My article, “Planarity and Street Network Representation in Urban Form Analysis,” was recently published in Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science. Models of street networks underlie research in urban travel behavior, accessibility, design patterns, and morphology. These models are commonly defined as planar, meaning they can be represented in two dimensions without any underpasses or overpasses. However, real-world urban street networks exist in three-dimensional space and frequently feature grade separation such as bridges and tunnels: planar simplifications can be useful but they also impact the results of real-world street network analysis. This study measures the nonplanarity of drivable and walkable street networks in the centers of 50 cities worldwide, then examines the variation of nonplanarity across a single city. While some street networks are approximately planar, I empirically quantify how planar models can inconsistently but drastically misrepresent intersection density, street lengths, routing, and connectivity.
Author: gboeing
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Fall Conference Presentations
I’ve been traveling a lot over the past month, presenting my recent research at the Architect of the Future conference in Moscow, the Venice Biennale of Architecture, and the ACSP conference in Buffalo. At the first two, I shared my recent findings on how planners have used street networks to organize urban space according to an evolving set of spatial logics during the 20th century. At the third, I shared my findings on how technology platforms like Craigslist can shape rental housing markets and also shape how researchers and policymakers understand affordability. Both papers coming soon.
Looking ahead to the spring, in April I’ll be presenting at UAA in Los Angeles as well as a full slate at AAG in Washington, where I’ll give a paper talk, speak on an urban data science panel, and deliver the Transactions in GIS plenary address. See you there!
My article, Measuring the Complexity of Urban Form and Design, is now in-press for publication at Urban Design International (download free PDF). Cities are complex systems composed of many human agents interacting in physical urban space. This paper develops a typology of measures and indicators for assessing the physical complexity of the built environment at the scale of urban design. It extends quantitative measures from city planning, network science, ecosystems studies, fractal geometry, statistical physics, and information theory to the analysis of urban form and qualitative human experience.
My article, “A Multi-Scale Analysis of 27,000 Urban Street Networks: Every US City, Town, Urbanized Area, and Zillow Neighborhood,” was recently published in Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science. This study uses OSMnx to download and analyze 27,000 street networks from OpenStreetMap at metropolitan, municipal, and neighborhood scales – namely, every US city and town, census urbanized area, and Zillow-defined neighborhood. It illustrates the use of OSMnx and OpenStreetMap to consistently conduct street network analysis with extremely large sample sizes, with clearly defined network definitions and extents for reproducibility, and using nonplanar, directed graphs.
These 27,000 street networks as well as their measures have been shared in a free public repository at the Harvard Dataverse for anyone to re-purpose. This study’s empirical findings emphasize measures relevant to graph theory, transportation, urban design, and morphology, such as structure, connectedness, density, centrality, and resilience. It uses graph Maximum Betweenness Centrality and Average Node Connectivity to examine how “resilient” a street network is, in terms of how reliant it is on important nodes and how easy it is to disconnect it.
This post is adapted from this research paper that you can read/cite for more info. It analyzes and visualizes 100 cities around the world.
By popular request, this is a quick follow-up to this post comparing the orientation of streets in 25 US cities using Python and OSMnx. Here are 25 more cities around the world:
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Comparing US City Street Orientations
This post is adapted from this research paper that you can read/cite for more info. It analyzes and visualizes 100 cities around the world.
“We say the cows laid out Boston. Well, there are worse surveyors.” –Ralph Waldo Emerson. In 1960, one hundred years after Emerson’s quote, Kevin Lynch published The Image of the City, his treatise on the legibility of urban patterns. How coherent is a city’s spatial organization? How do these patterns help or hinder urban navigation? I recently wrote about visualizing street orientations with Python and OSMnx. That is, how is a city’s street network oriented in terms of the streets’ compass bearings? How well does it adhere to a straightforward north-south-east-west layout? I wanted to revisit this by comparing 25 major US cities’ orientations (EDIT: by popular request, see also this follow-up comparing world cities):
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Estimating Daytime Density in RSRS
My short article “Estimating Local Daytime Population Density from Census and Payroll Data” is out now in the latest issue of Regional Studies, Regional Science. I discuss a method for estimating local daytime density across a metropolitan area using US Census and LEHD LODES data, and dig into some limitations and biases. I look at the San Francisco Bay Area as a case study:
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New Position at Northeastern
I’m happy to announce that I have accepted a tenure-track offer from Northeastern University as an assistant professor of urban informatics in the School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs, with a faculty affiliation in Northeastern’s Network Science Institute. I will be starting in the Fall and moving to Boston later this summer!
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Network-Based Spatial Clustering
Jobs, establishments, and other amenities tend to agglomerate and cluster in cities. To identify these agglomerations and explore their causes and effects, we often use spatial clustering algorithms. However, urban space cannot simply be traversed as-the-crow-flies: human mobility is network-constrained. To properly model agglomeration along a city’s street network, we must use network-based spatial clustering.
The code for this example can be found in this GitHub repo. We use OSMnx to download and assemble the street network for a small city. We also have a dataframe of points representing the locations of (fake) restaurants in this city. Our restaurants cluster into distinct districts, as many establishments and industries tend to do:
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OSMnx Features Round-Up
OSMnx is a Python package for quickly and easily downloading, modeling, analyzing, and visualizing street networks and other spatial data from OpenStreetMap. Here’s a quick round-up of recent updates to OSMnx. I’ll try to keep this up to date as a single reference source. A lot of new features have appeared in the past few months, and people have been asking about what’s new and what’s possible. You can:
- Download and model street networks or other networked infrastructure anywhere in the world with a single line of code
- Download any other spatial geometries, place boundaries, building footprints, or points of interest as a GeoDataFrame
- Download by city name, polygon, bounding box, or point/address + network distance
- Download drivable, walkable, bikeable, or all street networks
- Download node elevations and calculate edge grades (inclines)
- Impute missing speeds and calculate graph edge travel times
- Simplify and correct the network’s topology to clean-up nodes and consolidate intersections
- Fast map-matching of points, routes, or trajectories to nearest graph edges or nodes
- Save networks to disk as shapefiles, geopackages, and GraphML
- Save/load street network to/from a local .osm xml file
- Conduct topological and spatial analyses to automatically calculate dozens of indicators
- Calculate and visualize street bearings and orientations
- Calculate and visualize shortest-path routes that minimize distance, travel time, elevation, etc
- Visualize street networks as a static map or interactive leaflet web map
- Visualize travel distance and travel time with isoline and isochrone maps
- Plot figure-ground diagrams of street networks and building footprints