Our Top 10 posts of 2014

Here is a list with our 10 most popular posts written in 2014. I hope you enjoy it again. A great 2015 for all of us!

1. The Oligopoly that is Academia
   
   
2. Listen to Durkheim delivering a talk in 1911
   
   
3. Making 3D Maps in Excel
   
   
4. Subway systems of Rio and Shanghai 1993-2013
   
   
5. Urban Density Patterns in 9 Global Cities
   
   
6. Real-time map of 202 transit systems worldwide
   
   
7. Average Commute Time in metropolitan areas across the globe
   
   
8. Spatial data analysis in R: where to start
   
   
9. The Age of Peak Academic Performance
   
   
10. The Evolution of Commute Times in Brazilian Metropolitan Areas (1992-2013) 

Bonus:

1. Population Density Maps
2. Download free Brazil Shapefiles
3. Urban Primacy 
4. Porn star demographic

Urban Picture

Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, by the great Cameron Booth. More pictures from other photographers here.

[image credit: Cameron Booth, @Chaos_Boy]

Assorted links on Fertility

1. Fertility decisions and the escape from slavery
   
   
2.  The effects of social interactions on fertility decline: An agent-based simulation
   
   
3. "Around 1 million babies are likely to have been born to Erasmus programme couples since 1987"
   
   
4. How does the UK's fertility rate compare to other nations?
   
   
5. Probabilities of failing birth control methods
   
   
6. Development and fertility in Brazil: fertility reversion for more developed municipalities? , Paper by Bernardo Queiroz
   
   
7. The causal relationship between female labor supply and fertility in the USA
   
   
8. Data! The Human Fertility Database (HFD) and the Human Fertility Collection, organized by the Max Planck and the Vienna Inst. of Demography (via Carl Schmertmann )

[image credit: Javier Pérez]

Merry Isaac Newton's Birthday

A couple of centuries ago, a man was born who changed the course of history. Merry Isaac Newton's Birthday!

[image credit: ? via Matt Dawson]

In the spirit of Christmas, I have a gift to share with my hundreds of thousands of readers out there:

Daughter: NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert

Fieldwork in Rio + Urban Picture

I've been a little absent lately stuck in traffic for many hours doing some exploratory fieldwork in Rio de Janeiro. One day, it took me 4,5 hours to travel 29 km by car. This is 3 times as estimated by Google Maps without traffic. Google's estimate for for the same journey using public transport is 2h41m without traffic. 

The problem is: 'no traffic' is not a reasonable assumption great urban areas like Rio. Under such congested contexts, GTFS data is hardly accurate and that's when real-time data (e.g. GPS) becomes necessary for more reliable analysis.

Rio has the worst traffic conditions in Brazil and many other problems, and yet it is impossible not to love this city.

[image credit: ? ]

ps. Dear readers, I miss you too.

Soundtrack:

R Links

1. Learn about handling character data in R with this free e-book
   
   
2. International population pyramids with ggplot2, by Kyle Walker
   
   
3. Beautiful mistakes in R
   
   
4. An interactive simulation model of Ebola, via Robin Lovelace
   
   
5. Interactive maps in R
   
   
6. Series of youtube tutorials for R users and developers, by Google Developers
   
   
7. List of R packages related to networks, graphs, Bayesian models, and flow diagrams
   
   
8. Interactive Circular Migration Flow Plots in R (by Nikola Sander and Guy Abel)

A debate with D.Harvey and Ed.Glaeser

The team at Caos Planejado (a very good Brazilian blog focused on urban economics) points out to a recent event where David Harvey and Edward Glaeser discussed the 'Economics of the Creative Economy'.

It is certainly not every day that we have this kind of debate. David Harvey is one of the most influential critical geographers with a great academic history and his writings have shaped a lot of the Marxist readings on cities. On the other corner of the ring Edward Glaeser is among the greatest urban economists nowadays and has a brilliant list of publications on a variety of issues related to urban development.

Despite ideological divergences, both are highly qualified scholars. They are also extremely polite, to a point that their disagreements always come in a gentle  sometimes even subtle way. I confess I was expecting some more blood.

My two highlights. Harvey and Glaser disagree on two particular questions that caught my attention: the connection between affordability issues and the idea of successful cities (29'-37'), and their different (normative) understandings of how property should be organized (1:04'-1:08'). Their disagreement on these two topics reflect markedly different positions in political philosophy more generally. More deeply, it shows rather different understandings of what justice means, and what should be the role of governments and markets in the pursuit for justice. 

I will stop here before you fall asleep with this post. Hope you enjoy the video.

ps. Glaser's body language reaction at 1:05' is hilarious.

How much space do we dedicate to cars?

Chris Bruntlett points out to this great drawing by Karl Jilg depicting 'the sad state of walking in our cities'. It's a nice way to illustrate how much public space is dedicated to cars in our cities and its health risk implications.

[image credit: Karl Jilg/Swedish Road Administration]

It is a well known and old stylized fact that cars occupy a disproportional amount of road space. Artistic expressions a aside and despite the effort of a few good researchers, no one really knows how much road space we actually dedicate to cars compared to other transport modes. This is not a trivial question to answer. There are many variables involved (including vehicle occupancy rates, vehicle speeds, the amount of road and parking spaces, fleet composition, etc), these variables change drastically across different parts of the city and different times of the day and such data is hardly available.

In the 'time of big data' with very profound and rapid changes in data collection, there are huge opportunities to advance this research agenda using computational modelling and I've been really tempted to work on this topic during my PhD. Would someone like join me? ;)

The Shortest bike lane ever

Shortest bike lane ever. Amazing. pic.twitter.com/nTUusAiBzr
— Justin S (@urban_future) December 9, 2014

Related Links:

• Real time mapping of bikeshare schemes around the world by Oliver O'Brien
• The size of bike-sharing systems Worldwide
• Bicycles access and school enrollment
• The world leader in bike-sharing is… China
• Google Maps now features elevation profiles for some bike routes
• The Impact of the Built Environment on Bicycle Commuting: Evidence from Beijing

The Rise and Fall of Manhattan’s Density (updated)

Alexander McQuilkin has written a very nice piece on the rise and fall of Manhattan’s density over the past 200 years. It's certainly worth a read.

"Between 1800 and 1910, density in urban Manhattan tripled from 200 to 600 people per hectare. Neighborhoods like Chinatown, the Lower East Side, and the East Village were significantly denser than the average, approaching 1,600 people per hectare." [This is about 4 times the population density of these neighborhoods as observed today !]

This is an interesting and not so new  map showing the 'de-densification of Manhattan', by Shlomo Angel and Patrick Lamson-Hall.

[image credit: Shlomo Angel and Patrick Lamson-Hall]

Updated: If you liked this post, you might like this interactive tool called Urban Layers that tracks Manhattan's rise, block by block, since 1765.

[image credit: @morphocode]

The invisible patterns of air travel

James Cheshire (who has one of the greatest blogs about spatial analysis and R) points out to this incredible visualization of the invisible patterns of air travel in the UK.

Related Links:

• Visualizing regional urban systems
• Animated map of Flights over NYC

Urban Picture

Cesar A. Hidalgo has pointed me to this picture showing an amazing contrast in the urban fabric of a city in Venezuela (I think this is Caracas but I'm not quite sure).

Urban contrast in Venezuela. Another example of how cities reflect society. @UrbDemogrphics @MITdusp @MITCities pic.twitter.com/g6Qj4zDfQg
— Cesar A. Hidalgo (@cesifoti) December 6, 2014

One Day on Waze

'One Day on Waze' is a series of data visualization videos showing 24 hours worth of data on Waze. The cities include: Boston, Jakarta, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Rio de Janeiro, San José, and Tel Aviv.

One Day on Waze from Justin Chen on Vimeo.

This is the video of Rio, where it's possible to spot some ugly red bottlenecks.

One Day on Waze - Rio de Janeiro from Takashi Kawashima on Vimeo.

Related Links:

• How we move in cities
• A day in the life of a city
• Visualizing Disabled Freedom Pass trips on the London Underground 
• NYC Taxi Trips Data from 2013

Assorted links

1. All papers published in Nature will be made free to read in screen-view format (ht Cheli Cresswell)
   
   
2. The world's most beautiful metro stations in pictures
   
   
3. Nature explores the most-cited research of all time
   
   
4. Mind-blowing post "Visualizing Algorithms" (ht Andy Boneau) 


5. Louis Smith has written a great piece to celebrate the 100th anniversary Lina Bo Bardi, the Italian architect who designed MASP in Sao Paulo and the Bowl Chair
   
   
6. Some common ways we're misled with charts
    
7. Migrants account for 70% of the increase in working-age population in OECD area
   
   
8. How big is #67P? Compare size of the comet with cities across Europe
   
   
9. World population predictions keep getting upward revisions these days (ht Sander Wagner)

[click on the image to enlarge it]

[image credit: Scientific American]

Finding time for academic writing

#truestory

 

[#FAIL image credit: ? ]