: opportunity availability, access to potential activities, local capability fit, interactions among activities, historical legacies and feedback, and extra-local connectivity. The framework brings together insights from sectoral transition, urban scaling, relatedness, economic complexity, production networks, and urban metabolism, while distinguishing changes in economic composition from judgments about what counts as sustainable. Five falsifiable propositions and a seven-step diagnostic workflow show how it can identify different barriers to green industrial diversification, circular production, low-carbon buildings, resilience, and other sustainable transformations. The framework does not treat cities as biological ecosystems, assume that urban economies follow a universal sequence, or equate greater internal cycling with greater sustainability. Instead, it offers a comparative research program for identifying recurrent transition pathways, explaining why cities depart from them, and matching interventions to the specific constraints operating in particular city-regions.
