Leisure mobility and mobility problems of elderly people in urban, suburban and rural environment: preliminary results from the research project FRAME

Ageing is a lifelong process. But currently the attitudes about ageing and the opportunities for older people are changing. The foreseeable demographic development in the next 30 years provides a challenge to analyse and develop for the expected social and spatial effects of an ageing population. Formerly, the image of ageing included homogeneous portraits of immobile, lonely and frail older people and their activity spaces were mainly concentrated on the neighbourhood environment. In the future, more older people will be healthier, they will live longer, they will be more mobile having their own car, and more time will be available for leisure activities in additional and more distant areas. For urban and regional planning this development contains the following challenges: - The increasing variation within the age groups ranging from very active and mobile lifestyles to uninvolved and immobile lifestyles creates concurrent requirements for urban and regional structures. - The contradiction of restricting the negative impact of car-related environmental effects and supporting a self-reliant mobility of older people - especially in rural areas - cannot be solved with conventional planning methods. - The decentralized accessibility of service and leisure infrastructure is decreasing because of a general tendency of concentration and the 'ageing of the suburbs' meaning the percentage of older people in suburbs is growing. Serving this (sub)urban development is as critical as limiting it. Besides these changes, services and urban infrastructure do not only provide functional but also social qualities (e.g. meeting a neighbour on the way to the grocery). For older people who don't drive a car (any more), mobility is definitely restricted when the possibilities of activity become less accessible. First empirical results from the research project "FRAME - Leisure Mobility of Older People", a cooperation of geographers, psychologists and transportation planners from the Universities of Bonn and Dortmund, supported by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research will be presented. The aim of the project is a concept of a mobility design for leisure activities of older people in consideration of environmental, social and ecological constraints. In the Region of Bonn and the Eifel an analysis will be led focussing on urban, suburban and rural areas. The different spatial frame conditions will be analysed in relation to leisure mobility of older people. So far, the relationship between residential satisfaction, access to a car, transportation behaviour etc. cannot easily be connected to the spatial structure because of the simultaneous impact of social and spatial effects. Causalities are difficult to state: The average use of a car is not only determined by the built environment, but the choice of the housing location was made with the expectation of the constant availability of a car. For the conceptual part it is important to state, that community structures are not only determined by the built environment, but by social, organizational and operative structures as well. Existing social networks are a basis for mobility, because for older people, the question often is whether an accompanying person or a travel companion is available. An adequate design might be an organizational concept to support older people moving to a new home early enough within a short distance. The aim would be for example to maintain the social network and to decrease the distance to infrastructure or public transportation. Urban and regional structures in general are crucial for self-reliant mobility of older people. The structure needs to follow the aim to secure an inspiring environment and to facilitate the daily business getting done even without a car. To ensure quality of life, motivations and reasons for mobility need to be known.

Lifestyles, choice of housing location and daily mobility. Conceptual framework, methods and preliminary results of the interdisciplinary research project "StadtLeben"

Today, spatial research and planning is confronted with complex frame conditions which have substantially changed in the past decades. Thus, a comprehensive social change is stated, giving new room for individual development, but on the other hand making new decisions necessary (cue: individualisation). At the same time, settlement structures and time-regimes - essential conditions for spatial mobility - have developed dynamically (cues: decentralisation, flexibilisation). These trends are spatially resulting: - in a growing demand for housing size, which is realised predominantly in suburban and post-suburban settlement forms, - in high volumes of traffic in leisure, holidays, supply and commuting which are realised primarily by car and - in leisure and holidays - also by plane, - in changing mobility rationales; for instance, migrations are increasingly substituted by high distance commuting, - in new, partially virtual mobility forms (internet surfing, e-commerce, online banking, 'virtual leisure', event leisure). These mobility forms are characterised by interdependencies with physical passenger travel and freight transport as well as locational choice. From the perspective of a sustainable urban development, these trends have to be partially assessed as incompatible. At the same time, they offer chances for a more sustainable configuration of locations and transport. For instance, the change from industrial to service society facilitates the renaissance of the spatial integration of housing and working. New information and communication technologies allow to reduce job and supply trips (tele working, e-commerce). However, hitherto research and planning show serious methodological problems in the consideration of the stated changes. The explanation patterns of existing approaches for spatial mobility are mainly based upon spatial and individual restrictions. Neither the increasing degrees of freedom nor the subjective rationales behind mobility decisions are adequately considered. The referee presents the conceptual framework, methods and preliminary results of the interdisciplinary research project "StadtLeben". In this project, transport researchers, urban planners, geographers and psychologists from the universities of Aachen, Dortmund, Berlin (FU) and Bochum are working together. The project is supported by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research in the research programme "Building and Housing". The central research question focuses on the interrelation between social structures (lifestyles, milieus), space-time-structures, housing resp. choice of housing location, and everyday mobility. In exemplary study areas in the urban regions of Köln and Leipzig, the specific interdependency of lifestyles, milieus and space-time-structures (f.i. infrastructure facilities, characteristic urban structures) as central influences on spatial action is investigated. In doing so, it is assumed that these interdependencies are to be understood as "contextual figures" rather than as clearly defined one-directional causal chains. The proposed research approach shall help to investigate the complex and manifold interrelations between social and spatial structures as well as the choice of housing location and everyday mobility. By means of this advanced descriptive and explanatory approach, target group-oriented and efficient planning and design strategies shall be developed. Together with planning practitioners, action-oriented knowledge as well as suggestions for planning methods (participation, processes, competence) shall be derived.

Radar-based Road User Classification and Novelty Detection with Recurrent Neural Network Ensembles

Radar-based road user classification is an important yet still challenging task towards autonomous driving applications. The resolution of conventional automotive radar sensors results in a sparse data representation which is tough to recover by subsequent signal processing. In this article, classifier ensembles originating from a one-vs-one binarization paradigm are enriched by one-vs-all correction classifiers. They are utilized to efficiently classify individual traffic participants and also identify hidden object classes which have not been presented to the classifiers during training. For each classifier of the ensemble an individual feature set is determined from a total set of 98 features. Thereby, the overall classification performance can be improved when compared to previous methods and, additionally, novel classes can be identified much more accurately. Furthermore, the proposed structure allows to give new insights in the importance of features for the recognition of individual classes which is crucial for the development of new algorithms and sensor requirements.Comment: 8 pages, 9 figures, accepted paper for 2019 IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium (IV), Paris, France, June 201

Radar-based Feature Design and Multiclass Classification for Road User Recognition

The classification of individual traffic participants is a complex task, especially for challenging scenarios with multiple road users or under bad weather conditions. Radar sensors provide an - with respect to well established camera systems - orthogonal way of measuring such scenes. In order to gain accurate classification results, 50 different features are extracted from the measurement data and tested on their performance. From these features a suitable subset is chosen and passed to random forest and long short-term memory (LSTM) classifiers to obtain class predictions for the radar input. Moreover, it is shown why data imbalance is an inherent problem in automotive radar classification when the dataset is not sufficiently large. To overcome this issue, classifier binarization is used among other techniques in order to better account for underrepresented classes. A new method to couple the resulting probabilities is proposed and compared to others with great success. Final results show substantial improvements when compared to ordinary multiclass classificationComment: 8 pages, 6 figure

Multi-objective optimization shapes ecological variation

Ecological systems contain a huge amount of quantitative variation between and within species and locations, which makes it difficult to obtain unambiguous verification of theoretical predictions. Ordinary experiments consider just a few explanatory factors and are prone to providing oversimplified answers because they ignore the complexity of the factors that underlie variation. We used multi-objective optimization (MO) for a mechanistic analysis of the potential ecological and evolutionary causes and consequences of variation in the life-history traits of a species of moth. Optimal life-history solutions were sought for environmental conditions where different life stages of the moth were subject to predation and other known fitness-reducing factors in a manner that was dependent on the duration of these life stages and on variable mortality rates. We found that multi-objective optimal solutions to these conditions that the moths regularly experience explained most of the life-history variation within this species. Our results demonstrate that variation can have a causal interpretation even for organisms under steady conditions. The results suggest that weather and species interactions can act as underlying causes of variation, and MO acts as a corresponding adaptive mechanism that maintains variation in the traits of organisms

A linguagem expositiva e o modo como se apresenta no jardim botânico do Rio de Janeiro

SIAM. Series Iberoamericanas de Museología. Año 3, Vol.

Reflexões sobre o museu virtual

The paper analyses some relationships between Museology and the concept of virtual – using, as object of analysis, the virtual museum. Pierre Lévy defines ‘virtual’ according to the vocabulary of philosophy, as something that is not static. The origin of the term would be the Latin virtualis, derived from virtus, that signifies force, potency: the tree, for example, would be virtually present in the seed. The virtual is in process, implies complexity. It is problematic and circumstantial. It does not bring solutions, but problems, since it contains a degree of indetermination. It implies freedom, being understood as a permanent ‘to-be’. Virtual would thus be something that is in constant process of change. Therefore, it might be asked whether the internet, as a medium of manifestation, would be the unique qualifier of the virtual museum.The approach is complemented with the analysis of two examples of existing museums: the Museum of the Person (Museu da Pessoa, Brazil) – as an electronic virtual museum, webmuseum or cybermuseum, existent only in the internet; and the Temporary Museum of Permanent Change, in Salt Lake City, Utah (USA), as a museum organized out of the internet