Hey all!
For this issue, I’ll try something a bit different than usual. Instead of choosing one urban planning theme, for this month’s newsletter I’ll share with you a few interesting resources I’ve come across recently. These are some cool articles, podcasts and videos on various topics and themes. Let’s get started!
P.S. Let me know if you’d prefer more content like this! 😊
📄 “Identifying spatiotemporal urban activities through linguistic signatures” (link)
This article discusses using social media data to model various spatial and temporal patterns of urban life. It uses geolocated Twitter data from Baltimore, DC and New York and then performs topic modeling to extract the most important topics from each tweet. (topics typically are made up of groups of words and they capture information on what the tweet is talking about) Some of the topics include activities like “work” or “watching a live show” and the study observed how they change in frequency over the course of the day. Here is a chart:
They also map out some of these topics, such as this chart of Baltimore showing the frequency of “meal”:
Why is this approach useful or interesting? The main motivation is using these kinds of techniques on social media datasets to stand in as proxies for underlying human behavior. This idea is called “social sensing” and it builds on using big data and its technologies to understand our society and environments better. Social sensing uses the internet to model different aspects of our society and it relies on immense amounts of data to do so. Of course, there are many assumptions that go into these techniques, including thinking about representing people using datasets and what it means to use social media to make inferences about groups of people as a whole.
🎤 Planning Ideas That Matter: Episode 5: Justin Steil and Sam Jung (link to podcast)
I’ve been listening to MIT DUSP’s podcast for a few weeks now, and there has been so much to learn and think about! Here is one of my favorite episodes with Justin Steil (DUSP asc. prof., researching environmental justice and the dynamics of power and inequality in urban spaces) and Sam Jung (Deputy Director of Inclusive Economic Development and Business Innovation at the Office of the NYC Deputy Mayor for Strategic Policy Initiatives).
In the podcast, Steil and Jung chat about issues of environmental justice, climate hazards and how different communities are affected asymmetrically. Some of the most interesting takeaways for me were the dynamics of evictions, housing and disasters. Steil discusses his research on the impact of disasters and how they affect eviction rates but also emergency medical services and health equity. Jung talks about economic development initiatives and how his work relates to climate adaptations, like moving away from fossil fuels or managing toxic sites.
Give it a listen!
🍿 City Beautiful: Does Your City Have Enough Parks?
How many parks does your city have? In Istanbul and Bogota, only 2.2 and 4.9% of the city spaces are covered by parks, although as you’ll hear about in the video, percentage of area is not really a useful metric. What’s more informative is park area per person, and states can set standards for how much park space per person should be allocated. Another important metric is distance from parks: in California for example all residents should be 800m from a park. Areas with lower income population or higher percentage of people of color on average have less access to park space. In lower income areas, residents have access to 42% less park space and whiter neighborhoods have 44% more park space (report by TPL).
Wrapping Up
This were some of my recommendations for this issue! As always, thanks for reading and let me know what you thought!