Sunday, March 27, 2016

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.


SessionMega 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.

Thursday, March 24, 2016

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



Wednesday, March 23, 2016

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.


Saturday, March 19, 2016

How to argue on the internet


Thursday, March 17, 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.


Wednesday, March 16, 2016

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

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


Thursday, March 10, 2016

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.

Japan_pyramid
credit: Kyle Walker

Sunday, March 6, 2016

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