Browsing by Author "Rowe, Francisco"
Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
Results Per Page
Sort Options
Item A city of cities: Measuring how 15-minutes urban accessibility shapes human mobility in Barcelona(2021) Graells-Garrido, Eduardo; Rowe, Francisco; Serra-Burriel, Feliu; Cucchietti, Fernando M.; Reyes, PatricioAs cities expand, human mobility has become a central focus of urban planning and policy making to make cities more inclusive and sustainable. Initiatives such as the “15-minutes city” have been put in place to shift the attention from monocentric city configurations to polycentric structures, increasing the availability and diversity of local urban amenities. Ultimately they expect to increase local walkability and increase mobility within residential areas. While we know how urban amenities influence human mobility at the city level, little is known about spatial variations in this relationship. Here, we use mobile phone, census, and volunteered geographical data to measure geographic variations in the relationship between origin-destination flows and local urban accessibility in Barcelona. Using a Negative Binomial Geographically Weighted Regression model, we show that, globally, people tend to visit neighborhoods with better access to education and retail. Locally, these and other features change in sign and magnitude through the different neighborhoods of the city in ways that are not explained by administrative boundaries, and that provide deeper insights regarding urban characteristics such as rental prices. In conclusion, our work suggests that the qualities of a 15-minutes city can be measured at scale, delivering actionable insights on the polycentric structure of cities, and how people use and access this structure.Publication A data fusion approach with mobile phone data for updating travel survey-based mode split estimates(2023) Graells-Garrido, Eduardo; Opitz, Daniela; Rowe, Francisco; Arriagada, JacquelineUp-to-date information on different modes of travel to monitor transport traffic and evaluate rapid urban transport planning interventions is often lacking. Transport systems typically rely on traditional data sources providing outdated mode-of-travel data due to their data latency, infrequent data collection and high cost. To address this issue, we propose a method that leverages mobile phone data as a cost-effective and rich source of geospatial information to capture current human mobility patterns at unprecedented spatiotemporal resolution. Our approach employs mobile phone application usage traces to infer modes of transportation that are challenging to identify (bikes and ride-hailing/taxi services) based on mobile phone location data. Using data fusion and matrix factorisation techniques, we integrate official data sources (household surveys and census data) with mobile phone application usage data. This integration enables us to reconstruct the official data and create an updated dataset that incorporates insights from digital footprint data from application usage. We illustrate our method using a case study focused on Santiago, Chile successfully inferring four modes of transportation: mass-transit (all public transportation), motorised (cars and similar vehicles), active (pedestrian and cycle trips), and taxi (traditional taxi and ride-hailing services). Our analysis revealed significant changes in transportation patterns between 2012 and 2020. We quantify a reduction in mass-transit usage across municipalities in Santiago, except where metro/rail lines have been more recently introduced, highlighting added resilience to the public transport network of these infrastructure enhancements. Additionally, we evidence an overall increase in motorised transport throughout Santiago, revealing persistent challenges in promoting urban sustainable transportation. Findings also point to a rise in the share of taxi usage, and a drop in active mobility, suggesting a modal shift towards less sustainable modes of travel. We validate our findings comparing our updated estimates with official smart card transaction data. The consistency of findings with expert domain knowledge from the literature and historical transport usage trends further support the robustness of our approach.Item A Framework to Understand Attitudes towards Immigration through Twitter(2021) Freire-Vidal, Yerka; Graells-Garrido, Eduardo; Rowe, FranciscoUnderstanding public opinion towards immigrants is key to prevent acts of violence, discrimination and abuse. Traditional data sources, such as surveys, provide rich insights into the formation of such attitudes; yet, they are costly and offer limited temporal granularity, providing only a partial understanding of the dynamics of attitudes towards immigrants. Leveraging Twitter data and natural language processing, we propose a framework to measure attitudes towards immigration in online discussions. Grounded in theories of social psychology, the proposed framework enables the classification of users’ into profile stances of positive and negative attitudes towards immigrants and characterisation of these profiles quantitatively summarising users’ content and temporal stance trends. We use a Twitter sample composed of 36 K users and 160 K tweets discussing the topic in 2017, when the immigrant population in the country recorded an increase by a factor of four from 2010. We found that the negative attitude group of users is smaller than the positive group, and that both attitudes have different distributions of the volume of content. Both types of attitudes show fluctuations over time that seem to be influenced by news events related to immigration. Accounts with negative attitudes use arguments of labour competition and stricter regulation of immigration. In contrast, accounts with positive attitudes reflect arguments in support of immigrants’ human and civil rights. The framework and its application can inform policy makers about how people feel about immigration, with possible implications for policy communication and the design of interventions to improve negative attitudes.Item Measuring the local complementarity of population, amenities and digital activities to identify and understand urban areas of interest(2022) Graells-Garrido, Eduardo; Schifanella, Rossano; Opitz, Daniela; Rowe, FranciscoIdentifying and understanding areas of interest are essential for urban planning. These areas are normallydefined from static features of the resident population and urban amenities. Research has emphasised the importance of human mobility activity to capture the changing nature of these areas throughout the day, and the use of digital applications to reflect the increasing integration between material and online activities. Drawing on mobile phone data, this paper develops a novel approach to identify areas of interest based on the degree of complementarity of digital activities, available amenities and population levels. As a case study, we focus on the largest urban agglomeration of Chile, Santiago, where we identify three distinctive groups of areas: those concentrating (1) high availability of amenities; (2) high diversity of amenities and digital activities; and (3) areas lacking amenities, yet, presenting high usage of digital leisure and mobility applications. These findings identify areas where digital activities and local amenities play a complementary role in association with local population levels, and provide data-driven insights into the structure of material and digital activities in urban spaces that may characterise large Latin American cities.