Why cities should focus on promoting accessibility, not mobility

Amit Bhatt (WRI) has written a very eloquent piece on why cities should focus on promoting accessibility, not mobility. Good read.

Call for Applications: ITF Young Researcher of the Year Award

The International Transport Forum (ITF) at the OECD has opened a call for applications for the 2020 Young Researcher of the Year Award. The winner of the Award will be invited to present her/his work at the ITF Annual Summit.

"The principal aim of the International Transport Forum’s Young Researcher of the Year Award is to highlight the importance of transport research for sound transport policy formulation and implementation, and to foster closer links between transport policy and research. For 2020, the theme of the Summit is 'Transport Innovation for Sustainable Development'."

I was really honored to receive this award last year and it was a truly great experience. If you are eligible, I would highly recommend you apply for this award. The application is "open to researchers under 35 years of age at the time of closing of applications who have undertaken the research presented in the submitted paper in an institution, university or consultancy firm located in a member country of the ITF/OECD".

First results of Access to Opportunities Project are now online

Last week, we officialy launched the Access to Opportunities Project. In this first edition of the project (2019) we present accessibility estimates by active transport modes (walking and cycling) for the 20 largest cities in the Brazil, and by public transport for 7 major cities (São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte, Recife, Fortaleza, Porto Alegre e Curitiba).

At the occasion of the event, we launched the website of the project where one can find:

1. a published report analyzing inequalities in access to opportunities in Brazil's largest cities (report only available in Portuguese)
2. an interactive map to explore the results
3. the data outputs of the project
4. the computational code used to process, analyze and visualize the data

Here is a quick demo of the interactive map but please go ahead and try it for yourself. The app scales fairly well despite the massive amount of data, thanks to Kauê Braga's work using in R to create a mapdeck application in shiny.

Is this Transit Oriented Development (TOD) ?

Aerial footage of the Maeklong Rail Market, Thailand. Captured by the talented Demas Rusli ( Instagram, Twitter).

Plotting the metropolitan areas of Brazil in R

Here is a simple R script to download the shape files of Brazilian metropolitan areas by year and plot them in R.

obs. It's important to note that, since the 1988, metro areas are created by state governments. As a rule, this is done with absolutely no transparency nor any technical criteria. It is this legal issue, rather than the urbanization process in the country itself, that led to such an inflated increase in the number of metro areas in the country over the past two decades.

Number of metro areas in Brazil:

1970: 9

2001: 24 

2018: 77

Procrastination is not about productivity

Procrastination is “a way of coping with challenging emotions and negative moods induced by certain tasks — boredom, anxiety, self-doubt”. At its core, it’s about emotions, not productivity. 

This is from this brilliant article written by Charlotte Lieberman for the NYT, probably the best piece on procrastination I’ve ever read.

Urban Picture

Rio de Janeiro, photo via CityDescriber

Building up or spreading out? Urban growth across 478 cities

New paper by the Seto Lab in collaboration with Anjali Mahendra (who is also onTwitter).

Mahtta, R., Mahendra, A., & Seto, K. C. (2019). Building up or spreading out? Typologies of urban growth across 478 cities of 1 million+. Environmental Research Letters, 14(12), 124077.

Abstract

Urban form in both two- (2D) and three-dimensions (3D) has significant impacts on local and global environments. Here we developed the largest global dataset characterizing 2D and 3D urban growth for 478 cities with populations of one million or larger. Using remote sensing data from the SeaWinds scatterometer for 2001 and 2009, and the Global Human Settlement Layer for 2000 and 2014, we applied a cluster analysis and found five urban growth typologies: stabilized, outward, mature upward, budding outward, upward and outward. Budding outward is the dominant typology worldwide, per the largest total area. Cities characterized by upward and outward growth are few in number and concentrated primarily in China and South Korea, where there has been a large increase in high-rises during the study period. With the exception of East Asia, cities within a geographic region exhibit remarkably similar patterns of urban growth. Our results show that every city exhibits multiple urban growth typologies concurrently. Thus, while it is possible to describe a city by its dominant urban growth typology, a more accurate and comprehensive characterization would include some combination of the five typologies. The implications of the results for urban sustainability are multi-fold. First, the results suggest that there is considerable opportunity to shape future patterns of urbanization, given that most of the new urban growth is nascent and low magnitude outward expansion. Second, the clear geographic patterns and wide variations in the physical form of urban growth, within country and city, suggest that markets, national and subnational policies, including the absence of, can shape how cities grow. Third, the presence of different typologies within each city suggests the need for differentiated strategies for different parts of a single city. Finally, the new urban forms revealed in this analysis provide a first glimpse into the carbon lock-in of recently constructed energy-demanding infrastructure of urban settlements.

ps. The image below was taken from the WRI report that originated the paper.

How AI shaped online shopping in the 2010s

ht Guilherme Carrara Neto

The mobility patterns of historically notable individuals

A new study using Natural Language Processing techniques to retrieve historical information from Wikipedia and analyze the spatial mobility patterns of historically notable individuals. A nice and inventive method to study historical mobility patterns. Science can be incredible and fun. (HT Marco De Nadai)

Lucchini, L., Tonelli, S. & Lepri, B. Following the footsteps of giants: modeling the mobility of historically notable individuals using Wikipedia. EPJ Data Sci. 8, 36 (2019) doi:10.1140/epjds/s13688-019-0215-7

image credit: Lucchini et al 2019