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?
Tag: academia
Categories
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:
Getting started
What is OSMnx? What does it do? Here’s a succinct overview.
The easiest way to get started with street network modeling and analysis in OSMnx is with this docker image and these example/tutorial Jupyter notebooks. The OSMnx software documentation is available here and this journal article introduces it more formally.
Categories
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.
The resulting public data repository contains over 110,000 processed, cleaned street network graphs (which in turn comprise over 55 million nodes and over 137 million edges) at various scales—comprehensively covering the entire U.S.—archived as reusable open-source GraphML files, node/edge lists, and ESRI shapefiles that can be immediately loaded and analyzed in standard tools such as ArcGIS, QGIS, NetworkX, graph-tool, igraph, or Gephi.
Categories
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.
Categories
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.
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.
Categories
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:
Categories
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!
Categories
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.
