Modelling and simulating ‘informal urbanization’: An integrated agent-based and cellular automata model of urban residential growth in Ghana

The global urban population is expected to grow by 2.5 billion over the next three decades, and 90% of this growth will occur in African and Asian countries. Urban expansion in these regions is often characterised by ‘informal urbanization’ whereby households self-build without planning permission in contexts of ambiguous, insecure or disputed property rights. Despite the scale of informal urbanization, it has received little attention from scholars working in the domains of urban analytics and city science. Towards addressing this gap, we introduce TI-City, an urban growth model designed to predict the locations, legal status and socio-economic status of future residential developments in an African city. In a bottom-up approach, we use agent-based and cellular automata modelling techniques to predict the geospatial behaviour of key urban development actors, including households, real estate developers and government. We apply the model to the city-region of Accra, Ghana, drawing on local data collection, including a household survey, to parameterise the model. Using a multi-spatial-scale validation technique, we compare TI-City’s ability to simulate historically observed built-up patterns with SLEUTH, a highly popular urban growth model. Results show that TI-City outperforms SLEUTH at each scale, suggesting the model could offer a valuable decision support tool in similar city contexts.

Analyze the usage of urban greenways through social media images and computer vision

Urban greenway is an emerging form of urban landscape offering multifaceted benefits to public health, economy, and ecology. However, the usage and user experiences of greenways are often challenging to measure because it is costly to survey such large areas. Based on the online postings from Instagram in 2017, this paper used Computer Vision (CV) technology to analyze and compare how the general public uses two typical greenway parks, The High Line in New York City and the Atlanta Beltline in Atlanta. Face and object detection analysis were conducted to infer user composition, activities, and key experiences. We presented the temporal patterns of Instagram postings as well as the group gatherings, smiling, and representative objects detected from photos. Our results have shown high user engagement levels for both parks while teens are significantly underrepresented. The High Line had more group activities and was more active during weekdays than the Atlanta Beltline. Stronger sense of escape and physical activities can be found in Atlanta Beltline. In summary, social media images like Instagram can provide strong empirical evidence for urban greenway usage when combined with artificial intelligence technologies, which can support the future practice of landscape architecture and urban design.

Quantifying changes in bicycle volumes using crowdsourced data

Most cities in the United States lack comprehensive or connected bicycle infrastructure; therefore, inexpensive and easy-to-implement solutions for connecting existing bicycle infrastructure are increasingly being employed. Signage is one of the promising solutions. However, the necessary data for evaluating its effect on cycling ridership is lacking. To overcome this challenge, this study tests the potential of using readily-available crowdsourced data in concert with machine-learning methods to provide insight into signage intervention effectiveness. We do this by assessing a natural experiment to identify the potential effects of adding or replacing signage within existing bicycle infrastructure in 2019 in the city of Omaha, Nebraska. Specifically, we first visually compare cycling traffic changes in 2019 to those from the previous two years (2017–2018) using data extracted from the Strava fitness app. Then, we use a new three-step machine-learning approach to quantify the impact of signage while controlling for weather, demographics, and street characteristics. The steps are as follows: Step 1 (modeling and validation) build and train a model from the available 2017 crowdsourced data (i.e., Strava, Census, and weather) that accurately predicts the cycling traffic data for any street within the study area in 2018; Step 2 (prediction) use the model from Step 1 to predict bicycle traffic in 2019 while assuming new signage was not added; Step 3 (impact evaluation) use the difference in prediction from actual traffic in 2019 as evidence of the likely impact of signage. While our work does not demonstrate causality, it does demonstrate an inexpensive method, using readily-available data, to identify changing trends in bicycling over the same time that new infrastructure investments are being added.

The private rental housing market before and during the COVID-19 pandemic: A submarket analysis in Cracow, Poland

How the COVID-19 pandemic has altered the segmentation of residential rental markets is largely unknown. We therefore assessed rental housing submarkets before and during the pandemic in Cracow, Poland. We used geographically and temporally weighted regression to investigate the marginal prices of housing attributes over space–time. The marginal prices were further reduced to a few principal components per time period and spatially clustered to identify housing submarkets. Finally, we applied the adjusted Rand index to evaluate the spatiotemporal stability of the housing submarkets. The results revealed that the pandemic outbreak significantly lowered rents and modified the relevance of some housing characteristics for rental prices. Proximity to the university was no longer among the residential amenities during the pandemic. Similarly, the virus outbreak diminished the effect of a housing unit’s proximity to the city center. The market partitioning showed that the number of Cracow’s residential rental submarkets increased significantly as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, as it enhanced the spatial variation in the marginal prices of covariates. Our findings suggest that the emergence of the coronavirus reshaped the residential rental market in three ways: Rents were decreased, the underlying rental price-determining factors changed, and the spatiotemporal submarket structure was altered.

Using weighted multilayer networks to uncover scaling of public transport system

The public transport system is considered as one of the most important subsystems in metropolises for achieving sustainability objectives by mediating resources and travel demand. Representing the various urban transport networks is crucial in understanding travel behavior and the function of the transport system. However, previous studies have ignored the coupling relationships between multi-mode transport networks and travel flows. To address this problem, we constructed a multilayer network to illustrate two modes of transport (bus and metro) by assigning weights of travel flow and efficiency. We explored the scaling of the public transport system to validate the multilayer network and offered new visions for transportation improvements by considering population. The proposed methodology was demonstrated by using public transport datasets of Shanghai, China. For both the bus network and multilayer network, the scaling of node degree versus Population were explored at 1 km * 1 km urban cells. The results suggested that in the multilayer network, the scaling relations between node degree and population can provide valuable insights into quantifying the integration between the public transport system and urban land use, which will benefit sustainable improvements to cities.

TOPOI – A method for analysing settlement units and their linkages in an urban–rural fabric

Many years, urbanisation research has largely focused the development of urban agglomerations and megacity regions, whereas less attention was paid on the development of medium-sized cities, small towns, villages, or rural areas. Yet many interrelations and spatial linkages between urban and rural areas exist. In this paper, we present a novel method called ‘TOPOI’ for the integrated analysis and description of settlement units in an urban–rural setting. The TOPOI-method enhances the understanding of the built environment by clustering and describing settlement units of similar characteristics with view to their physical form, function, and connectivity. The method is built on known planning parameters, but does not limit the analysis of settlement units to their administrative boundaries. Based on 11 indicators, 13 TOPOI-classes were identified in two exemplary study regions revealing new insights into urban–rural settlement types. This allows a better understanding of urban–rural linkages and therefore opens up new pathways for a more sustainable development.

Toward comparative polycentricity scores: Assessing variations in regional delineation and subcenter identification

Urban spatial structure is increasingly characterized by polycentricity, the presence of multiple interconnected centers of similar size. Polycentricity indicators, which influence research and policies related to urban development, rely on three phases of analysis: (a) delineating regions, (b) identifying subcenters within these regions, and (c) operationalizing polycentricity; and each phase contains decision points for analysts. This paper argues that polycentricity methodologies should be thought of in terms of pathways, then systematically applies 15 such pathways to the case of German regional polycentricity and compares the results. Findings suggest that questions of polycentricity are more robustly measured by comparing across multiple regional delineation methods and selection of subcenters, then looking for signs of agreement or disagreement. When possible, constructing regions from larger areas through bottom-up methods tends to avoid the biases of administratively defined regions. When this is not possible, statistical approaches to subcenter identification can serve as a check to avoid forced selection of subcenters in poorly defined regions.

Urban form in Canada at a small-area level: Quantifying “compactness” and “sprawl” with bayesian multivariate spatial factor analysis

Quantifying urban forms to explore urban compactness or sprawl has become increasingly popular in multiple fields in the past decades. However, previous studies predominantly analyze the multidimensional phenomenon at large-area levels such as metropolitan areas, concealing variations that probably occur at small-area levels. Canadian studies measuring urban forms are usually conducted at the regional level with inconsistent indicators and approaches, hindering meaningful comparisons of compactness or sprawling between different regions. This study bridges a previous gap by applying Bayesian multivariate spatial factor analysis to construct a new composite urban compactness index for all Census Tracts (CT) in Canada. Nine urban form indictors representing four dimensions, density, centering, land use, and street connectivity are used in developing the index. Posterior probability is used to detect CTs that are most compact or sprawling. Results indicate that gross population and employment densities best characterize urban compactness at the CT level while land-use mix is the least central indictor to define the multi-faceted concept. Notable differences of urban compactness are detected across Canada and among different Census Metropolitan Areas (CMA). The most compact CTs usually locate in downtown or city center areas of a CMA. Larger and more populous CMAs, which also capture a larger extent of periphery areas, are not necessarily more compact and vice versa, suggesting the need to measure local variations of urban compactness. The constructed composite index allows direct urban compactness comparisons across different Canadian regions. Findings from this study can be used to guide smart and sustainable urban development in Canada.