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This paper investigates everyday struggles in claiming access to public space and water supply in a low-income settlement of Dhaka, Bangladesh. It looks at the rationality, processes and outcomes of informal negotiations. The empirical findings confirm the contested nature of access to public space and water supply and demonstrate how negotiations in an unbalanced power structure guarantee privileged access for a few local political leaders based on social and political relationships. This is at the cost of the exclusion of the majority. Such an “organised encroachment of the powerful” can be understood as an addition to Bayat's notion of a counter politics, the “quiet encroachment of the ordinary.” This paper advocates the need for complete understanding of context-specific power structures as this may help to reduce the threat of theoretical overgeneralisation and promote a more inclusive and just approach to urban planning.

In the last two decades, suicide bombings became quite common among some communities in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, India, Sri Lanka, USA, and a few African and European countries. The modeling of reported suicide bombings has been the subject of a few studies, but the pattern of incidents turned out to be difficult to assess. Nevertheless, to uncover the bombing patterns in past incident locations is of major importance because it can improve social security and save human lives. It is believed that most of the Suicide Attack, with few exceptions, happens with long term planning and preparation from the offender's side to attack the target people at a specific geographic location and time. The Capital city of Afghanistan, Kabul, has experienced on average around one suicide attack in every month since 2001. The overall objective of this study is to characterize the spatial and temporal patterns of suicide attack incidences occurred in Kabul City since 2006 to 2010.

Purpose– Climate change has several impacts on people’s lives, directly or indirectly, and displacement is one such indirect effect. The purpose of this paper is to bring this fact to light, as Bangladesh is going to face severe problems due to the displacement of population predicted by researchers. Design/methodology/approach– This paper is an outcome of a thorough study of Bogi village in the southwestern coastal region of Bangladesh. Several factors such as demographic conditions, natural disasters, land loss and changes in landuse pattern, have been taken into consideration. Methods used for data collection were questionnaire survey and focus group discussions in the study area. The nature and extent of displacement are found by comparing the changes in occupation, location of settlement and permanent migration of family members. Findings– Population growth rate decreased in recent years as the annual growth rate for both sexes was 0.89 in between 1991 and 2001 but in recent years, from 2001 to 2005, it was 0.63, which is a clear indication that the natural growth is hampered or a major proportion of the population is migrating. On the other hand, 361 hectors of land were lost throughout the last 18 years. As a result, 93 percent of people in that area were forced to move to other places for at least one time in their life. The major reason of displacement found was loss of land and occupation caused by cyclone, storm surge and erosion. Practical implications– The study findings depict scenarios of rural urban migration due to disasters and critically found out the sectors to be addressed. The study can be a representative of the condition of almost all the remote coastal region and may work as a hammering tool to formulate strategic options to deal with the environmental issues and socio-economic situation. Originality/value– Sophisticated but commonly used methods and techniques have been used to find out the problems associated with climate change and disasters in the coastal belt. The study has taken an initiative to identify climate change impacts at micro level on the basis of spatial and non-spatial attributes. The way this study was conducted can be a popular path to put future researches on a human-oriented track.

The primary objective of this research is to predict and analyze the future urban growth of Dhaka City using the Landsat satellite images of 1989, 1999 and 2009. Dhaka City Corporation (DCC) and its surrounding impact areas have been selected as the study area. At the beginning, a fisher supervised classification method has been applied to prepare the base maps with five land cover classes. In the next stage, three different models have been implemented to simulate the land cover map of Dhaka city of 2009. These have been named as “Stochastic Markov (St_Markov)” Model, “Cellular Automata Markov (CA_Markov)” Model and “Multi Layer Perceptron Markov (MLP_Markov)” Model. Then the best-fitted model has been selected by implementing a method to compare land cover categories in three maps: a reference map of time 1, a reference map of time 2 and a simulation map of time 2. This is how the “Multi Layer Perceptron Markov (MLP_Markov)” Model has been qualified as the most appropriate model for this research. Later, using the MLP_Markov model, the land cover map of 2019 has been predicted. The MLP_Markov model extrapolates that built-up area increases from 46% to 58% of the total study area during 2009–2019.

This study presents an approach to assess the effectiveness of road-crash databases in providing meaningful analysis. The assessment was done for the case of the database system in the United Arab Emirates. The assessment was based on feedback from two groups: one involved crash investigators and database managers, and the second involved other traffic safety experts. A quantitative geographical information system-based data analysis was also included to illustrate some deficiencies in the existing database. The survey of crash investigators and database managers focused on aspects including database utilization, technology for providing data services, methods of data collection, sufficiency of the traffic crash report, difficulties in the traffic crash report, and sufficiency of pedestrian crash data. The experts’ survey addressed aspects of difficulties of the traffic crash report and database system, required data for crash analyses, need of in-depth crash data, need for Global Positioning System data, involving a private party in handling the database system, and permissible extent of data sharing. The conducted analyses were used to subjectively quantify the importance and the perceived level of satisfaction of the surveyed aspects. This was then used to propose measures to upgrade the database system and the crash investigation process to overcome the identified deficiencies.

In this paper, the baseline performance level of Al Ain Public Bus Service is evalu¬ated using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) based on some selected input (travel time per round trip, total number of stops, total number of operators, total number of buses) and output (daily ridership and vehicle-kilometer) variables. Two types of scenarios were developed and tested. The first set of scenarios aimed at investigating the possibility of reducing the operating cost while maintaining the same perfor¬mance levels (efficiency and effectiveness) for the routes. The second set of scenarios was used to demonstrate how the baseline performance levels can be improved by slightly altering the route alignment (and subsequently input and output variables). Sensitivity analysis was then conducted to measure the efficiency and effectiveness of each route. Conclusions on how the transit authority can reduce daily operating hours while maintaining the existing performance level are made. Also, suggestions are presented on how to improve the overall performance level of the bus service by changing some route characteristics.

This paper discusses the development of fuzzy logic model for estimating the 85th percentile speed of urban roads. For this, spot speed survey has been conducted on four randomly selected urban road segments for a typical weekday and a weekend. The road segment attribute data namely length of the road segment, number of access points/intersecting links, number of pedestrian crossings, number of lanes, hourly traffic volume, hourly pedestrian volume and current posted speed limits of the selected roads have also been collected and used as input variables in the model. Two models for weekday and weekend have been developed in this study based on the field survey data. Both models have been calibrated later using the neuro-fuzzy technique for optimizing the logic parameters. Analyses of estimated results show that fuzzy logic can estimate the 85th percentile speed to a reasonable level.