Related papers: Jane Jacobs in the Sky: Predicting Urban Vitality …
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…
As urban critic Jane Jacobs conceived, a city is essentially the problem of organized complexity. What underlies the complexity refers to a structural factor, called living structure, which is defined as a mathematical structure composed of…
Urban population grows constantly. By 2050 two thirds of the world population will reside in urban areas. This growth is faster and more complex than the ability of cities to measure and plan for their sustainability. To understand what…
Many cities promote walkability through concepts such as the compact city and 15-minute city to enhance urban livability, yet few methods link spatial walkability features to empirically measured livability and account for temporal…
Nighttime lights satellite imagery has been used for decades as a uniform, global source of data for studying a wide range of socioeconomic factors. Recently, another more terrestrial source is producing data with similarly uniform global…
Urban planning is increasingly data driven, yet the challenge of designing with data at a city scale and remaining sensitive to the impact at a human scale is as important today as it was for Jane Jacobs. We address this challenge with…
Understanding urban mobility requires models that capture how people interact with and navigate the built environment. We present a scalable, generalizable agent-based framework in which daily schedules emerge from the interplay between…
Benchmarking and monitoring urban design and transport features is critical to achieving local and international health and sustainability goals. However, most urban indicator frameworks use coarse spatial scales that only allow…
Cellular phones are now offering an ubiquitous means for scientists to observe life: how people act, move and respond to external influences. They can be utilized as measurement devices of individual persons and for groups of people of the…
We consider the scaling laws, second-order statistics and entropy of the consumed energy of metropolis cities which are hybrid complex systems comprising social networks, engineering systems, agricultural output, economic activity and…
This chapter is about Complexity and Spatial Dynamics in Urban Systems. Strong inequalities in the size of cities and the apparent difficulty of limiting their growth raise practical issues for spatial planning. At a time when new…
More than one-third of the adult population in the United States is obese. Obesity has been linked to factors such as, genetics, diet, physical activity and the environment. However, evidence indicating associations between the built…
As buildings are central to the social and environmental sustainability of human settlements, high-quality geospatial data are necessary to support their management and planning. Authorities around the world are increasingly collecting and…
In a multiverse setting, we expect to be situated in a universe that is exceptionally good at producing life. Though the conditions for what life needs to arise and thrive are currently unknown, many will be tested in the coming decades.…
Given the importance of urban sustainability and resilience to the future of our planet, there is a need to better understand the interconnectedness between the social, economic, environmental, and governance outcomes that underline these…
The interaction of all mobile species with their environment hinges on their movement patterns: the places they visit and how frequently they go there. In human society, where the prevalent form of cohabitation is in cities, the highly…
Cities are physical manifestations of our competitive and cooperative behaviours. The tension between these two forces generates dynamic equilibriums whose material expressions are cities and their evolutions. In a Darwinian cooperative…
Cycling is an outdoor activity with massive health benefits, and an effective solution towards sustainable urban transport. Despite these benefits and the recent rising popularity of cycling, most countries still have a negligible uptake.…
Challenges due to the rapid urbanization of the world -- especially in emerging countries -- range from an increasing dependence on energy, to air pollution, socio-spatial inequalities, environmental and sustainability issues. Modelling the…
Studies using massive, passively data collected from communication technologies have revealed many ubiquitous aspects of social networks, helping us understand and model social media, information diffusion, and organizational dynamics. More…