Rapid urbanisation, infrastructure interdependencies, climate-related pressures, resource constraints, and growing societal expectations require integrated approaches to urban resilience and sustainability. However, safety, health, water, environmental, energy, transportation, and resource circularity are often managed through fragmented institutional and operational structures, limiting the capacity to recognise cross-domain risks and cascading effects. This Perspective proposes an Integrated Risk–Safety–Sustainability (IRSS) Framework for Resilient Urban Infrastructure and Improved City Life. The framework conceptualises urban infrastructure as an interconnected socio-technical system and uses multidimensional risk as a common basis for integrating the seven urban domains. A distinctive feature is the conceptual extension of near-miss intelligence beyond conventional occupational safety to support identification of precursor conditions, latent vulnerabilities, cross-domain dependencies, and emerging system imbalances. The framework integrates systems thinking, urban resilience, risk governance, sustainability transitions, and integrated management principles within a four-layer architecture linking urban systems, risk and near-miss intelligence, risk assessment and interpretation, and risk-informed decision-making with adaptive governance and continuous learning. The framework provides a conceptual foundation for exploring coordinated urban risk management and for future empirical validation, indicator development, pilot implementation, and policy application. Its potential contribution to urban resilience, sustainability, infrastructure performance, and quality of city life remains to be evaluated through empirical research.
Rapid urbanization in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) has expanded informal settlements where residents face extreme heat, yet informal settlement thermal dynamics remain understudied. Nowhere is this more evident than in Nairobi, one of SSA’s most rapidly growing metropolises, which faces critical challenges from unregulated informal settlement expansion, characterized by high population density and threats to urban sustainability and resident well-being. Using Landsat 8/9 imagery from three February scenes (2015, 2020, 2025), remotely sensed indices, and geospatial data, this study investigated land surface temperature (LST) evolution across Nairobi’s 17 subdivisions and 13 mapped informal settlements, of which 12 were retained for formal analysis. Informal settlements consistently exhibited elevated LSTs, with Kibera approximately 2.6 °C warmer than its parent administrative subdivision in 2015 (34.28 °C vs. 31.67 °C), a pattern that persisted with variations of 1.5–2.9 °C. The urban heat island followed a persistent east–west gradient: industrial and informal settlements were > 95
Abstract Rapid peri-urban growth in Global South secondary cities consistently outpaces municipal public service delivery, generating severe spatial inequalities. This paper examines the spatial and institutional production of primary school infrastructure deficits in Adama City, Ethiopia. Deploying a mixed-method approach, this study integrates a GIS-based Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) site suitability model configured at a precise 30 m $$\:\times\:$$ 30 m grid resolution, a 384-household socioeconomic survey, 12 key informant interviews with planning and education officials, and four focus group discussions with community leaders, parents, and teachers. The spatial model indicates that while 16.14% of municipal land is highly suitable for educational infrastructure, existing school infrastructure remains concentrated in saturated central cores rather than in these newly identified peripheral priority zones. This spatial mismatch coincides with severe overcrowding: the 12 schools identified as operating above capacity average 58 students per classroom. Analytically, spatial and field validation indicated that 73% of the area classified as underserved (by household, administrative, and stakeholder indicators) fell within model-identified high-suitability zones; because the validation indicators and the model criteria draw on related conditions, this is evidence of convergence rather than fully independent validation. Qualitative findings suggest that accessibility deficits are shaped not merely by geographic friction, but also by institutional land-reservation failures, unauthorized land-use conversions, and un-synchronized capital investment cycles. This study contributes by indicating how spatial decision-support tools may need to be coupled with institutional governance reforms to enforce land-use zoning and mitigate infrastructure lag in rapidly expanding secondary cities. For Adama and comparable Global South secondary cities, the findings suggest that GIS-AHP suitability outputs should be embedded within binding land-reservation and inter-agency coordination mechanisms before, rather than after, peripheral settlement occurs.
This study examines the potential of domestic gardens to support urban sustainability in Greater Accra, Ghana. It explores homeowners’ perceptions of the social, economic, and ecological benefits of domestic gardening and identifies the main factors influencing engagement across two socioeconomically distinct communities, East Legon and Kwabenya. A comparative quantitative survey design, complemented by illustrative field observations, was used to collect data from 226 household heads through structured questionnaires. The Mann–Whitney U test was used to examine differences in perceptions between the two communities, while the Relative Importance Index (RII) was used to rank the perceived ecological, personal, and economic drivers of domestic gardening. The results indicate significant differences between the two communities in perceptions of healthy eating (r = 0.804), poverty reduction (r = 0.490), and sustainable technology adoption (r = 0.316). Despite these differences, homeowners in both communities recognized several important ecological functions of domestic gardening, particularly microclimate regulation, flood mitigation, and soil enrichment. Field observations further illustrate differences in gardening practices, ranging from ornamental and technology-supported gardens in East Legon to more food-oriented gardens in Kwabenya. The findings highlight domestic gardens as important socio-ecological assets in sub-Saharan African (SSA) cities and provide evidence for incorporating private residential green spaces into broader urban sustainability and climate adaptation strategies.
Urban pluvial flooding can disrupt road networks, delay emergency medical services and produce spatially uneven losses of access to urgent healthcare. This study evaluates how flood-induced road disruption affects ambulance travel performance and identifies buildings, neighbourhoods and populations that experience reduced emergency healthcare accessibility under rainfall events with return periods of 10, 20 and 100 years in Thessaloniki, Greece. High-resolution flood-depth outputs were integrated with direction-specific road operating speeds, building footprints, population estimates, an ambulance terminal and seven public hospitals. Road-section speeds were adjusted according to local flood depth and impassable sections were removed, while minimum-time routes were then calculated for the terminal-to-patient, patient-to-hospital and hospital-to-terminal legs across 21 two-hospital duty configurations. Flooding produced substantial increases in travel time and distance even though only a small proportion of road links became impassable. Under the 100-year scenario, the median full-service-cycle time increased from 24.8 to 33.0 min, patient-delivery completion declined from 100.0
