This session belongs to a series of informal seminars which aims to break away from the serious approach often seen at this type of event and promote team-building and exchange between research groups from different disciplines in a relaxed atmosphere.
Abstract:
When we think about public space, we picture parks, greenways and seaside, but overlook the largest single public space asset in any city: streets. Prosperity scales with land dedicated to street pattern, and particularly, with space allotted to pedestrians. While coarse estimations of public land use are at hand, fine-grained information about the size of sidewalks and bike lanes (per street, per block, per neighborhood) are currently unavailable –nor their impact on people’s life. Such measure is key to urban long-term challenges, as an indicator for (a) urban accessibility and walkability; (b) of areas that are specifically problematic for their confluence (traffic risk); and (c) of the urban configuration to empower community interaction and integration. We propose a civic technology project aiming at performing such measure at scale. To do so, the project will first advance from current remote sensing techniques and deep-learning image segmentation, exploiting Geographic Big Data (orthoimagery) to quantify space distribution in streets (asphalt, sidewalk, buildings, etc.). Profiling every street in a selected number of cities (in Catalonia, Europe and the Mediterranean region), we will then design the analytical tools to assess «intra-city» connectivity and walkability. Finally, the identification of imbalances in the space division will boost, via the implication of local associations, public intervention and the recovery of citizen participation, following the example of "Eix Pere IV".