Understanding Road Usage Patterns in Urban Areas

In this paper, we combine the most complete record of daily mobility, based on large-scale mobile phone data, with detailed Geographic Information System (GIS) data, uncovering previously hidden patterns in urban road usage. We find that the major usage of each road segment can be traced to its own - surprisingly few - driver sources. Based on this finding we propose a network of road usage by defining a bipartite network framework, demonstrating that in contrast to traditional approaches, which define road importance solely by topological measures, the role of a road segment depends on both: its betweeness and its degree in the road usage network. Moreover, our ability to pinpoint the few driver sources contributing to the major traffic flow allows us to create a strategy that achieves a significant reduction of the travel time across the entire road system, compared to a benchmark approach.NNSFC of China (51208520

The Collaborative Image of The City: Mapping the Inequality of Urban Perception

A traveler visiting Rio, Manila or Caracas does not need a report to learn that these cities are unequal; she can see it directly from the taxicab window. This is because in most cities inequality is conspicuous, but also, because cities express different forms of inequality that are evident to casual observers. Cities are highly heterogeneous and often unequal with respect to the income of their residents, but also with respect to the cleanliness of their neighborhoods, the beauty of their architecture, and the liveliness of their streets, among many other evaluative dimensions. Until now, however, our ability to understand the effect of a city's built environment on social and economic outcomes has been limited by the lack of quantitative data on urban perception. Here, we build on the intuition that inequality is partly conspicuous to create quantitative measure of a city's contrasts. Using thousands of geo-tagged images, we measure the perception of safety, class and uniqueness; in the cities of Boston and New York in the United States, and Linz and Salzburg in Austria, finding that the range of perceptions elicited by the images of New York and Boston is larger than the range of perceptions elicited by images from Linz and Salzburg. We interpret this as evidence that the cityscapes of Boston and New York are more contrasting, or unequal, than those of Linz and Salzburg. Finally, we validate our measures by exploring the connection between them and homicides, finding a significant correlation between the perceptions of safety and class and the number of homicides in a NYC zip code, after controlling for the effects of income, population, area and age. Our results show that online images can be used to create reproducible quantitative measures of urban perception and characterize the inequality of different cities.MIT Media Lab Consortiu

Understanding Walking Behaviour - Pedestrian Motion Patterns and Preferences in Shopping Environments

The promotion of walkable environments and the design of attractive places for walkers require comprehensive knowledge about pedestrians´ needs and preferences. However, so far little is known about the factors encouraging people to walk in specific environments and prompting them to avoid others. As previous studies have already indicated, the design and structure of the surrounding indoor or outdoor environment is counted among the most crucial determining factors. Especially in the field of marketing research a lot of effort is put on the identification of relevant parameters affecting the spatial behaviour of shoppers. Some of these results had a large impact on shopping centre architecture, e.g. the predicted evolvement of shopping to an active leisure activity led to the creation of large landmark shopping centres which offer specific thematic, interactive surroundings (e.g. Canal City, Fukuoka, Japan). Turley and Millimen (2000) researched the atmospheric effects on shopping behaviour and especially lighting concepts proved to be of high relevance for movement behaviour in shopping streets. A currently ongoing study is focussing at the investigation of pedestrian spatio-temporal behaviour in indoor and outdoor shopping environments. A combination of different qualitative-interpretative and quantitative-statistical empirical methods is employed in order to obtain a comprehensive insight to human motion behaviour and underlying intentions, motivations and individual preferences. Special attention is paid on the investigation of potential differences of indoor and outdoor behaviour patterns and related influence factors. We present initial results based on a data set collected from 130 interviews of pedestrians in indoor and outdoor shopping environments, who were asked to give a self-assessment of their walking behaviour, preferred environmental attributes, and other walking-related characteristics. The experimental results include identified key attributes, classes of homogeneous self-perceptions, and a comparison of indoor and outdoor results

AXIS, Zukunftsfest

Evolutionärer Städtebau, e-topia: Smart Cities & Smart CitizensEvolutionary Urbanism, e-topia: Smart Cities & Smart Citizen

Bridging the Adoption Gap for Smart City Technologies: An Interview with Rob Kitchin

Rob Kitchin talks about how we can bridge the adoption gap between city administrations and developers of smart city technologies. This interview is part of a special issue on smart cities