This paper explores the potential of machine learning algorithms (MLAs) for the simulation of intercity networks. To this end, we implement the random forest MLA to simulate the intercity corporate networks created by Fortune China 500 firms in mainland China. The random forest MLA does not require a predefined model but detects patterns directly from the data to automatically build models. The city-dyad

This paper focuses on urban green spaces in terms of climate and human thermal comfort containing their effect on heat load mitigation. It incorporates a modelling study in which the role of green spaces was investigated in terms of heat stress modification by applying MUKLIMO_3 model. During the experiment, the thermal effects of dense trees, scattered trees, grasslands and mixed green infrastructure

Establishing the relationship between elements of alternative network-based representations of a system is an important component of conflation, error/uncertainty assessment, change detection, and other geospatial analyses. An array of techniques have been proposed in support of such tasks to relate arcs and nodes in one network with those in another based upon establishing linkages among their attributes

Several global gridded population data sets are available at unprecedented high-resolution, including recent releases at 100-m, 30-m, and 10-m resolution. These data sets are the result of the application of advanced methods to disaggregate census population counts from administrative units and facilitated by the proliferation of increasingly high-resolution spatial information pertaining to the built

Points of interest (POIs) digitally represent real-world amenities as point locations. POI categories (e.g. restaurant, hotel, museum etc.) play a prominent role in several location-based applications such as social media, navigation, recommender systems, geographic information retrieval tools, and travel-related services. The majority of user queries in these applications center around POI categories

The last decade has witnessed a wealth of studies on characterizing human mobility patterns using movement datasets. Such efforts have highlighted a few salient dimensions of individual travel behavior relevant to urban planning and policy analysis. Despite the fruitful research outcomes, most of the findings are drawn upon urban residents. The behavioral characteristics of other population groups

Landmarks have been identified as relevant and prominent urban elements, explicitly involved in human navigation processes. Despite the understanding accumulated around their functions, landmarks have not been included in simulation models of pedestrian movement in urban environments. In this paper, we describe an Agent-Based Model (ABM) for pedestrian movement simulation that incorporates the role

Urban areas of interest (AOIs) represent areas within the urban environment featuring high levels of public interaction, with their understanding holding utility for a wide range of urban planning applications. Within this context, our study proposes a novel space-time analytical framework and implements it to the taxi GPS data for the extent of Manhattan, NYC to identify and describe 31 road-constrained

Segregation often dismantles common activity spaces and isolates people of different backgrounds, leading to irreconcilable inequalities that disfavour the poor and minorities and intensifies societal fragmentation. Therefore, segregation has become an increasing concern and topic of research with studies typically concentrating on the residential communities of a particular racial or socioeconomic

Maptables are increasingly used to support collaborative spatial planning processes. Despite the proven benefits and claimed potential of using a maptable in such processes, software applications specifically designed for this device are still scarce. Moreover, often-used applications do not fully exploit the touch functionality of a maptable, or have low usability. To address this gap, we developed

Urban growth is a complex spatio-temporal phenomenon that includes built-up activities taking place both horizontally and vertically. The built-up land density in a city is a function of land desirability and suitability of a location in terms of the quality of the available public services, access to infrastructure, neighborhood type, vibrancy of socio-economic and cultural characteristics. The simulation

Based on an offender spatial decision-making perspective, this burglary target location choice study aims to understand how physical and social barriers affect why residential burglars commit their crimes at particular locations in a major Chinese city. Using data on 3860 residential burglaries committed by 3772 burglars between January 2012 and June 2016 in ZG city, China, conditional logit (discrete

Utility networks comprise a fundamental part of our complex urban systems and the integration of digital representations of these networks across multiple spatial scales can be used to help address priority challenges. Deteriorating water utility infrastructure and low routing redundancy result in network fragility and thus supply outages when assets fail. Water distribution network configurations

As the distinction between online and physical spaces rapidly degrades, social media have now become an integral component of how many people's everyday experiences are mediated. As such, increasing interest has emerged in exploring how the content shared through those online platforms comes to contribute to the collaborative creation of places in physical space at the urban scale. Exploring digital

Cities are continually evolving through adjustments to zonings. The potential to integrate more equitable and effective value capture mechanisms into the rezoning process makes estimation of increases in land value from rezoning of interest to urban planners. The use of Residual Land Valuation (RLV), while accepted practice in development feasibility calculations, tends to be absent from the rezoning

Since new (Power) Transmission Lines (TLs) can have a long-term effect on the makeup of a landscape and on the human living space, it should be expected that the route of any new TL will be based on objective criteria that take into account the views of the public. Geographic Information Science (GIScience) provides powerful tools that assist in the determination of feasible locations for new TLs based

Cellular Automata (CA) are widely used to model the dynamics within complex land use and land cover (LULC) systems. Past CA model research has focused on improving the technical modeling procedures, and only a few studies have sought to improve our understanding of the nonlinear relationships that underlie LULC change. Many CA models lack the ability to simulate the detailed patch evolution of multiple

The landscape of cycling activities from a dockless bike-share system is dynamic over space and time. Decoding usage patterns from bike-share trips have been a highly charged area in the literature. Therefore, this study aims at developing an analytical approach to understanding the trip demands of bike-share and model the spatiotemporal dynamics of cycling flows. Under the proposed framework, global

The challenge posed by the management of sudden migration of large groups of people lies in the ability to portray and predict the scale and dynamics of such movement accurately. This is further complicated by the fact that associated data pertaining to such migration are largely incomplete or untrustworthy. In view of the shortcomings in respect of modelling instances of conflict and the lack of data

In China, the illegal adoption of missing persons and especially of missing children is a major public safety issue that affects social and family stability. Recent work has established a trafficking information network developed from a volunteer-managed database of missing persons that identifies and locates node cities and critical paths of illegal adoption. In order to evaluate locations where trafficking

This study develops a Geographic Data Science framework that transforms the Foursquare check-in locations and user origin-destination flows data into knowledge about the emerging forms and characteristics of cities' neighbourhoods. We employ a longitudinal mobility dataset describing human interactions with Foursquare venues in ten global cities: Chicago, Istanbul, Jakarta, London, Los Angeles, New

News travels fast and far, and the general idea is that the spatial extent of news coverage has increased over time. Information flows are always involved in systems of interdependent cities. This is the reason why George Zipf and Allan Pred, both pioneers of the urban systems literature, were eager to obtain data on these relations to understand urban system dynamics. However, because of limited resources

The rise of small businesses, self-employment, and homeworking are transforming traditional industrial ways of working. Our research fills a noticeable gap in the literature by using portable devices (i.e., smartphones) to capture individual mobility data on an understudied population group – small business owners (owner managers and self-employed with up to 49 employees) and whether they work from

Estimating health outcomes at a neighborhood scale is important for promoting urban health, yet costly and time-consuming. In this paper, we present a machine-learning-enabled approach to predicting the prevalence of six common non-communicable chronic diseases at the census tract level. We apply our approach to the City of Austin and show that our method can yield fairly accurate predictions. In searching

Digital footprints collected from social media platforms are often clustered using methods such as the density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise (DBSCAN) and its variants to identify daily travel activities (e.g., dwelling, working, entertainment, and eating). However, these clustering methods mostly only consider the spatial distribution of travel activity points while ignoring their

Recent advancements in mobile sensing and wearable technologies create new opportunities to improve our understanding of how people experience their environment. This understanding can inform urban design decisions. Currently, an important urban design issue is the adaptation of infrastructure to increasing cycle and e-bike use. Using data collected from 12 cyclists on a cycle highway between two municipalities

Mobile activity tracking data, i.e. data collected by mobile applications that enable activity tracking based on the use of the Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS), contains information on cycling in urban areas at an unprecedented spatial and temporal extent and resolution. It can be a valuable source of information about the quality of bicycling in the city. Required is a notion of quality

The traditional approach to mobile phone positioning is based on the assumption that the geographical location of a cell tower recorded in a Call Details Record (CDR) is a proxy for a device's location. A Voronoi tessellation is then constructed based on the entire network of cell towers and this tessellation is considered as a coordinate system, with the device located in a Voronoi polygon of a cell

Geo-located travel blogs, a new data source, enable to achieve more detailed analysis of tourists' spatio-temporal behavior. Taking Chinese tourists in Nordic countries as the research object, this paper focuses on their behavior, seasonal patterns and complex network effects by using geo-located travel blog data collected from Qunar.com. The results show that: (1) Chinese tourists visiting Nordic

The spatial structure of urban areas plays a major role in the daily life of dwellers. The current policy framework to ensure the quality of life of inhabitants leaving no one behind, leads decision-makers to seek better-informed choices for the sustainable planning of urban areas. Thus, a better understanding between the spatial structure of cities and their socio-economic level is of crucial relevance

Traffic volume is a critical piece of information in many applications, such as transportation long-range planning and traffic operation analysis. Effectively capturing traffic volumes on a network scale is beneficial to Transportation Systems Management & Operations (TSM&O). Yet it is impractical to install sensors to cover a large road network. To address this issue, spatial prediction techniques

This study evaluates how random variations in urban development affect projections of urban water management over long time horizons, based on combined simulations of urban development and water management. The urban development was simulated based on existing procedural tools; however, novel procedures were implemented to allow the simulation of re-development in existing areas. The urban layout was

Accurate forecasting of future urban land expansion can provide useful information for policy makers and urban planners to better plan for the impacts of future land use and land cover change (LULCC) on the ecosystem. However, most current studies do not emphasize spatial variations in the influence intensities of the various driving forces, resulting in unreliable predictions of future urban development

Given instances (spatial points) of different spatial features (categories), significant spatial co-distribution pattern discovery aims to find subsets of spatial features whose spatial distributions are statistically significantly similar to each other. Discovering significant spatial co-distribution patterns is important for many application domains such as identifying spatial associations between

Recent studies suggest that the traditional determinants of housing wealth are insufficient to explain its current inequality levels. Thus, they argue that efforts should focus on understanding institutional factors. From the perspective of complex adaptive systems, institutions are more than the ‘the rules of the game’, they also consider the interaction protocols or the ‘algorithm’ through which

Google Earth Engine (GEE) has been increasingly used in environmental and urban studies due to its cloud-based geospatial processing capability and accessibility to a large collection of geospatial datasets like Landsat, Modis, etc. However, at present, ecological and urban modeling efforts based on GEE are facing three grave challenges: current illustrations of GEE are to a large extent “straightforward

Rapid urbanization has led to a massive influx of people into cities. When many people congregate in urban areas, crowd crushing emergencies are likely to occur. If vulnerable areas with potential evacuation problems are detected in advance, crowd crushing emergencies may be minimized or even avoided. Thus, an evacuation vulnerability assessment from a precautionary perspective is fundamental. However

High-quality temperature data at a finer spatio-temporal scale is critical for analyzing the risk of heat exposure and hazards in urban environments. The variability of urban landscapes makes cities a challenging environment for quantifying heat exposure. Most of the existing heat hazard studies have inherent limitations on two fronts; first, the spatio-temporal granularities are too coarse, and second

Greenery and open spaces play significant roles in environmentally sustainable societies, providing urban ecosystem services and economic benefits that reduce urban poverty. Current urban poverty research has solely focused on top-down observations or direct human exposure to greenery and open spaces and has failed to sense landscape characteristics, including occupation and inequality, representing

Mobility models have a broad range of applications in areas related to human movements, such as urban planning, transportation, and simulations of diseases spread. In the last decade, the extensive geolocated user trajectories collected from mobile devices allowed for more realistic mobility modelling, improving its accuracy. However, mobility data sharing raises privacy concerns, which in turn limits

In his classic book “The Image of the City” Kevin Lynch used empirical work to show how different elements of the city were perceived: such as paths, landmarks, districts, edges, and nodes. Streets, by providing paths from which cities can be experienced, were argued to be one of the key elements of cities. Despite this long standing empirical basis, and the importance of Lynch's model in policy associated

Urban land use is known to affect commuting efficiency according to the excess commuting framework. However, most studies do not include temporal dynamics, and those that do, focus on decadal, yearly, or daily temporal resolutions. However, commuting is not a stationary spatial process. Since people leave home and start their jobs at different times of the day and since traffic congestion varies throughout

This study investigated the spatial consistency of the SLEUTH urban growth and land use change model using a massive data set. The research asks whether SLEUTH can yield both a reliable forecast of land use in the state of California for the year 2100 CE, and an assessment of the forecast's reliability. Data were prepared, and SLEUTH calibrated for 174 tiles made by partitioning the data within the

Obtaining accurate speed and travel time information is a challenge for researchers, geographers, and transportation agencies. In the past, traffic data were usually acquired and disseminated by government agencies through fixed-location sensors. High costs, infrastructure demands, and low coverage levels of these sensor devices require agencies and researchers to look beyond the traditional approaches

Short-term demand prediction is important for managing transportation infrastructure, particularly in times of disruption, or around new developments. Many bike-sharing schemes face the challenges of managing service provision and bike fleet rebalancing due to the “tidal flows” of travel and use. For them, it is crucial to have precise predictions of travel demand at a fine spatiotemporal granularities

Hurricanes are one of the most frequent and destructive disasters in the United States. The events are large scale and have relatively long-term impacts. Social networking platforms such as Twitter can provide real-time information for disaster managers and affected populations during large-scale disasters (e.g., hurricanes), but extracting useful information and interpreting data accurately for disaster

Spatial flow data are often used to represent spatial interaction phenomena such as daily commuting trips, human or animal migrations, and the exchanges of commodities, capital, or even information between regions. With the increasingly available large volume of flow data in fine spatiotemporal resolution, exploratory spatial data analysis (ESDA) has become more important than ever to gain understanding

This study investigates the impact of extreme weather events on urban human flow disruptions using location-based service data obtained from Baidu Map. Utilizing the 2018 Typhoon Mangkhut as an example, the spatial and temporal variations of urban human flow patterns in Shenzhen are examined using GIS and spatial flow analysis. In addition, the variation of human flow by different urban functions (e

Use of Public Participation Geographic Information System (PPGIS) for data collection has been significantly growing over the past few years in different areas of research and practice. With the growing amount of data, there is little doubt that a potentially wider community can benefit from open access to them. Additionally, open data add to the transparency of research and can be considered as an

GIS-based Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis is a well-known decision support tool that can be used in a wide variety of contexts. It is particularly useful for territorial planning in situations where several actors with different, and sometimes contradictory, point of views have to take a decision regarding land use development. While the impact of the weights used to represent the relative importance

Geodemographics, providing the information of population's characteristics in the regions on a geographical basis, is of immense importance in urban studies, public policy-making, social research and business, among others. Such data, however, are difficult to collect from the public, which is usually done via census, with a low update frequency. In urban areas, with the increasing prevalence of public

The roll-out of 5G infrastructure can provide enhanced high capacity, low latency communications enabling a range of new use cases. However, to deliver the improvements 5G promises, we need to understand how to enhance capacity and coverage, at reasonable cost, across space and over time. In this paper, we take a spatio-temporal simulation modeling approach, using industry-standard engineering models

The objective of this study is to examine and quantify the relationships among sociodemographic factors, damage claims, and social media attention on areas during natural disasters. Social media has become an important communication channel for people to share and seek situational information to learn of risks, to cope with community disruptions, and to support disaster response. Recent studies in

Planning support systems (PSS) enabled by smart city technologies (big data and information and communication technologies (ICTs)) are becoming more widespread in their availability, but have not yet been fully recognized as being useful in planning practice. Thus, a better understanding of the determinants of PSS usefulness in practice helps to improve the functional support of PSS for smart cities

Socio-economic activities and incidents such as crimes and traffic accidents have a negative impact on our society, and their reduction has been a priority in our social-science endeavour. These events are not uniform in their occurrences but, rather, manifest a distinct set of concentrations, commonly known as hotspots. Detecting the exact extent, shape and changes in these hotspots can lead to deeper

As a major method to serve the demand for land requirement in Chinese urban construction, land acquisition has been intensified since the speeding up of urbanization. However, clashes arise during the process of land acquisition, out of conflicts of interests, which to some extent have affected the development and direction of urban expansion, as well as social harmony and stability. Therefore, the

Uncertainty and error are inevitable when continuously varying geographic phenomena are approximated. Describing geography and spatial relationships is, therefore, challenging using analytics for planning and management. A critical aspect of spatial description has to do with allocation, a process of determining who is best served by which facility. Allocation is useful in reflecting customer behavior

Roadside channel systems are critical for the management of stormwater runoff and the protection of the structural integrity of roads; and thus, require systematic evaluation and maintenance. However, the evaluation of these systems remains ad hoc due to the lack of efficient inspection methods. This paper contributes to filling this gap by providing an automated process for the inspection and evaluation