Urban Picture

Times Square, NYC, 1903

credit: ?

Soundtrack:

Assorted Links

1. Another (strong) sign there is a housing bubble in China - via Leo Monasterio
   
   
2. More that 120 videos on spatial analytics by Luc Anselin and his team at the Center for Spatial Data Science - Geoda Center (ht Ana Maria Bonomi Barufi)
   
3. Possibly the most cited academics of all with more than 2.4 million citations! Meet Prof. Et. Al.   ht Cesar Hidalgo
   
   
4. The one thing Trump and Clinton agree on is infrastructure and Ed. Galeser thinks they’re both wrong via Jake Anbinder
   
   
5. Apparently,  humans inherited a propensity for violence from our primate ancestors
   
   
6. Jane Jacobs once wrote a song together with Bob Dylan
   
   
7. The Bangladeshi Traffic Jam That Never Ends, via MR
   
   
8. What abandoned Olympic venues from around the world look like today (more here)
   
   
9. Population Estimation Using a 3D City model, by Filip Biljecki and colleagues

credit: Filip Biljecki and colleagues

Inequalities, cities, big data, transport and health

These are the core issues covered in five special issues of top journals this year, what I think reflects how these topics and particularly cities and social inequality have gained strong momentum in recent years.

• Nature: Science and Inequality
• Nature: a  not so  new urban agenda and the UN’s Habitat III meeting
• Science: Urban Planet
• Built Environment: Big data and the city
• The Lancet: Urban design, transport, and health

Quote of the Day: progress

Sean Illing: What would you consider the most dangerous idea in human history?

Tyler Cowen: The idea of progress. ... Well, we're all for progress. It's easy to say the most dangerous idea is evil or racism or genocide or murder, but those ideas tend to persist only when they're packaged with some notion of progress. Progress, for all of its good, brings us new technologies and threats against which we can't deter, environmental problems, biodiversity loss, and so on. That we cannot avoid believing in progress may also prove to be our undoing.

This is from an interview T. Cowen gave to Vox.

How Brazil compares to other countries in terms of area, population and human development

These maps were made by Roberto Rocco with data from 2008.

Area

Population

Human Development Index (HDI)

Empty spaces in the crowd: Residential vacancy in São Paulo

Nadalin, V., & Igliori, D. (2016). Empty spaces in the crowd. Residential vacancy in São Paulo’s city centre. Urban Studies, DOI: 10.1177/0042098016666498.

Abstract

In the past decades, when São Paulo became the national manufacturing centre, it has experienced great population growth. Since then, many housing problems have emerged. In addition, the difficulties that inner cities face in attracting jobs and maintaining economic activities are particularly challenging. Indeed, even if many cities have successfully regenerated their central areas, the so-called inner city problem is still very much alive in the case of São Paulo. As a result although the city centre has abundant urban infrastructure it still has plenty of vacant spaces, including residential buildings. One could say that São Paulo’s city centre is characterised by a large number of empty spaces in an area that is simultaneously crowded with buildings and urban facilities. This paper intends to contribute to the empirical analysis of the determinants of vacancy rates, with a particular focus on historical city centres, using São Paulo Metropolitan Area as our case study. Our empirical analysis relies on district-level data for the years 2000 and 2010, and combines standard spatial econometric methods with hedonic modelling. Our results suggest that there are three main groups of determinants: individual buildings characteristics, mobility of households and neighbourhood quality. We find evidence that the historic central city is a distinctive submarket, needing special urban policies. Its determinants work differently when compared with the housing markets of other areas across the city.

credit: Nadalin & Igliori, 2016

#wherearetheracks in Cambridge ?

I took this picture yesterday near the train station at Cambridge UK. I confess I'm surprised with how poor is cycling infrastructure in Cambridge given that this is the city with the highest share of commutes by bike in Britain. Without much ambition, I'm starting the hashtag #wherearetheracks in Twitter to raise awareness of local authorities about the lack of cycling racks in their communities.  

This is the least that happens where there is a lack of cycling infrastructure. 

#wherearetheracks in Cambridge ?

image credit: Rafael Pereira

Message of the Day

image credit: ?

Assorted Links

1. 80,000 photographs of 19th-Century New York City, arranged by location , and a similar project focused on London with pictures and movies movies
   
   
2. Theory, Culture & Society has a special issue with some of the most influential works of John Urry (ht mCenter Drexel)
   
   
3. Schelling-like interactive segregation model by Nicky Case
   
   
4. Open data: Unveiling the geography of historical patents in the United States from 1836 to 1975
   
   
5. How significant is racial inequality in education in Brazil ? via MR
   
   
6. Now you can contribute to Moral Machine! A new platform from an MIT project for gathering a human perspective on moral decisions made by machine intelligence, such as self-driving cars. HT Cesar Hidalgo
   
   
7. How the robots revolution started 
   
   
8. Mapping internal connectivity through human migration in malaria endemic countries (alt. link)

Measuring exposure to air pollution using mobile phone data

Tijs Neutens and colleagues have a new paper where they use mobile phone data to assess people's exposure to air pollution in Belgium in high spatio-temporal resolution. Some of you might be interested (via GAUMAS).

Dewulf, B., et al. (2016). Dynamic assessment of exposure to air pollution using mobile phone data. International journal of health geographics, 15(1), 1.

image credit: Dewulf, et al. (2016)