Andres Sevtsuk

MIT · School of Architecture and Planning

Although many cities are incentivizing non-auto modes of transportation in response to the climate crisis, their sustainable mobility transition efforts are being challenged by the rising intensity and frequency of heatwaves. Pedestrians are exposed to high levels of heat stress on hot days, which may reduce their willingness to walk. It is thus im...

Climate change and the associated increase in heat-related hazards pose a pressing threat to urban residents’ health and well-being. People, when walking in particular, are at risk of experiencing heat stress as they navigate urban environments. This study proposes a novel heat risk assessment framework combining pedestrian mobility modeling with u...

The global climate-change crisis, along with public health and economic competitiveness challenges in cities around the world have underscored the need for analytic tools to examine the relationship between city design and sustainable mobility. Car-centered travel demand models and land-use-transportation interaction models have historically analyz...

Why do some streets attract more social activities than others? Is it due to street design, or do land use patterns in neighborhoods create opportunities for businesses where people gather? These questions have intrigued urban sociologists, designers, and planners for decades. Yet, most research in this area has remained limited in scale, lacking a...

Conté: Foreword: Walking the streets: an approach to urban proximity through the analysis of pedestrian networks / Eulàlia Gómez-Escoda -- Presentation: Urban Network Analysis tools for modeling land use and transportation interactions for pedestrians and cyclists / Andres Sevtsuk -- Barcelona’s Superblocks under the spotlight: evaluating expected...

Research on how socioeconomic status interacts with neighbourhood characteristics to influence disparities in obesity outcomes is currently limited by residential segregation-induced structural confounding, a lack of empirical studies outside the U.S. and other ‘Western’ contexts, and an over-reliance on cross-sectional analyses. This study address...

We examine differences in mobility outcomes between residents of highest and lowest socio-economic index (SEI) at the Census block group (CBG) level in nine major US cities prior to and during the COVID-19 pandemic. While low-SEI groups generally traveled shorter distances but visited more city-wide CBGs before the pandemic, high-SEI residents univ...

This study adds to the nascent but growing literature on the use of big data for pedestrian route choice analysis. We explore behavioral preferences for various route attributes in Boston, MA using a large dataset of GPS trajectories (n = 11,165) sourced from a third-party smartphone app. Although the data are anonymized and limit our exploration o...

Among a number of variables shown to affect pedestrian route choice, path length and turns have stood out as the most consequential. Turns have been considered the superior variable by some architectural scholars of urban street networks, while transportation planners and geographers believe distance to be paramount. The longstanding debate between...

There is a lack of data on the location, condition, and accessibility of sidewalks across the world, which not only impacts where and how people travel but also fundamentally limits interactive mapping tools and urban analytics. In this paper, we describe initial work in semi-automatically building a sidewalk network topology from satellite imagery...

How does the spatial structure of work environments affect social interactions among workers? Building on prior studies of both physical and electronic communication networks, we present the results of a study conducted on the MIT campus using an anonymized dataset of e-mail communication to examine how spatial relatedness between faculty, staff, a...

La rápida motorización y los cambios en las pautas de desplazamiento son síntomas comunes del crecimiento metropolitano en el Sur Global en la actualidad. El crecimiento de las economías encarece el suelo en el centro de las ciudades, lo que provoca un fuerte impulso de expansión urbana en los bordes, así como desarrollos informales en terrenos int...

La falta de datos en las áreas informales de las ciudades es una gran limitación para la gestión de políticas públicas, afectando a todos los ámbitos de la gestión, desde la capacidad de hacer un buen diagnóstico de los problemas en la población más vulnerable, hasta la evaluación de la efectividad de los programas de desarrollo. Esta monografía ab...

Cities are increasingly promoting walkability to tackle climate change, improve urban quality of life, and address socioeconomic inequities that auto-oriented development tends to exacerbate, prompting a need for predictive pedestrian flow models. This paper implements a novel network-based pedestrian flow model at a property-level resolution in th...

While there has been much speculation on how the pandemic has affected work location patterns and home location choices, there is sparse evidence regarding the impacts that COVID-19 has had on amenity visits in American cities, which typically constitute over half of all urban trips. Using aggregate app-based GPS positioning data from smartphone us...

Big data from smartphone applications are enabling travel behavior studies at an unprecedented scale. In this paper, we examine pedestrian route choice preferences in San Francisco, California using a large, anonymized dataset of walking trajectories collected from an activity-based smartphone application. We study the impact of various street attr...

Problem, research strategy, and findings City governments and planners alike commonly seek to increase pedestrian activity on city streets as part of broader sustainability, community building, and economic development strategies. Though walkability has received ample attention in planning literature, most planners still lack practical methods for...

Street attributes are thought to play an important role in influencing pedestrian route choices. Faced with alternatives, pedestrians have been observed to choose faster, safer, more comfortable, more interesting or more beautiful routes. Literature on pedestrian route choice has provided methods for assessing the likelihood of such options using d...

In this paper, we examine transportation sustainability in American metropolitan areas using transportation-related CO₂ emissions, public transit accessibility, and commuting times as indicators. Though variations in these indicators may stem from historic contexts, policies, institutional arrangements, social and cultural origins, the spatial stru...

Advances in computational urbanism have stimulated the rise of generative and parametric approaches to urban design. Yet, most generative and parametric approaches focus on physical characteristics, such as a neighborhoods walkability, energy efficiency, and urban form. Here, we study the colocation patterns of more than one million amenities in 47...

Rapidly evolving mobility technologies and the associated behavioral adjustments of travelers are bringing about dramatic changes to the morphology of cities, some of which have already begun to take root. With the seemingly endless amounts of data that technology is producing about life in cities, new mathematical modeling techniques will be requi...

We introduce a version of the Huff retail expenditure model, where retail demand depends on households’ access to retail centers. Household-level survey data suggest that total retail visits in a system of retail centers depends on the relative location pattern of stores and customers. This dependence opens up an important question—could overall vi...

We introduce a version of the Huff retail expenditure model, where retail demand depends on households’ access to retail centers. Household-level survey data suggests that total retail visits in a system of retail centers depends on the relative location pattern of stores and customers. This dependence opens up an important question – could overall...

Research on urban form and walkability suggests that on average smaller blocks are better for pedestrians. We explore how block sizes, plot dimensions and street widths affect pedestrian accessibility in regular grids. Pedestrian accessibility is captured by the gravity index, which is proportional to the number of neighbouring plots that can be re...

This paper introduces a method for creating double-curved grid structures made out of flat components, where fabrication is limited to only 2-dimensional cutting, making complex architectural structures accessible to a wider audience at a lower cost. The focus of the paper is to identify the limitations and to map the geometric solution-space of th...

This article analyzes location patterns of retail and food establishments, whose presence constitutes an important aspect of livable and walkable neighborhoods. Using approximately fourteen thousand buildings on the street network of Cambridge and Somerville, Massachusetts, as units of analysis, this article tests five hypotheses about retail locat...

We introduce a method for creating free-form architectural structures out of 2D domain line networks. The resulting structure combines principles of thin shell and single-layer grid structures. The innovation lies in a three-dimensional geometrical arrangement, where all structural elements can be cut out of flat panels. The advantage of the propos...

This paper investigates the relationship between street properties and cognitive maps. It is focused on the question of how human cognition of the built environment is affected by street properties. Building on the foundations of Kevin Lynch's studies of environmental perception (Lynch 1960) and recent configuration measurement techniques of the bu...

We introduce an open-source Urban Network Analysis (UNA) toolbox for ArcGIS, which can be used to compute five types of centrality measures on spatial networks -- Reach; Gravity Index; Betweenness; Closeness; and Straightness. Though primarily developed for the analysis of urban street- and building-networks, the toolbox is equally suited for other...

This dissertation investigates retail location patterns in urban settings -- a domain that has received relatively little attention in recent decades. We analyze which land use, urban form, and agglomeration factors explain observed retail patterns in an empirical case study of Cambridge and Somerville, MA. We are particularly interested in whether...

Does the distribution of Rome's population follow routine hourly, daily, or weekly patterns? And if it does, how do such patterns vary in different parts of the city? This paper reports on our investigation of the aggregate patterns of urban mobility in Rome, Italy for which we used novel data from a mobile phone operator. Unlike research that char...

Strategies for achieving urban energy efficiency frequently focus upon reducing overall transportation demand, and upon shifting demand from automobiles to public transportation. But there is abundant evidence that high levels of interconnectivity are crucial to vibrant, flexible, creative cities; and that the inhabitants of cities greatly value pe...

In recent years, a new approach for estimating people’s movement in cities has emerged through mobile phone positioning. As opposed to the more traditional methods of traffic surveys, automated counts, or individual counters on streets, the use of aggregated and anonymous cellular network log files has shown promise for large-scale surveys with not...

This paper presents the iSPOTS project, which collects and maps data of WiFi usage on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus. Instead of simply mapping the locations of WiFi availability, the project is possibly first to use and analyze log files from the Institute's Internet service provider and to produce spatial visualizations of the o...

Much of our understanding of urban systems comes from traditional data collection methods such as surveys by person or phone. These approaches can provide detailed information about urban behaviors, but they're hard to update and might limit results to "snapshots in time." In the past few years, some innovative approaches have sought to use mobile...

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 2006. This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections. Includes bibliographical references (p. 123-126). This thesis explores the idea of real-time urban space management. Whil...

The technology for determining the geographic location of cellphones and other hand-held devices is becoming increasingly available. It is opening the way to a wide range of applications, collectively referred to as Location Based Services (LBS), that are primarily aimed at individual users. However, if deployed to retrieve aggregated data in citie...

The aim of this paper is to present research in progress within the iSPOTS project, which monitors and collects data of WiFi usage on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus. Instead of simply mapping WiFi availability, as in increasingly common wireless-sniffing exercises, the project is one of the first to use and analyze LOG files from...

This chapter presents the iSPOTS project, which collects and maps data of WiFi usage on the Massachu- setts Institute of Technology campus in Cambridge, Boston. Instead of simply mapping the locations of WiFi availability, the project is possibly the first to use and analyze log files from the Institute's Internet service provider and to produce sp...

We investigate the aggregate urban mobility patterns in Rome, Italy, using novel data from a mobile phone operator. We address the following questions: Does the population distribution in Rome follow routine hourly, daily and weekly patterns? And how do such patterns vary in different parts of the city? As opposed to prior research on individual tr...

The aim of this paper is to discuss the usability of aggregate mobile phone usage data in urban studies and planning. First, the mobile phone log data used in the Real-Time-Rome project, the MIT SENSEable City Laboratory's contribution to the 2006 Venice Biennale, is described. Then, analyzing the data, spatio-tem-poral variations of mobile phone u...