Research Notes
This is a long-running series of short blog posts discussing ongoing projects, “how-to” tutorials, forthcoming publications, and other research-related news.
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Travel Time Prediction from Sparse Open Data
My article “Travel Time Prediction from Sparse Open Data,” co-authored by my doctoral student Wendy Zhou, has just been published in the International Journal of Geographical Information Science. You can download it from IJGIS or via this open-access pre-print.
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Nobel Sustainability Award
The Nobel Sustainability Trust has announced that our team has won the 2025 Nobel Sustainability Award for “outstanding research and development for intelligent and sustainable urban solutions” for our Global Observatory of Healthy and Sustainable Cities (GOHSC).
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AAG Session on Urban Spatial Analytics
AAG session call for papers: “Urban spatial analytics: Toward problem-driven methods instead of methods-driven problems.”
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A Universal Model of Urban Street Networks
Marc Barthelemy and I have a new article out in Physical Review Letters titled “Universal Model of Urban Street Networks” (because PRL apparently doesn’t allow titles that start with an indefinite article).
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Street Network Simplification
How many street intersections do you see in this figure? I have a new article published this week in Transactions in GIS (open-access) and its first sentence sums it up: “Counting is hard.” Hear me out… it really is!
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OSMnx Reference Paper Published
The official OSMnx reference paper, titled “Modeling and Analyzing Urban Networks and Amenities With OSMnx,” has just been published open-access by Geographical Analysis. Years in the making, this article describes what OSMnx does and why it does it that way.
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Tenure
This is just a brief personal announcement that USC has decided to grant me tenure and promote me to Associate Professor. This has been a long and arduous journey, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. There hasn’t been much to celebrate this year in academia or science or international collaboration—the worlds in which I live my daily life—but here’s a small thing to celebrate.
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Zephyr Foundation Award
I am happy to share that I was awarded the Zephyr Foundation’s 2025 Exceptional Technical Achievement Award for my work on OSMnx. This annual award recognizes a project that has had a positive impact on the fields or transportation and/or land use decision-making.
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Global Healthy and Sustainable City Indicators
I recently co-authored an article, “Global Healthy and Sustainable City Indicators: Collaborative Development of an Open Science Toolkit for Calculating and Reporting on Urban Indicators Internationally,” now published in Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science. This was a collaboration with my colleagues at the Global Observatory of Healthy and Sustainable Cities, in which we discuss our spatial software co-development process with collaborators and practitioners around the world.
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Surfacic Networks
I recently coauthored an article titled “Surfacic Networks” in PNAS Nexus with Marc Barthelemy, Alain Chiaradia, and Chris Webster. We propose the concept of surfacic networks to describe a class of spatial networks embedded in non-flat two-dimensional manifolds (e.g., the Earth’s surface), and what this means for distance metrics and lazy path solving when accounting for fluctuations in the manifold’s curvature (e.g., changes in elevation on Earth’s surface).
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OSMnx 2.0 Released
OSMnx version 2.0.0 has been released. This has been a massive effort over the past year to streamline the package’s API, re-think its internal organization, and optimize its code. Today OSMnx is faster, more memory efficient, and fully type-annotated for a better user experience.
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Access to the Exclusive City
I recently coauthored an article in Urban Studies with Julia Harten titled “Access to the Exclusive City: Home Sharing as an Affordable Housing Strategy.” We examined how shared housing serves increasingly diverse populations as a pathway into otherwise unaffordable housing submarkets.
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A Roadmap for Data-Driven Urban Research
I recently coauthored an article in the journal Cities titled “A Road Map for Future Data-Driven Urban Planning and Environmental Health Research.” This arose from a symposium in Sitges, Spain which I was invited to last year by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health.
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The Structure of Street Networks
I recently coauthored an article titled “A Review of the Structure of Street Networks” with Marc Barthelemy in Transport Findings. On a personal note, Marc has long been a personal hero of mine and was the 2nd most cited author in my dissertation, after Mike Batty (who I also recently had the pleasure of collaborating with).
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Urban Form, Transport, Environment and Health
I recently coauthored an article in Environmental Research, titled “Exploring the Nexus of Urban Form, Transport, Environment and Health in Large-Scale Urban Studies: A State-of-the-Art Scoping Review.” This arose from a symposium in Sitges, Spain which I was invited to last year by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health.
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AI and NLP for Urban Mixed Methods Research
One area where urban AI research seems promising is in mixed methods work. For example, it’s hard to use traditional qualitative methods on really large text data sets because of the overwhelming manual labor involved. But if you could train a model to do, say, topic labeling for you, you’d be able to (potentially) analyze nearly unlimited text data nearly instantly after that initial training work. The mixed methods holy grail.
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OSMnx 2.0 Beta
OSMnx v2.0.0 is targeted for release later in 2024. This major release includes some breaking changes (including removing previously deprecated functionality) that are not backwards compatible with v1. See the migration guide and reference paper for details.
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Resilient by Design
I have a new article out now in Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice. Here’s a free open-access pre-print if you lack institutional access.
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Street Network Design and GHG Emissions
I have a new article out in Transportation Research Part D that estimates relationships between street network characteristics and transport CO2 emissions across every urban area in the world and investigates whether they are the same across development levels and design paradigms.
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Equity in the Built Environment
I coauthored a recently published article in Building and Environment which systematically reviews perspectives on and approaches to social equity in the built environment. From the abstract:
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Rethinking the One-Way Street
I recently published an article in Transfers Magazine with Billy Riggs questioning some of the received wisdom about one-way streets and efficiency. This builds on our recent research published in JPER modeling vehicle distance traveled before and after hypothetical one-way to two-way street conversions.
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Air Pollution Exposure in Los Angeles
I have a new article out now in Urban Studies, which finds that—all else equal—residents of Los Angeles census tracts that generate more vehicular travel tend to be exposed to less vehicular air pollution, and that tracts with a larger non-white population proportion—whether high- or low-income—experience more air pollution than do whiter but otherwise similar tracts. There’s also a free, open access pre-print available.
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Urban Analytics: History, Trajectory and Critique
I have a new chapter titled “Urban Analytics: History, Trajectory and Critique,” co-authored with Mike Batty, Shan Jiang, and Lisa Schweitzer, now published in the Handbook of Spatial Analysis in the Social Sciences, edited by Serge Rey and Rachel Franklin.
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Delivering Healthy and Sustainable Cities
I have a new article out now in The Journal of City Climate Policy and Economy, coauthored with a team that includes several of the folks from our recent series in The Lancet Global Health. The JCCPE article, “A Pathway to Prioritizing and Delivering Healthy and Sustainable Cities,” synthesizes findings and recommended policy actions arising from that recent TLGH series.
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ISPAH in Abu Dhabi
Alongside Billie Giles-Corti and Jim Sallis, I will be presenting our team’s recent research into accessible, sustainable urban design around the world at the ISPAH Congress in Abu Dhabi this week. Our symposium at the congress will share the methods and findings from our The Lancet Global Health series published this summer, as well as our ongoing work on the Thousand Cities Challenge.
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Scaling Urban Indicators
I have a new article out now in the journal of Urban Policy and Research coauthored with a team comprising many of the folks from our recent series in The Lancet Global Health. The article is titled “Policy-Relevant Spatial Indicators of Urban Liveability and Sustainability: Scaling from Local to Global” and discusses measuring urban indicators and scaling the software to calculate them from a local case study to a worldwide effort.
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Two-Way Streets and Network Efficiency
I have a new article out now in the Journal of Planning Education and Research with Billy Riggs, in which we examine how two-way street conversions impact street network efficiency. Most of the efficiency literature looks at the benefits of one-way streets for signalization and vehicular throughput. We took a different approach, considering how one-way streets inherently increase travel distances.
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The Lancet Global Health Series on Urban Design, Transport, and Health
After many years of hard work, our series of articles on urban design, transport, and health has been published by The Lancet Global Health.
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OSMnx v1.2 Released
OSMnx v1.2.0 has been released. It includes several new features, bug fixes, and performance enhancements. I encourage you to upgrade and take advantage of everything new. For more information, check out the OSMnx documentation and usage examples for demonstrations of all you can do.
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Housing Tech and Tilted Platforms
I have a new article out now in a special issue on platform urbanism, co- authored with Max Besbris, David Wachsmuth, and Jake Wegmann, titled Tilted Platforms: Rental Housing Technology and the Rise of Urban Big Data Oligopolies. We reflect on short-term and long-term rental housing technologies and how they’re affecting the housing search, equity, and affordability.
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Framework for Measuring Pedestrian Accessibility
I’m a co-author of a new article, “A Generalized Framework for Measuring Pedestrian Accessibility around the World Using Open Data,” which has just been published by Geographical Analysis. We developed an open source, containerized software framework for modeling pedestrian networks using open data to analyze disaggregate access to daily living needs. We worked with local partners in 25 cities around the world to demonstrate and validate this toolkit.
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OSMnx v1.1 Released
OSMnx v1.1.0 has been released. It includes several new features, bug fixes, and performance enhancements. I encourage you to upgrade and take advantage of everything new. I’ll summarize some of the key improvements in this post.
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Robert Moses Responds to Robert Caro
In 1974, Robert Caro published The Power Broker, a critical biography of Robert Moses’s dictatorial tenure as the “master builder” of mid-century New York. Moses profoundly transformed New York’s urban fabric and transportation system, producing the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, the Westside Highway, the Cross-Bronx Expressway, the Lincoln Center, the UN headquarters, Shea Stadium, Jones Beach State Park and many other projects. However, The Power Broker did lasting damage to his public image and today he remains one of the most controversial figures in city planning history.
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Worldwide Street Network Models and Indicators
My article, “Street Network Models and Indicators for Every Urban Area in the World” has been published by Geographical Analysis. This project was a massive undertaking and I’m excited to share it. As you might guess from the title, I modeled and analyzed the street network of each urban area in the world then deposited all the source code and models and indicators in open repositories for public reuse. The article also includes a high-level analysis of urban street network form across the world.
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GIS and Computational Notebooks
I have a new chapter “GIS and Computational Notebooks,” co-authored with Dani Arribas-Bel, out now in The Geographic Information Science & Technology Body of Knowledge. Want to make your spatial analyses more reproducible, portable, and well-documented? Our chapter is a short, gentle intro to using code and notebooks for modern GIS work.
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OSMnx 1.0 Is Here
Happy new year! After five years of development and over 2,000 code commits from dozens of contributors, OSMnx v1.0 has officially been released. This has been a long labor of love and I’m thrilled to see it reach this milestone.
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Urban Form and OpenStreetMap
My chapter “Exploring Urban Form Through OpenStreetMap Data: A Visual Introduction” has just been published in the new book Urban Experience and Design: Contemporary Perspectives on Improving the Public Realm edited by Justin Hollander and Ann Sussman.
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Off the Grid... and Back Again?
My article “Off the Grid… and Back Again? The Recent Evolution of American Street Network Planning and Design” has been published by the Journal of the American Planning Association and won the 2020 Stough-Johansson Springer best paper award.
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Geospatial Tool Building
My new article “The Right Tools for the Job: The Case for Spatial Science Tool-Building” has been published in Transactions in GIS (free PDF). I originally presented this paper as the 8th annual Transactions in GIS plenary address at the AAG annual meeting last year. I argue that tool-building is an essential but poorly incentivized component of academic geography and social science more broadly. To conduct better science, we need to build better tools. Better tools and data models, spearheaded by academics, can help infuse theory into our field’s quantitative work where it is too often lacking. But if we want better tools, we have to build them. It is not ESRI’s job to satisfy all the theoretical needs of the spatial sciences.
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OSMnx Summer Wrap-Up
OSMnx underwent a major overhaul this summer, with the development of several new features, improvements, and optimizations. This project concluded yesterday with the release of v0.16.0.
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Outlook to Google Calendar Sync
Ah, the travails of academia. Like many universities, USC uses Microsoft Outlook as its email and calendar provider. This presents some integration challenges for those of us, like me, who use Google Calendar everywhere else in life. It’s effectively impossible to sync an Outlook Calendar with a Google Calendar, so I had to juggle between both when trying to schedule anything. Chaos ensues.
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What's New With OSMnx, Part 2
This is a follow-up to last month’s post discussing the many new features, improvements, and optimizations made to OSMnx this summer. As this major improvement project now draws to a close, I will summarize what’s new(er) here. Long story short: there are a bunch of new features and everything in the package has been streamlined and optimized to be easier to use, faster, and more memory efficient.
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What's New with OSMnx, Part 1
There have been some major changes to OSMnx in the past couple months. I’ll review them briefly here, demonstrate some usage examples, then reflect on a couple upcoming improvements on the horizon. First, what’s new:
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New Article on Computational Notebooks
I have a new article out in Region: Journal of the European Regional Science Association, “Urban Street Network Analysis in a Computational Notebook.” It reflects on the use of Jupyter notebooks in applied data science research, pedagogy, and practice, and it uses the OSMnx examples repository as an example.
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Rental Housing Spot Markets
My new article, “Rental Housing Spot Markets: How Online Information Exchanges Can Supplement Transacted-Rents Data,” with Jake Wegmann and Junfeng Jiao is now published in the Journal of Planning Education and Research (download free PDF).
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Housing Search in the Age of Big Data
My article “Housing Search in the Age of Big Data: Smarter Cities or the Same Old Blind Spots?” with Max Besbris, Ariela Schachter, and John Kuk is now published in Housing Policy Debate. We look at the quantity and quality of information in online housing listings and find that they are much higher in White and non- poor neighborhoods than they are in poor, Black, or Latino neighborhoods. Listings in White neighborhoods include more descriptive text and focus on unit and neighborhood amenities, while listings in Black neighborhoods focus more on applicant (dis)qualifications. We discuss what this means for housing markets, filter bubbles, residential sorting and segregation, and housing policy. You can download a free PDF.
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Off the Grid at TRB
I am presenting my ongoing research into the recent evolution of American street network planning and design at the annual meeting of the Transportation Research Board in Washington DC on January 13. This presentation asks the question: how has street network design changed over time, especially in recent years? I analyze the street networks of every US census tract and estimate each’s vintage.
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We're Hiring
USC’s Department of Urban Planning and Spatial Analysis is hiring! We’re looking for an environmental planner, broadly construed, at the Assistant/Associate Professor level. I am on the search committee and happy to answer any questions. Work on urban resilience, sustainability, environmental security, and climate adaptation will be especially competitive. We hope to complement our department’s cross-cutting themes of 1) social justice and 2) data and the built environment at the methodological cutting-edge. We are looking broadly for new scholarly ideas and you do not have to hit on every theme to be a strong applicant. If your research/teaching touches any of these topics, we would love to see you apply and learn more about your work.
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Big Data in Urban Morphology
My new article “Spatial Information and the Legibility of Urban Form: Big Data in Urban Morphology” has been published in the International Journal of Information Management (download free PDF). It builds on recent work by Crooks et al, presenting workflows to integrate data-driven and narrative approaches to urban morphology in today’s era of ubiquitous urban big data. It situates this theoretically in the visual culture of planning to present a visualization-mediated interpretative process of data-driven urban morphology, focusing on transportation infrastructure via OSMnx.
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Defining Urban Data Science
I’m a co-author on a new article out in Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science titled “A Roundtable Discussion: Defining Urban Data Science” (download free PDF). It arises from a panel discussion I participated in at the 2019 AAG Annual Meeting in DC. Vanessa Frias-Martinez, Song Gao, Ate Poorthuis, and Wenfei Xu joined me on the panel, which was organized and moderated by Wei Kang, Taylor Oshan, and Levi Wolf. From the abstract:
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Urban Street Network Orientation
My new article, Urban Spatial Order: Street Network Orientation, Configuration, and Entropy, has just been published in Applied Network Science (download free PDF).
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Online Rental Housing Market Representation
My article, Online Rental Housing Market Representation and the Digital Reproduction of Urban Inequality, has just been published in Environment and Planning A (download free PDF). It explores the representation of different communities in online rental listings from two perspectives: 1) how might biases in representativeness impact housing planners’ knowledge of rental markets, and 2) how might information inequality impact residential mobility, community legibility, gentrification, and housing voucher utilization?
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New Article in Frontiers in Neurology
I recently teamed up with an international group of public health researchers and spatial analysts to co-author an article, An Introduction to Software Tools, Data, and Services for Geospatial Analysis of Stroke Services, that has been accepted for publication at Frontiers in Neurology (download free PDF).
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New Position at USC
I’m happy to announce that I have accepted a tenure-track offer from the University of Southern California as an assistant professor in the Sol Price School’s Department of Urban Planning and Spatial Analysis. I will be starting in the Fall and moving to Los Angeles later this summer! Looking forward to heading back home to California.
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AAG Transactions in GIS Plenary
I am giving the Transactions in GIS plenary address at the AAG conference this afternoon. I’ll be reflecting on urban science, spatial networks, and tool-building in academia, focusing on OSMnx. A paper will be forthcoming soon, but in the meantime, for any interested plenary session attendees or other folks, here are a few links to more info and related resources:
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US Street Network Models and Measures
My new article, “Street Network Models and Measures for Every U.S. City, County, Urbanized Area, Census Tract, and Zillow-Defined Neighborhood” has been published in Urban Science. This paper reports results from a broader project that collected raw street network data from OpenStreetMap using the Python-based OSMnx software for every U.S. city and town, county, urbanized area, census tract, and Zillow-defined neighborhood boundary. It constructed nonplanar directed multigraphs for each and analyzed their structural and morphological characteristics.
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Street Network Analysis in a Docker Container
Containerization is the way of the
futurepresent. I’ve heard feedback from some folks over the past few months who would like to play around with OSMnx for street network analysis, transport modeling, and urban design—but can’t because they can’t install Python and its data science stack on their computers. Furthermore, it would be nice to have a consistent reference environment to deploy on AWS or elsewhere in the cloud. -
New Chapter: Street Network Morphology
My chapter The Morphology and Circuity of Walkable and Drivable Street Networks is now in-press for publication in the forthcoming book The Mathematics of Urban Morphology (download free PDF). The book integrates recent theoretical and empirical work from urban planning, geography, sociology, architecture, economics, and mathematics around the theme of how we model and understand the urban form’s physical patterns and shaping processes. Fellow authors in this volume include Michael Batty, Diane Davis, Keith Clarke, Bin Jiang, Kay Axhausen, Carlo Ratti, and Stephen Marshall. The book itself can be purchased here.
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Spring Teaching
Happy new year! In the spring semester I’ll be teaching two new courses: Big Data for Cities and Advanced Spatial Analysis of Urban Systems. The former serves as a sort of gateway course to Northeastern’s urban informatics master’s program, introducing students to urban theories and scientific methods of analyzing urban data. The latter introduces advanced students to a computational workflow of spatial analysis and statistics with Python, PostGIS, and other open-source tools. I’ll be creating my lectures as Jupyter notebooks and will share a GitHub link soon when they’re all together.
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New Article: Planar Models of Street Networks
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.
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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.
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New Article: Complexity in Urban Form and Design
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.
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New Article: Urban Street Networks in EP-B
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.
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City Street Orientations around the World
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.
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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.
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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.
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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:
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Street Network Orientation
OSMnx is a Python package for easily downloading and analyzing street networks anywhere in the world. Among other analyses, we can use it to explore street network orientation. That is, what are the bearings and spatial orientations of the streets in the network? All of the code for this example is in this GitHub notebook. First we use OSMnx to download the street network of Moraga, California, a small town in the hills just east of Berkeley:
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Urban Street Network Centrality
Check out the journal article about OSMnx.
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Estimating Daytime Population Density
Check out the journal article about this project.
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New Article: Craigslist Housing Markets in JPER
Our article “New Insights into Rental Housing Markets across the United States: Web Scraping and Analyzing Craigslist Rental Listings” is finally appearing in print in the Journal of Planning Education and Research ‘s forthcoming winter issue. We collected, validated, and analyzed 11 million Craigslist rental listings to discover fine-grained patterns across metropolitan housing markets in the United States.
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New Article: OSMnx in CEUS
My article “OSMnx: New methods for acquiring, constructing, analyzing, and visualizing complex street networks” was published in the journal Computers, Environment and Urban Systems earlier this month. OSMnx is a Python package that lets you download a street network anywhere in the world at any scale with a single line of code, then analyze or visualize it with one more line of code.
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Describing Cities with Computer Vision
What does artificial intelligence see when it looks at your city? I recently created a Twitter bot in Python called CityDescriber that takes popular photos of cities from Reddit and describes them using Microsoft’s computer vision AI. The bot typically does pretty well with straightforward images of city skylines and street scenes:
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Isochrone Maps with OSMnx + Python
Check out the journal article about OSMnx.
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Craft Beer, Urban Planning, and Gentrification
I co-authored a chapter in the new book Untapped: Exploring the Cultural Dimensions of Craft Beer with the estimable Jesus Barajas and Julie Wartell. Our chapter is titled “Neighborhood Change, One Pint at a Time” and it explores the relationship between craft breweries, urban planning and policy, and gentrification.
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OSMnx and Street Network Elevation Data
Check out the journal article about OSMnx.
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Urban Form Analysis with OpenStreetMap Data
Check out the journal article about OSMnx. This is a summary of some of my recent research on making OpenStreetMap data analysis easy for urban planners. It was also published on the ACSP blog.
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Urban Form Figure-Ground Diagrams
Check out the journal article about OSMnx.
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Getting Started with Python
This is a guide for absolute beginners to get started using Python. Since releasing OSMnx a few weeks ago, I’ve received a lot of comments from people who would love to try it out, but don’t know where to begin with Python. I’ll demonstrate how to get Python up and running on your system, how to install packages, and how to run code.
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Square-Mile Street Network Visualization
Check out the journal article about OSMnx. All figures in this article come from this journal article, which you can read/cite for more.
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Animating the Lorenz Attractor with Python
Edward Lorenz, the father of chaos theory, once described chaos as “when the present determines the future, but the approximate present does not approximately determine the future.”
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OSMnx: Python for Street Networks
If you use OSMnx in your work, please cite the journal article.
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R-tree Spatial Indexing with Python
Check out the journal article about OSMnx, which implements this technique.
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College Football Stadium Attendance
A few months ago, I wrote about the large investments that U.S. universities are making in their football stadiums. This also included a visual analysis of stadium capacity around the country. Outside of North Korea, the 8 largest stadiums in the world are college football stadiums, and the 15 largest college football stadiums are larger than any NFL stadium.
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Craigslist and U.S. Rental Housing Markets
This is a summary of our JPER journal article (available here) about Craigslist rental listings’ insights into U.S. housing markets.
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How to Visualize Urban Accessibility and Walkability
Tools like WalkScore visualize how “walkable” a neighborhood is in terms of access to different amenities like parks, schools, or restaurants. It’s easy to create accessibility visualizations like these ad hoc with Python and its pandana library. Pandana (pandas for network analysis - developed by Fletcher Foti during his dissertation research here at UC Berkeley) performs fast accessibility queries over a network. I’ll demonstrate how to use it to visualize urban walkability. My code is in these IPython notebooks in this urban data science course GitHub repo.
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Mapping Everywhere I've Ever Been in My Life
I recently wrote about visualizing my Foursquare check-in history and mapping my Google location history, and it inspired me to mount a more substantial project: mapping everywhere I’ve ever been in my life (!!). I’ve got 4 years of Foursquare check-ins and Google location history data. For everything pre-smart phone, I typed up a simple spreadsheet of places I’d visited in the past and then geocoded it with the Google Maps API. All my Python and Leaflet code is available in this GitHub repo and is easy to re-purpose to visualize your own location history.
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Mapping Your Google Location History with Python
I recently wrote about visualizing my Foursquare check-in history and it inspired me to map my entire Google location history data - about 1.2 million GPS coordinates from my Android phone between 2012 and 2016. I used Python and its pandas, matplotlib, and basemap libraries. The Python code is available in this notebook in this GitHub repo, and it’s simple to re-use to visualize your own location history.
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Analyzing Last.fm Listening History
Last.fm is a web site that tracks your music listening history across devices (computer, phone, iPod, etc) and services (Spotify, iTunes, Google Play, etc). I’ve been using Last.fm for nearly 10 years now, and my tracked listening history goes back even further when you consider all my pre-existing iTunes play counts that I scrobbled (ie, submitted to my Last.fm database) when I joined Last.fm.
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Visualize Foursquare Location History
I started using Foursquare at the end of 2012 and kept with it even after it became the pointless muck that is Swarm. Since I’ve now got 4 years of location history (ie, check-ins) data, I decided to visualize and map it with Python, matplotlib, and basemap. The code is available in this GitHub repo. It’s easy to re-purpose to visualize your own check-in history: you just need to plug in your Foursquare OAuth token then run the notebook.
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Visualizing a Gmail Inbox
Google Takeout lets you download an archive of your data from various Google products. I downloaded my Gmail archive as an mbox file and visualized all of my personal Gmail account traffic since signing up back in July 2004. This analysis excludes work and school email traffic (as well as my other Gmail account for signing up for web sites and services), as I have separate dedicated email accounts for each. It also excludes the Hangouts/chats that Google includes in your mbox archive. So, this analysis just covers personal communication.
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America's College Football Stadiums
Also check out this follow-up analysis of stadium attendance.
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The Landscape of U.S. Rents
Which U.S. cities are the most expensive for rental housing? Where are rents rising the fastest? The American Community Survey (ACS) recently released its latest batch of 1-year data and I analyzed, mapped, and visualized it. My methodology is below, and my code and data are in this GitHub repo.
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Exporting Python Data to GeoJSON
I like to do my data wrangling and analysis work in Python, using the pandas library. I also use Python for much of my data visualization and simple mapping. But for interactive web maps, I usually use Leaflet. There isn’t dead-simple way to dump a pandas DataFrame with geographic data to something you can load with Leaflet. You could use GeoPandas to convert your DataFrame then dump it to GeoJSON, but that isn’t a very lightweight solution.
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Urban Design and Complexity
I am presenting at the 2015 Conference on Complex Systems tomorrow in Tempe, Arizona. My paper is on methods for assessing the complexity of urban design. If you’re attending the conference, come on by!
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Urban Informatics and Visualization at UC Berkeley
Update, September 2017 : I am no longer a Berkeley GSI, but Paul’s class is ongoing. Check out his teaching materials in his GitHub repo. From my experiences here, I have developed a course series on urban data science with Python and Jupyter, available in this GitHub repo.
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Animated 3-D Plots in Python
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Visualizing Chaos and Randomness
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Chaos Theory and the Logistic Map
Using Python to visualize chaos, fractals, and self-similarity to better understand the limits of knowledge and prediction. Download/cite the article here and try pynamical yourself.
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LEED-ND and Neighborhood Livability
I recently co-authored a journal article titled LEED-ND and Livability Revisited, which won the Kaye Bock award. LEED-ND is a system for evaluating neighborhood design that was developed by CNU, USGBC, and NRDC. Many of its criteria, particularly site location and neighborhood pattern, accordingly reflect New Urbanist and Smart Growth principles and are inspired by traditional neighborhood design.
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How Our Neighborhoods Lost Local Food (And How They Can Get It Back)
This post is adapted from an article I wrote in Progressive Planning.
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Visualizing Craigslist Rental Listings
Our paper on collecting and analyzing U.S. housing rental markets through Craigslist rental listings has been accepted for publication by the Journal of Planning Education and Research. Check out the article here. This map of rental listings in the contiguous U.S. is divided into quintiles by rent per square foot:
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Using geopandas on Windows
This guide was written in 2014 and updated slightly in November 2020.
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Clustering to Reduce Spatial Data Set Size
Read/cite the paper here.