Tag: city

Categories
Planning

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.

From the abstract:

Creating healthy and sustainable cities should be a global priority. Some cities prioritize 15-minute cities as a planning approach with co-benefits for health, climate change mitigation, equity, and economic recovery from COVID-19. Yet, as our recent The Lancet Global Health series on “Urban Design, Transport, and Health” showed, many cities have a long way to go to achieve this vision. This policy guideline summarizes the main findings of the series, which assessed health and sustainability indicators for 25 cities in 19 countries. We then outline steps governments can take to strengthen policy frameworks and deliver more healthy, equitable, and sustainable built environments. The Lancet Global Health series provided clear evidence that cities need to transform urban governance to enable integrated planning for health and sustainability and commit to policy implementation. Evidence-informed indicators should be used to benchmark and monitor progress. Cities need policy frameworks that are comprehensive and consistent with evidence, with measurable policy targets to support implementation and accountability. The series provided evidence-informed thresholds for some key urban design and transport features, which can be embedded as policy targets. Policies and interventions must prioritize identifying and reducing inequities in access to health-supportive environments. Governments should also invest in open data and promote citizen-science programmes, to support indicator development and research for public benefit. We provide tools to replicate our indicators and an invitation to join our 1,000 Cities Challenge via the Global Observatory of Healthy and Sustainable Cities.

For more, check out the JCCPE article itself. And you may also be interested in our recent The Lancet Global Health series of articles that developed similar themes in great depth.

Categories
Planning

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.

Our geospatial team developed open-source software to calculate indicators of walkability and accessibility around the world, and then linked these back to cities’ policy contexts and identified populations living above and below estimated thresholds for physical activity. Few cities had measurable policy standards and targets to actually build healthier and more sustainable cities, and their health-supportive built environment features were often inadequate or inequitably distributed.

We simultaneously launched the Global Observatory of Healthy and Sustainable Cities to promote healthy and sustainable urban planning, benchmark and monitor cities’ progress, and share more consistent, comparable urban data. The whole series of articles is free and open access, as is our software.

Categories
Urban

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.

From the abstract:

Urban liveability is a global priority for creating healthy, sustainable cities. Measurement of policy-relevant spatial indicators of the built and natural environment supports city planning at all levels of government. Analysis of their spatial distribution within cities, and impacts on individuals and communities, is crucial to ensure planning decisions are effective and equitable. This paper outlines challenges and lessons from a 5-year collaborative research program, scaling up a software workflow for calculating a composite indicator of urban liveability for residential address points across Melbourne, to Australia’s 21 largest cities, and further extension to 25 global cities in diverse contexts.

For more, check out the article itself. And you may also be interested in our recent The Lancet Global Health series of articles that developed similar themes in great depth.

Categories
Planning

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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Categories
Urban

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.

The Lancet Global Health infographic on benchmarking healthy sustainable citiesIn our first paper, we analyzed urban policies and calculated built environment indicators for 25 cities across 6 continents to assess walkability and accessibility. Our policy analysis found policies inconsistent with public health evidence, rhetoric endorsing health and sustainability but few measurable policy targets, and substantial implementation gaps.

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Categories
Planning

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.

Today, The Power Broker may be the most well-known biography of any urban planner ever. Less-known: on August 26, 1974, Moses issued a turgid 23-page statement denouncing Caro’s work as “full of mistakes, unsupported charges, nasty baseless personalities, and random haymakers.” Moses’s original typewritten statement survives today as a grainy photocopy in the New York City Parks Department archive. To better preserve and disseminate it, I extracted and transcribed its text using optical character recognition and edited the result to correct errors. My transcription of Moses’s statement, alongside Caro’s response to it, is available here.

Categories
Data

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.

Cities worldwide exhibit a variety of street patterns and configurations that shape human mobility, equity, health, and livelihoods. Using boundaries derived from the Global Human Settlement Layer, I modeled and analyzed the street networks of every urban area in the world using OSMnx and OpenStreetMap raw data. In total, I modeled over 160 million street network nodes and over 320 million edges across 8,914 urban areas in 178 countries. I attached node elevations and street grades to every node/edge in the final models. All the final models were topologically simplified such that nodes represent intersections and dead-ends, and edges represent the street segments linking them.

Street network topology simplification with OSMnx and OpenStreetMap

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Categories
Urban

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.

From the abstract:

This chapter introduces OpenStreetMap—a crowdsourced, worldwide mapping project and geospatial data repository—to illustrate its usefulness in quickly and easily analyzing and visualizing planning and design outcomes in the built environment. It demonstrates the OSMnx toolkit for automatically downloading, modeling and visualizing spatial data from OpenStreetMap. We explore patterns and configurations in street networks and buildings around the world computationally through visualization methods—including figure-ground diagrams and polar histograms—that help compress urban complexity into comprehensible artifacts that reflect the human experience of the built environment. Ubiquitous urban data and computation can open up new urban form analyses from both quantitative and qualitative perspectives.

For more, check out the chapter.

Categories
Planning

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 Award for best paper. It identifies recent nationwide trends in American street network design, measuring how urban planners abandoned the grid and embraced sprawl over the 20th century, but since 2000 these trends have rebounded, shifting back toward historical design patterns. In this post I discuss these findings and visualizations across the US today as well as over time, then discuss my analysis methods.

Map of where street grids exist today across the US, made with OSMnx and Python

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Categories
Academia

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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