Assorted links

1. 25% of students think they are in the top 1% of social skills. 94% of professors think their work is better than their peers. The Social Psychology of Biased Self-Assessment (ht Leo Monasterio)
   
   
2. What happened when New York City (randomly) increased street lighting? Crime fell by 36% as a direct result. HT John B. Holbein ‏, who is great at finding this kind of gems by the way.
   
   
3. Sacred Spaces: a series on modernist churches' by Thibaud Poirier, HT Darran Anderson
   
   
4. Interesting report comparing housing in London , New York City, Paris and Tokyo, by Jim Gleeson. Some key results summarized in this short thread.
   
   
5. The power of a single book. Beautiful metaphor for how ideas can have real impact
   
   
6. The data that was missing in your research: an incredibly detailed 3-D maps of the lunar surface
   
   
7. Microsoft Researchers trained a neural network to analyze satellite imagery and generate the footprints of 125,192,184 building in all 50 US states. The data are available on GitHub. Great coverage in the NYT, by Tim Wallace et al.

image credit: NYT

The suburbs of Mesa, Arizona

image credit: NYT

How Barcelona is taking city streets back from cars

The team at Vox have produced some interesting videos on urban-related topics. I've posted a few of them here in the blog before. This one below covers the urban planning in Barcelona, which uses superblocks as a means to build more liveable and inclusive urban environments in parts of the city.

This video is actually from 2 years ago but I only saw this video last week (thanks to the recommendation of  Telmo Amand, who was my high-school geography teacher!)

The urban landscape of Hong Kong

Johnny Harris (Vox) has filmed a great series of short-videos that helps us understand the urban landscape of Hong Kong. In one of these videos, Johnny talks about how one of the most unaffordable housing markets in the world is driven by government's land-use regulations. The videos also cover the decline of Hong Kong's neon nightscape and even how feng shui shapes the city skyline. There is also a very informative one about the changing relationship between Hong Kong and China. You can check the list of videos below.

The Impact of Urban Appearance

We have mentioned the work of Cesar Hidalgo (twitter) in this blog a few times already but he keeps coming up with new interesting research . As many will know, Hidalgo and his team have a project called Place Pulse, in which they use computer vision techniques to analyze snapshots of google street view and crowdsource people's perception on city’s physical appearance. Here are my three highlight of the project so far.

• In its initial phase, the project focused on 19 American cities. Some of the research findings show how perceived safety of streetscapes has strong positive correlation with household income, population density and income inequality (PDF of the paper).
  
  
• In a more recent paper, led by Marco De Nadai (twitter), the authors combine Place Pulse with mobile phone data to show how the safety scores of neighbourhoods in Rome and Milan are also strongly correlated with urban liveliness, and that visual features like greenery and street facing windows contribute to a positive appearance of safety. This is an extension of Nadai's previous work, where he engages more directly with Jane Jacobs's ideas on urban vitality.
  
  
• Finally, the Place Pulse project has been recently updated and expanded to create the first global dataset of urban appearance "...containing 110,988 images from 56 cities, and 1,170,000 pairwise comparisons provided by 81,630 online volunteers along six perceptual attributes: safe, lively, boring, wealthy, depressing, and beautiful". 

The research possibilities here are endless, so I'm sure I'll be posting updates on this project again in the future. Don't forget to input some of your own perceptions to the project.

Testing Jane Jacobs's ideas on urban vitality using mobile phone data

In her influential book - The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), Jane Jacobs proposed that cities would only develop vibrant activities and flourish if they met four conditions of diverse urban environment:

1. City districts should serve more than one primary function, what would attract people with diverse purposes at different times of the day; 
   
   
2. Street blocks must be short, to allow pedestrian-friendly environments;
   
   
3. The buildings in a district should be diverse in terms of age and form, what would support diversity of economic activities and residents with of high- and low-income;
   
   
4. A district must have a sufficient density of people and buildings; what would foster “lively” environments that attract people for different purposes.

These conditions have recently been tested in four Italian cities in a paper by De Nadai and colleagues (2016). The authors use a combination of data sources, including socio-demographic information from the Italian Census, Open Street Map and human activity patterns extracted from mobile phone data. Good food for thought !

De Nadai, M. et al. (2016). The Death and Life of Great Italian Cities: A Mobile Phone Data Perspective. In Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on World Wide Web (pp. 413-423). International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee.

Abstract:

The Death and Life of Great American Cities was written in 1961 and is now one of the most influential book in city planning. In it, Jane Jacobs proposed four conditions that promote life in a city. However, these conditions have not been empirically tested until recently. This is mainly because it is hard to collect data about "city life". The city of Seoul recently collected pedestrian activity through surveys at an unprecedented scale, with an effort spanning more than a decade, allowing researchers to conduct the first study successfully testing Jacobs's conditions. In this paper, we identify a valuable alternative to the lengthy and costly collection of activity survey data: mobile phone data. We extract human activity from such data, collect land use and socio-demographic information from the Italian Census and Open Street Map, and test the four conditions in six Italian cities. Although these cities are very different from the places for which Jacobs's conditions were spelled out (i.e., great American cities) and from the places in which they were recently tested (i.e., the Asian city of Seoul), we find those conditions to be indeed associated with urban life in Italy as well. Our methodology promises to have a great impact on urban studies, not least because, if replicated, it will make it possible to test Jacobs's theories at scale.

ps. You might want to follow some of the authors on twitter: De Nadai, Staiano, Quercia and Lepri.

credit: De Nadai, M. et al. (2016).

Car-centric Brasilia

Brasilia is great for cars, but less so for people.

Tesourinhas de Brasília from Drone Brasília on Vimeo.

"We are not Amsterdam"

'We cannot get rid of cars in OUR city; we are not Amsterdam!' Well, neither was Amsterdam via @Pascal_Amsterda pic.twitter.com/P5zTEaG3S9

— Cycling Professor (@fietsprofessor) January 15, 2016

On the same topic, there is an interesting piece at the Guardian and a 6-min documentary on how the Dutch got their cycling infrastructure:

Redefining Urban Futures

Nice presentation by Kent Larson summarizing some of the projects they have been developing at MIT Media Lab and that are contributing to redefine the future of our cities, in some way.

I wouldn't say these ideas are new, revolutionary or even disruptive in a way that will solve the most pressing issues in most cities for every one. However, the work of Kent and his team make an enormous difference in bringing these ideas closer to reality.

Glaeser on Cities, Development, and Density

The NYU Stern Urbanization Project has been organizing a number of great seminars that cover interesting speakers at the intersection of urban planning and economics (Check their YouTube channel here). In December last year, they had Edward Glaeser talking about Cities, Development, and Density.

In case you want a more academic reference, much of Glaeser's presentation is present in his recent paper on 'the causes and consequences of urbanization in poorer countries'.

Assorted links

1. How to write a Visceral Abstract, or How to strongly express your opinion in academia (via Leo Monasterio)
   
   
2. A free spatial database of all administrative boundaries in the world 
   
   
3. A Rare Color Video Of London In 1927
   
   
4. How presidential elections are impacted by a 100 million year old coastline
   
   
5. Navigate Zurich in 3D (via Open Data Zurich)
   
   
6. A nice infographic comparing R and Python for data analysis
   
   
7. Other things I'd rather be doing
   
   
8. 6 Politically Motivated Cities Built From Scratch. I have survived one them not without some mental damage though
   
   
9. Map of Pangea With Current International Borders, by Massimo Pietrobon

click here to enlarge it

image credit: Massimo Pietrobon

Assorted links

1. 4 instant cities that are still empty
   
   
2. Hans Rosling delivers his Ignorance on international development
   
   
3. How urban highways have changed cities' landscapes in the US (ht Oxford Urban)
   
   
4. India has spent $74 million to put a satellite into Mars orbit. If you consider the cost per kilometer travelled, it is cheaper than an auto ride in Delhi (via Tyler Cowen)
   
   
5. 10 things statistics taught us about big data analysis
   
   
6. What happens when governments try to help poor people move to better neighborhoods?
   
   
   
7. Seven ways to make your Google Scholar Profile better
   
   
8. The rise of Blue. Using R to visualize the change in colors of paintings over the last 200 years (via Nicholas Christakis)

[image credit: Martin Bellander]

Big Data and Smart Urbanism

How smart are 'smart cities' ?

Unknown street artist, Poland

Big Data and Smart Cities are fairly recent buzzwords in the media and in the academic community. To be honest, these words are so commented that I cannot help rolling my eyes when I read researchers and journalists using them in a sloppy way, as they often do.

So I would like to share this presentation Rob Kitchin gave in Oxford Internet Institute (oii) on March 2014. Rob gives a broad picture of the cutting edge literature on smart urbanism. He also makes the concept of big data pretty clear by contrasting  it with more traditional types of data, like population census.  

In case you're interested, Rob's presentation is based in this paper recently published: The real-time city? Big data and smart urbanism.

Related Links:

• The Programmable City
• Cities,complexity, and emergent order, by M. Batty

Assorted links

1. Beijing City Lab
   
   
2. Say goodbye to your concentration problems
   
   
3. BBC uses a slightly different Chinese zodiac
   
   
4. rMaps | Interactive Maps from R, by Ramnath Vaidyanathan
   
   
5. The Super Bowl effect on porn traffic on the web
   
   
6. How a New Science of Cities Is Emerging from Mobile Phone Data Analysis
   
   
7. Valentines Cards for urban planners.  This!
   
   
8. A bit of PhD life. So real...
   
   
9. Stephen Fry Explains Cloud Computing in a Short Animated Video

Assorted links

1. Canada's weirdly recursive geography
   
   
2. FordLand: Henry Ford’s Failed Jungle Fantasy and 6 other abandoned wonders of Brazil
   
   
3. Moving to R after using Excel? How to do many spreadsheet tasks in R
   
   
4. Planning at work #fail
   
   
5.  The Oxford Institute of Population Ageing is undertaking Demography Research Programme on the role of Education and Environment in Fertility decision making and behaviour of women in developing countries Great website with info, publications and data viz.
   
   
6. The Largest Free Mass Transit Experiment in the World
   
   
7. What accounts for the geographical variation in socialmobility? and The Equality of Opportunity Project

[image credit: The Equality of Opportunity Project]

Urban Policies and Public Space Allocation

A couple of months ago, I shared a post with a short presentation by Janette Sadik-Khan talking about the recent low-cost interventions on public space in NY City. The fact is that these interventions have been around for years now, and Clarence Eckerson and the team at Streetfilms have been documenting these changes since their early stages.

Here is one of their short films showing the remarkable before-and-after transformation of several streets and intersections in NY City. (via Sarah Goodyear):

What makes me particularly interested in such urban transformations is the way they make evident the idea that public space is a scarce resource in large cities. Though unnoticed by some policy makers, great cities face a clear resource dilemma in the allocation of public space in general and road space in central areas in particular. In some large cities like London, transport authorities have acknowledged this issue a long time ago.

Deciding upon who should have the priority to use urban space in certain areas of the city (drivers, cyclists, pedestrians and/or public transport users), however, is quite complex. These decisions are complex both because of the technical aspects in the construction of bike lanes, bus lanes and corridors, congestion charging schemes etc. and especially because of the public and political acceptability of such decisions (Banister, 1994).

In the way I like to read these 'urban interventions', they all come down to the role played by policy makers in mediating conflicts that arise from unjust/asymmetrical appropriation of space by individuals and social groups. And as in any other field of public policy, it is crucial to evaluate such urban policies in order to identify those types of interventions that work and to learn from those that do not work. I will probably dedicate more attention to this topic in my research, so hopefully I'll post more on this theme in the future.

Related Links:

• Banister, David (1994).
• Equity Issues in Transport Policy
• An experimental confirmation of the Spatial Mismatch Hypothesis

Equity Issues in Transport Policy

As some of you may know, I have just started my PhD and I will be focusing on 'Equity Issues in Transport Policies' with bits of spatial and demographic analysis.

So I was very glad to watch this short talk by Enrique Peñalosa (former mayor of Bogota): 'Why buses represent democracy in action'. You know, it's always good to hear big names saying you're working on important problems.

Using Online images to map urban perception

Ricardo Dagnino emailed me months ago! a link to a very inventive research project that uses online images and crowdsourcing to map urban perception. The project is called Place Pulse and it is conducted by Cesar Hidalgo and his colleagues at the MIT Media Lab.

Here is how the research method works and the project webpage . By the way, take one minute to support the project with some clicks.

And here is one paper they published this year: 

The Collaborative Image of The City: Mapping the Inequality of Urban Perception, by P. Salesses, K. Schechtner and C. Hidalgo. published at PLOS one. 

ps. They have a Video Abstract.

Low-cost interventions on public space

A short presentation by Janette Sadik-Khan (New York transportation comissioner) talking about the recent low-cost interventions on public space in NY. I am keen to read new studies assessing these interventions under different perspectives (urban mobility, housing, segregation, accessibility, real state, market sales etc). I hope there is someone out there doing research on this.

Chinese Ghost Cities + Copy & Paste Cities

It's been a while since I don't make any post on the Chinese empty cities. So here is an updated 12-minute video on the "Chinese Ghost Cities":

Besides these famous Ghost Cities, China has also a growing number of copycat towns, the 'Copy & Paste Cities' as I like to call them. They have built a fake Paris, fake Hallstatt (Austrian village), fake Venice and a fake White House.

The Haussmann Effect

A recent study by Marc Barthelemy and colleagues analyzing more than 200 years (1789–2010) of the evolution of the street network of Paris. This paper has just been added to my reading list. (via Emily Badger). By the way, Micahel Batty and his team at UCL have done a similar study analyzing the evolution of London’s street-network over a 224 year-period (1786-2010).

Barthelemy's Abstract:

Interventions of central, top-down planning are serious limitations to the possibility of modelling the dynamics of cities. An example is the city of Paris (France), which during the 19th century experienced large modifications supervised by a central authority, the ‘Haussmann period’. In this article, we report an empirical analysis of more than 200 years (1789–2010) of the evolution of the street network of Paris. We show that the usual network measures display a smooth behavior and that the most important quantitative signatures of central planning is the spatial reorganization of centrality and the modification of the block shape distribution. Such effects can only be obtained by structural modifications at a large-scale level, with the creation of new roads not constrained by the existing geometry. The evolution of a city thus seems to result from the superimposition of continuous, local growth processes and punctual changes operating at large spatial scales.

Figure 2: (a) Map of Paris in 1789 superimposed on the map of current 2010 Paris.In the whole study, we focus on the Haussmann modifications and limited ourselves to the 1789 portion of the street network. (b) Map of Haussmann modifications.

[click on the image to enlarge it]

[Image Credit: Barthelemy et al (2013)]

Related links/posts:

• The evolution of road networks
• Assorted links on Space Syntax
• Assorted Links on S. Syntax and Accessibility
• Extracting Feature Geometries from OpenStreetMap
• The amazing David Rumsey Database of historical maps