On my way to San Francisco

The blog will be a little less active in the next few days as I will be at the AAG in San Francisco. I will be presenting the second paper of my PhD (details below). Anyway, in case you're in SF next week and want to reach out and grab a  coffee  beer, you can drop me line or a tweet.


Session: Mega Event Planning for Sustainable Legacies

Mega-events, transport legacy and the redistribution of employment accessibility

Rafael H M Pereira

Abstract:

A growing number of studies have discussed how mega-event strategies to fast-track urban development in host cities are commonly backed by pro-growth discourses, which rely on the assumption that all local residents equally benefit from the trickle-down effect of economic growth and infrastructure investments. What has received much less attention in the literature, however, is the discussion of transport legacy, and particularly the distributive aspects of who benefits from the new transport infrastructure developments once they have been put in place. This paper discusses the social impact of transport legacies in terms of how such developments affect the transport accessibility to job opportunities of different social groups in host cities and whether local governments mobilize these events to reinforce or redress existing patterns of urban inequalities and segregation. As a case study, we analyze Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), looking particularly at the transformations carried out in the city’s transport system in preparation for the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympic Games. We make a before-and-after comparison of Rio’s transport system, calculating employment accessibility changes that have resulted from these new investments between 2013 and 2016 and compare how accessibility gains vary across different social groups and areas of the city.

R Links

1. Using R to model spatial patterns of urban growth in Africa
   
   
2. Great 'course' on network visualization with R, by Katherine Ognyanova
   
   
3. Building a Schelling segregation model in R, by Ben Davies
   
   
4. Basic mapping and attribute joins in R, by Robin Lovelace
   
   
5. A shiny app to explore the demographics of Texas counties, by Kyle Walker
   
   
6. Nathan Yau compares ggplot2 and R Base Graphics
   
   
7. A Compendium of Clean Graphs in R
   
   
8. I've gathered some code to show how to create Flow maps in R using ggplot2

Inside the mind of a master procrastinator

How  my mind works  the mind of a procrastinator works, by Tim Urban. ht Analise Real.

mental note: I guess I'm best friends with the Panic Monster at this stage

Urban Picture

This is a picture of Vila Amaury, a temporary village of 16,000 people in Brasilia - Brazil. Most of those people were construction workers who built public buildings in the city, including some ministries and the National Congress, the tall building you see in the picture. (ht Telmo Ribeiro)

The village was later covered by the water when the Paranoá River was dammed to create an artificial lake.

credit: Public Archives of the Federal District, via Histórias de Brasília

Assorted Links

1. Cyclists will outnumber car drivers entering central London in rush hour in the next few years, according to Transport for London (TfL)
   
   
2. 3-D interactive digital reconstruction of King Richard III's grave (ht  Rafael Marinho)
   
   
3. Core Concepts in Computational social science
   
   
4. I would have a mental breakdown doing this
   
   
5. Paper on th effect of additional government revenues on political corruption and on the quality of politicians (ht Arthur Bragança)
   
   
6. The last programming book you'll ever need
   
   
7. Map of Building Heights in London using open LIDAR data (via maps mania)
   
   
8. The Least  (and most) Segregated Cities in the US, and a more artistic conception of segregation maps by Jim Vallandingham

credit: Jim Vallandingham

How to argue on the internet

I made a robot to help me argue on the internet pic.twitter.com/NxpXhk0NMM

— Simone Giertz (@SimoneGiertz) 16 March 2016

Global Grid of Probabilities of Urban Expansion to 2030

Karen Seto and her group at Yale have recently made available a dataset of Global Grid of Probabilities of Urban Expansion, which presents spatially explicit probabilistic forecasts of global urban land cover change from 2000 to 2030 at a 2.5 arc-minute resolution. This is the dataset they used in their PNAS paper we have mentioned back in 2012.

Thanks Marcia Castro for the pointer.

The data 'is' or the data 'are' ?

Another great PhD Comic asking the big questions of Science, via Carl Schmertmann.

Japan's aging population in R

Here is a nice GIF showing the population aging of Japan, and here is the script to make this animated population pyramid in R using ggplot. 

Kudos to Kyle Walker, author of this code and who you should definitely follow on Twitter and GitHub if you're interested in R, spatial analysis, data visualization and demography.

credit: Kyle Walker

Urban Picture

Tokyo from above, by Scott Kelly

Making a Spherical World Map with R

Ewen Gallic has a post showing how to use R and ggplot2 to make spherical maps like the ones you see below. Go on and check out his website with some great R tutorials.

image credit: Ewen Gallic

Assorted Links

1. The gap in life expectancy between the rich and the poor in the US is expanding
   
   
2. Using maths and maps to figure out the identity of the world's most famous anonymous artist. Here is the paper
   
   
3. Refugee camps from above, and here
   
   
4. Using a 3D projection of the globe in QGIS
   
   
5. Now you can rent Van Gogh’s Famous Bedroom on Airbnb in Chicago
   
   
6. New SEDAC Hazards Mapper lets users estimate population in proximity to hazards, and assess exposure
   
   
7. Mesmerizing ceilings of Mosques
   
   
8. Nice chart showing how deadly is Ebola compared to other infectious diseases
   
   
9. The average cost of a house at every London Underground stop

click on the image to enlarge it

webinar "Unlocking the Power of Big Data and Analytics for Mobility"

Heads Up: Urban Engines will be webcasting a promising seminar on March 22: “Faster. Better. Personalized. Unlocking the Power of Big Data and Analytics for Mobility.”