There has been recent interest in the use of network analysis to quantify bike network features and their impact on biking levels and safety. However, limited bike network indicators have been evaluated. This study introduces a list of network indicators to quantify the bike network and study its effect on bike kilometers traveled and bike–vehicle crashes. Data from the city of Vancouver, Canada, are

Noise is an ever-growing problem in cities. Conventional noise mitigation approaches may not necessarily control noise pollution, since whether a sound is perceived as noise is largely influenced by its specific contexts. Based on an activity-centric framework, this study examines the effects of activity-related contexts and measured sound levels based on individuals’ sound evaluations as they undertake

In the Urban Informatics session of the Computational Urban Planning and Urban Management (CUPUM 2019) conference (where we started the idea of this special issue), there were heated discussions on the fundamental meaning of the term “urban informatics”. Questions revolved around its definition, its role in urban planning, and more specifically, its role in planning support technology. Some consider

According to the Japanese government, vacant lots are randomly generated and accumulated (without being rebuilt after demolition) in the process of increasing vacant lots, a phenomenon called urban perforation. Urban perforation in urban areas may trigger a high degree of inefficiency in public infrastructure management. However, this observation lacks theoretical and empirical foundations, a lacuna

As an important part of the urban ecosystem, urban trees provide various benefits to urban residents. It is therefore important to examine the spatial distribution and the temporal change in urban tree canopies. Different from traditional overhead view remote sensing-based methods, street-level images, which present the most common view that people have of greenery, provide a more human-centric way

In this study, we attempt to estimate the effects of various transportation policies on the perceived safety of the built environment. We train a convolutional neural network on a dataset of safety perception scores for Google Street View images taken in Boston, MA . We then apply the trained neural network to a large set of Google Street View images of coordinates in Montreal and Toronto to generate

The inequalities that mark global society have been deepening worldwide. They materialize in cities, putting pressure on public transport systems for spatial and temporal supply, at the same time as mobility itself generates multifaceted inequalities. From empirical evidence of four socially and spatially distinct Brazilian cities — São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Curitiba, and Fortaleza — we explore how

This article introduces a Spatial Livability Index based on geographically weighted principal component analysis. We study the case of 203 subzones in Singapore which are dense geographic boundaries in terms of population and built-up area. These regions share spatial correlations of objective measures of livability such as open spaces or community facilities. The proposed objective indicator captures

With the rapid increase of city building density, public emergency service system for providing fire services faces increasing challenge in reducing the loss of lives and property, especially for the reduction of massive casualties in fire accidents. For obtaining a higher benefit from public service facilities, GIS-based techniques such as location optimization are commonly used. However, as a special

This research aimed to explain the co-presence patterns in public spaces, i.e. pedestrian movement rates, based on the analysis of spatial patterns established in street segments. Two dispersed residential neighbourhoods with different spatial characteristics – morphological configuration, land use and physical/visual permeability – were analysed in Santa Maria city. Generalized linear regression models

The recent literature on the “consumer city” and the “love of variety” argues that the provision of urban amenities makes a city more attractive. Meanwhile, polycentric urban development has been highlighted by academics and policymakers as a sustainable urban development regime, although its purported benefits need to be further investigated. Against this background, this paper empirically examines

Storm surges are one of the most destructive natural ocean disasters in the world, which pose a great threat to economic development, public safety, and transport in coastal cities. Investigating the response of urban traffic conditions during storm surges and discovering sensitive urban areas are crucial to urban planning, disaster prevention, and emergency rescue. Therefore, this study investigates

As is often believed that the more centrally located a shop, the higher its sales volume, this paper analyzed relationships between the spatial clustering of retail stores, their respective transaction volumes, and the urban street networks to determine whether, and to what extent, the accessibility and density of a store’s location was correlated with its transaction volume. While this hypothesis

Spatial accessibility to kindergartens is a critical issue related to the transport safety of children. Young children should be escorted to kindergartens by adults, and trips to kindergartens are occasionally dependent on parents’ home–work trips because parents may escort their children to kindergartens en route to work. Many types of school trip can be categorized into two main types: “Home–School”

Exploring the nature of spatial and temporal variation in house prices is important because it can help better understand such issues as affordability and equity of access to housing. In the UK, research on house price variation has been hindered by a lack of extensive data linking the prices of properties at different places and times to their physical attributes. This paper addresses this gap through

U.S. cities prioritize the storage of automobiles over the safe movement of bicycles. While this generally occurs by allocating street curbs for car parking instead of bike lanes, the privileging of the automobile is even more evident in the case of angled parking, in which cars sit roughly perpendicular to the flow of traffic. Such a layout takes up nearly double the space in the right of way as does

Level-of-service has been widely used to measure the operational efficiency of existing highway systems categorically, based on certain ranges of traffic speeds. However, this existing method is generic for investigating urban traffic characteristics. Hence, there is a crucial knowledge gap in capturing the unique traffic speed conditions during a certain temporal duration, in a common spatial area

The rapid spread of infectious diseases is devastating to the healthcare systems of all countries. The dynamics of the spatial spread of epidemic have received considerable scientific attention. However, the understanding of the spatial variation of epidemic severity in the urban system is lagging. Using synchronized epidemic data and human mobility data, integrated with other multiple-sourced data

Nighttime light imageries are widely used for mapping the gross domestic product (GDP) over large areas. However, nighttime light imagery is inappropriate to disaggregate agricultural GDP and inadequate to differentiate the GDP from the secondary and tertiary sectors. Points-of-interest, a kind of geospatial big data with geographic locations and textual descriptions of the category, can effectively

Evaluations of plan implementation are typically conceived in terms of plan conformance (the degree to which outcomes align with planning intent) or plan performance (the degree to which decision makers apply the plan). In this research, we consider the relationship between performance–conformance by evaluating the implementation of compact activity centre policy in greater Brisbane. We examine two

In many places, streets are still primarily designed for the convenience of motorists, considering mobility function as the principal design goal. There is a scarcity of empirical evidence on the relationship between the design of a street and how it is experienced by pedestrians who use it. This work focuses on quantifying pedestrians’ perception of walkability through a stated preference survey using

Urban sprawl is a phenomenon observed in most cities around the globe and especially in Latin America, where it is associated to socioeconomic segregation. In the case of Chile, sprawl has been generally based on large real estate projects. Developers target their projects to different types of consumers, which translates into submarkets with a broad range of housing-unit’s characteristics, but also

A large literature establishes the role of mobility in the maintenance of neighborhood social structures. Jane Jacobs famously argued that social capital is maintained through “cross-use of space,” and James Coleman formalized its dependence on the “closure” of human interactions. Since many of these interactions entail human movement, neighborhoods with higher social capital should be distinguishable

To explore the relationship between the objective morphological features and subjective scenic beauty preference of landscape open space units, this study improves the research method for morphology quantification, scenic beauty preference survey and relationship analysis. Fourteen morphology factors representing the features of boundary, domain and enclosure are quantified based on the point cloud

Traditional cell-based cellular automata (CA) models use a regular cellular grid to represent geographic space, and new approaches to CA models have explored the use of a vector representation of space instead of a regular grid to characterize urban space more realistically. However, less attention has been paid to modeling the interaction between the geospatial information and the irregular cells

This work addresses recent research in the area of pedestrian navigation aids that aims at finding alternatives to the widely used map-based turn-by-turn navigation systems in the context of Smart City environments. Four different approaches of pedestrian navigation systems were compared to each other in a user experiment that was conducted in a virtual environment: (1) map-based, (2) landmark-based

Some of the most overlooked valuation systems in current literature are those based on expert algorithms. Yet these algorithms can form the basis of a good estimation of the value of real estate since they allow simple computational methods that use big data to be integrated with the appraiser’ own knowledge of the situation. The main usefulness of the methodology is an ongoing mortgage risk appraisal

A framework for calculating a weighted random walk on an urban street segment network is described, and tested as a predictor of pedestrian and vehicle movement in London and the wider region. This paper has three aims. First, it proposes the simplest possible model of agency in that individuals have neither memory, goals nor knowledge of the network beyond street segments immediately visible at an

Vacant land is a ubiquitous urban phenomenon. The existence of vacant land in a neighborhood can either lower or heighten nearby housing values, depending on its relative development potential. However, this condition has rarely been examined longitudinally, nor has it been examined thoroughly across different socioeconomic conditions. This research examines the impact of vacant lots on housing premiums

Zones, cells, and parcels have long been regarded as the main units of analysis in urban modeling. However, only limited attention has been paid to street-level urban modeling. The emergence of fine-scale open and new data available from various sources has created substantial opportunities for research on urban modeling at the street level, particularly for modeling the spatiotemporal process of urban

Immersive virtual reality is a promising technology for planning participation. The paper contributes to the literature by comparing the latest virtual reality technology using head-mounted display with conventional graphic representation (pictures of rendered three-dimensional environments in this case) in terms of the effects on the participants’ preferences for the plans and their underlying decision

Origin–destination datasets representing millions of travel desire lines and routes are common in transport planning, but visualising such datasets is challenging. Existing methods often produce illegible results, low spatial resolution, or only a relative indication of the variation of flow on each road. This paper presents a new open-source algorithm called overline along with an accompanying method

It is shown that a virtual collapse in the space–time structure of a geographically distributed system may induce changes in the information flow field of the system and lead to instability. A case study of the commercial banking system of New York City demonstrates how a virtual collapse in the space–time structure of its check clearing process led to a transformed information flow environment in

The rise of the term ‘big data’ has contributed to recent advances in computational analysis techniques, such as machine learning and more broadly, artificial intelligence, which can extract patterns from large, multi-dimensional datasets. In the field of urban planning, it is pertinent to understand both how such techniques can advance our understanding of cities, and how they can be embedded within

This paper analyses the Spanish city size distribution from a new perspective, focusing on the role played by distance. Using un-truncated data from all cities in 1900 and 2011, we study the spatial distribution of cities and how the city size distribution varies with distance. First, K-densities are estimated to identify different spatial patterns depending on city size, with significant patterns

Spatial optimization represents a set of powerful spatial analysis techniques that can be used to identify optimal solution(s) and even generate a large number of competitive alternatives. The formulation of such problems involves maximizing or minimizing one or more objectives while satisfying a number of constraints. Solution techniques range from exact models solved with such approaches as linear

Recognizing urban functions is crucial for understanding urban spatial structures and urban planning. Previous work has investigated urban functions based on human activities that were derived from mobile phone positioning data, check-in data, taxi data, etc. However, urban functions can only be comprehensively sensed from both human activities and the physical environment together. To do so, a deep

We show how increasing returns to scale in urban scaling can artificially emerge, systematically and predictably, without any sorting or positive externalities. We employ a model where individual productivities are independent and identically distributed lognormal random variables across all cities. We use extreme value theory to demonstrate analytically the paradoxical emergence of increasing returns

The jobs–housing balance and urban spatial structure are naturally connected, and understanding the connection is important for urban planning, geography, and transport studies. Using smartcard data in Beijing and Shanghai, this research employs a comparative approach to reveal spatial distribution patterns of jobs–housing balance in terms of transit commuters and derive the implied urban spatial structures

China’s urban villages have distinct characteristics compared with the ones in western countries. Identifying urban villages provides a basis for policymakers to evaluate and improve the effectiveness of urban planning in China and other developing countries. However, perhaps due to limitations of data acquisition among others, few urban studies have successfully identified urban villages at the building

While most of us take wayfinding and orientation for granted, instinctively utilizing our visual channels to do so, millions of blind people around the world face challenges and obstacles when attempting to perform the most basic tasks, such as walking to the corner store or using public transportation. As blind pedestrians lack critical information about the space they traverse outside the familiarity

There is a long history of engaging citizens in planning processes, and the intention to involve them actively in planning is a common objective. However, the reality of doing so is rather fraught and much empirical work suggests poor results. Partly in response an increasingly sophisticated toolkit of methods has emerged, and, in recent years, the deployment of various creative and digital technologies

In this paper, we provide an update of recent developments and forthcoming challenges in the field of planning support systems, following earlier reviews in 2003 and 2009. The rationale for this update is the rapid development of information and communication technologies and their impact on planning support systems. After a brief retrospective assessment of past planning support system developments

Urban researchers have long debated the extent to which metropolitan employment is monocentric, polycentric, or diffuse. In this paper I use high-resolution data based on unemployment insurance records to show that employment in US metropolitan areas is not centralized but is spatially concentrated. Unlike residents, who form a continuous surface covering most parts of each metropolitan area, jobs

Although urban scenario planning is widely applied for exploring various directions of urban development, it often has high requirements on the medium of quantitative information analysis and transformation. Thus, this study establishes a method of combining scenario planning with a spatial dynamic planning support system to predict urban growth. Specifically, a scenario-based spatial dynamic modelling

This study presents the spatial analysis of walking accessibility to a public facility in a hilly, multi-level urban environment. Our spatial database includes street topography, physical impedances, formal crossings, and designated access points in assessing the network distance of all private residential buildings to public open space in Hong Kong. Pedestrian movement of uneven speed on walkways

The implementation of smart governance in government policies and practices is criticised for its dominant focus on technology investments, which leads to a rather technocratic and corporate way of ‘smartly’ governing cities and less consideration of actual user needs. To help prevent a mismatch between the demand for and the supply of technology, this paper explores what smart governance can learn

The role of urban planning in sound environments has recently received increased research attention. This study aims to examine the relationship between the rate of noise complaints and urban development patterns concerning planning and landscape at city/region level. Open-source government data sets are used for statistical analysis across all district and unitary local authorities in England. The

China has experienced rapid urbanization for over 40 years, posing a significant challenge to the ecological environment and urban sustainability, which is especially critical in cities in Western China. To critically measure the impact of ecological security on urban sustainability, we developed a quantitative approach to obtain evaluation results for decision-making. Taking Xi’an, one of the central

If I look back over 40 years of these editorials, what is striking is how new ideas about cities and their planning have emerged without premonition, ideas that at the time they were articulated had not even appeared on the horizon. When the journal was founded in 1974, the editor Lionel March and his colleagues which included myself, believed in the inherent predictability of the science that we were

There is a decided bent toward finding an optimal solution to a given facility location problem instance, even when there may be multiple optima or competitive near-optimal solutions. Identifying alternate solutions is often ignored in model application, even when such solutions may be preferred if they were known to exist. In this paper we discuss why generating close-to-optimal alternatives should

As the urban development continues, different parts of a city can grow or decay by varying degrees due to natural deterioration or changes in governmental policies. City is the center for business, culture, and social activities; is the place that reflects geography, commerce, society, and culture context; is a complex whole that is woven by “people,” “activity,” and “space” “People” in the “space”

Land use–transportation interaction models can be useful planning support systems to assess the long-term implications of emerging transportation technologies like mobility-on-demand and automated vehicles. We propose an agent-based simulation framework (SimMobility Long-Term) that uses econometrically robust behavioral models to model the potential impacts of accessibility changes in “car-lite” communities

The conformance approach is frequently used to evaluate the effectiveness of spatial plans in containing urban sprawl. However, non-conformances are widely considered inevitable. Prior conformance-based evaluations fail to answer the essential question of whether plans influence non-conforming situations. To address this gap, we built a framework for conformance measurement to reveal how plans affect

Urban form at the district scale is defined as a unique combination of the following basic spatial objects: road networks, plot patterns and building configurations. In particular, a plot represents one of the most important basic spatial objects of urban form. In recent theoretical and empirical work from downtown districts in Tokyo, it was found that (1) plot sizes and frontages approximately follow

Urban vitality, as a metric, measures the attractiveness and competitiveness of a city and is a driver of development. As the physical and social space of human activities, the urban landscape has close connections with urban vitality according to classical theories. However, limited quantitative criteria for the urban landscape and gaps between macro urban planning and micro design create difficulties

Abstract In the digital era of big data, data analytics and smart cities, a new generation of planning support systems is emerging. The Rapid Analytics Interactive Scenario Explorer is a novel planning support system developed to help planners and policy-makers determine the likely land value uplift associated with the provision of new city infrastructure. The Rapid Analytics Interactive Scenario Explorer

Planning for cycling is often made difficult by the lack of detailed information about when and where cycling takes place. Many have seen the arrival of new forms of data such as crowdsourced data as a potential saviour. One of the key challenges posed by these data forms is understanding how representative they are of the population. To address this challenge, a limited number of studies have compared

Many times in these editorials over the last 30 years have I speculated on how we might think about cities in terms of their dynamics. The central constructs in such thinking involve ways in which cities can be disrupted by new technologies, and how a myriad of networks define the way energy, materials, people and information come together to generate levels of complexity, unimaginable before the industrial