Jonathan Corcoran

The University of Queensland | UQ · School of Earth and Environmental Sciences

Following nearly a decade of unabated growth in the digitally disruptive short-term rental (STR) sector, the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 caused a relatively abrupt two-year industry contraction characterised by substantial reductions in participating properties and booking activities. Given the sudden opportunity to rethink how STR marke...

Stayers are an important component of the internal migration system, yet despite their numerical significance, they are often treated as ancillary to movers in the migration literature. As a result, there is a conflict between the mobility-centric view of immobility as undesirable and developing narratives which recognise staying as an active and c...

The familiar stranger is a social phenomenon that emerges from the serial reproduction of daily routines, structured around urban places and practices, that results in repeated encounters with the same individuals over time. Scholarship suggests that increased familiarity among individuals might incur crime control benefits at places by reducing in...

Familiar strangers, individuals who are visually recognisable yet do not engage in verbal conversations, emerge in communal urban places on the way and in between regular daily activities in the home and workplace. Described as invisible social ties and light touch community, familiar strangers represent an understudied and untapped source of socia...

Urban fire scholarship on the global south is scarce. Despite the majority of the 180,000 annual global fire deaths (World Health Organization, 2023) being from low- and middle-income nations we know very little about their characteristics and dynamics. At a time where most current and future urban growth is being experienced in the global south, t...

In the context of rising global migration and/or forced displacement, there is a pressing need to consider the well-being and life satisfaction of (im)migrants and refugees during resettlement. Research highlights the importance of social connectedness for (im)migrants and refugees during the resettlement phase. Yet, a critical gap remains in our u...

The Space-Time Budget (STB) method is used to collect spatial and temporal features of an individual’s activities and is an important technique to explore relationships between the environment and crime. This spatial and temporal approach to the study of everyday activity spaces reveals much about victimisation experiences, the relationship between...

Over the past century, the dramatic increase in private vehicles has resulted in a growing demand for parking spaces. Governments have sought to develop and adopt various parking policies to manage and regulate parking, but the results are mixed. Current research studies on parking policies often focus on a single aspect of parking. A comprehensive...

In built-up areas, creating segregated bicycle lanes involves trade-offs with other modes, such as repurposing existing kerbside parking. Can parking be eliminated without financially impacting local businesses? This study answers this question empirically, employing as a case study Boundary Street-the high street of a gentrifying inner-city suburb...

Platform-mediated short-term rentals (STRs) are a relatively new addition to the housing landscape, providing accommodation on a temporal scale that falls between hotel stays and long-term rentals (LTRs). Given the potential for STR hosts to charge significantly higher nightly rates for the same property than they might through an LTR lease enumera...

Familiar strangers—individuals related through regular and repeated visual encounter occurring without verbal interaction—may reduce the risk of crime at places by increasing guardianship and internal motivation for norm compliance. This study examines the association between familiar stranger presence and incidents of theft and disorder at train s...

Globally, the COVID-19 pandemic has induced a mental health crisis. Social media data offer a unique opportunity to track the mental health signals of a given population and quantify their negativity towards COVID-19. To date, however, we know little about how negative sentiments differ across countries and how these relate to the shifting policy l...

The weather-crime association has intrigued scholars for more than 150 years. While there is a long-standing history of scholarly interest in the weather-crime association, the last decade has evidenced a marked increase in the volume and diversity of empirical studies concerned with weather and its social implications including crime. In this pape...

Weather, climate, and daily human mobility patterns are inextricably linked, and so quantifying and examining these patterns is essential for smarter urban policy and design that are tailored to support our daily mobility needs and foreground urban sustainability. This study provides an empirical approach to better understanding the interface betwe...

Public transport with high levels of patronage is the cornerstone of a sustainable city. Passengers' feelings of safety shapes an individuals' decision to utilise public transport that are informed in large part by the other people with which the transit stations and public transit trips are shared. Some of these people are unknown to us but consid...

Understanding and monitoring socio-spatial patterns of population walking mobility can inform urban planning and geographically targeted health promotion strategies aimed at increasing population levels of physical activity. In this study we use aggregated, anonymous mobile phone mobility data to examine the association between neighbourhood physic...

Assessing vulnerability to natural hazards is at the heart of hazard risk reduction. However, many countries such as Australia lack measuring systems to quantity vulnerability for hazard risk evaluation. Drawing on 41 indicators from multiple data sources at the finest spatial unit of the Australian census, we re-forged the Cutter’s classic vulnera...

Parking is often overlooked by urban researchers even though parking consumes large proportions of a city’s physical footprint and imposes a significant impediment to more sustainable travel. Underpinning this lack of attention is suitable data and methods capable of capturing the complex dynamics of parking. Here we redress this gap by drawing on...

Commuters who live spatially proximate to their workplaces have the greatest potential to commute by cycling. Employing the concept of cycling dissonance—the mismatch of individuals who can commute by cycling given a cyclable distance between home and the workplace but travel by other modes—we examine the role of the street-scale environment in com...

Understanding and enhancing community resilience is a global priority as societies encounter a rising number of extreme weather events. Given that these events are typically both sudden and unexpected, community resilience is typically examined after the disaster so there can be no before and after comparisons. As such, the extent to which existing...

The last few decades have seen the intensity of internal migration decline in Australia and other advanced economies including the United States. Recent evidence suggests that changes in the composition of the population alone do not account for this persistent downward trend. This has led migration scholars to suspect that more profound behavioura...

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic there has been interest in the migration of city-dwellers to regional areas to escape lockdowns and movement restrictions, yet evidence of a ‘regional renaissance’ in Australia remains anecdotal. This paper aims to quantify the current and future dynamics of the COVID-19 pandemic on the levels, patterns...

In the context of public transport, the first and last mile (FLM) travel refers to access to or egress from public transport stations. The poor connection between trip origins and destinations impedes the transition towards sustainable transport by requiring commuters to initially use their cars to travel the FLM. Existing literature identifies tha...

Objectives Living in close proximity to recent, violent crime may undermine sense of safety in the home territory by increasing perceived crime risk. Yet it is also possible that practicing active guardianship by responding to local problems will moderate this association by reducing perceived vulnerability to crime. In this study we examine the as...

Public transit stations are places that are known to generate opportunities for crime. By spatially integrating crime data, smart card data and census data along with information from OpenStreetMap and Queensland Rail, we apply multilevel negative binomial regression models to examine the role of passenger presence on the three most common types of...

Australia is one of the most migratory countries in the world, yet as internal migrants typically represent only a small proportion of the population, the impact of stayers and transient populations need to be considered to create a fuller picture of regional population dynamics. To that end, this paper analyses net migration, population turnover,...

Widespread problems of psychological distress have been observed in many countries following the outbreak of COVID-19, including Australia. What is lacking from current scholarship is a national-scale assessment that tracks the shifts in mental health during the pandemic timeline and across geographic contexts. Drawing on 244 406 geotagged tweets i...

In car orientated nations, most commuters living close to work typically do not commute by bicycle. Empirical scholarship seeking to delineate the various barriers to cycling-to-work present a set of somewhat inconsistent findings. This study seeks to demystify this lack of clarity by introducing the concept of “cycling dissonance”—the mismatch bet...

This study establishes a new method for estimating the monthly Average Population Present (APP) in Australian regions. Conventional population statistics, which enumerate people where they usually live, ignore the significant spatial mobility driving short term shifts in population numbers. Estimates of the temporary or ambient population of a regi...

Hopping on your bike when it's raining, or snowing, might seem unappealing. But our research has found inclement weather conditions deter some cyclists more than others.

Having begun as a short-term rental platform in major cities, Airbnb has now extended to many remote and regional areas of Australia. One effect of this spread has been disruption to the conventional rental industry, which stimulates micro-entrepreneurship in local communities directly through short-term accommodation and indirectly through related...

Successive waves of international migration have rendered the residential patterns of cities a variegated patchwork of ethnical communities and spaces. Various theories attempt to account for this diversity, with particular regard to the motivations and drivers that explain the settlement pathways of individuals and households vis-à-vis co-ethnic r...

This paper investigates the utility of information and communication technologies data for the measurement of visitation dynamics in third places across a large metropolitan university campus. A suite of seven metrics encompassing intensity, popularity, capacity, tempo, dwell, churn, and periodicity are employed to describe the visitation dynamics...

This study examines the effect of weather on bikeshare use. We employ data from forty Public Bicycle Sharing Programs located in forty cities (16 countries) across five different climate zones, spanning tropical to boreal climates. Our curated dataset is longitudinal and consists of nearly 100 million cycling trips. Key findings include: (a) the mo...

Both built environment and natural environment have physiological and psychological effect on human behaviour, which potentially affect their sensitivity and tolerance to surrounding noise, and leads to annoyance, nuisance, distress or overt actions and aggressive behaviours such as noise complaints to people living neighborly. This study aims to e...

Neighbourhood places like shops, cafes and parks support a variety of social interactions ranging from the ephemeral to the intimate. Repeated interactions at neighbourhood places over time lay the foundation for the development of social cohesion and collective efficacy. In this study, we examine the proposition that changes in the presence or arr...

Background COVID-19 is an emergent infectious disease that has spread geographically to become a global pandemic. While much research focuses on the epidemiological and virological aspects of COVID-19 transmission, there remains an important gap in knowledge regarding the drivers of geographical diffusion between places, in particular at the global...

This paper examines the role of local weather conditions in explaining variations in assault, in sub-tropical Brisbane, Australia. It details the extent to which local variations in weather are important in shaping the necessary preconditions for assault to take place. Results suggest that higher daily temperatures are associated with an increased...

The first and last mile (FLM) problem, namely the poor connection between trip origins or destination and public transport stations, is a significant obstacle to sustainable transportation as it is likely to encourage the use of cars for FLM travel, if not for the entire trip. This study examines the role of modality style and built environment in...

Smartcard-based public transit systems have been widely adopted across many cities around the world. These systems generate large volumes of transaction records from individual passenger trips and contain the requisite information that enable the mapping, measurement and monitoring of fare equity. In this paper, we propose and apply new measures to...

Hägerstrand proposed that individuals’ daily mobility is constrained to a particular time–space path by capability, coupling, and authority requirements. This tethering of routine activities to particular places at scheduled times facilitates repetitive bundling of individuals at certain nodes. Associations emerging from repeated, cursory encounter...

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

Background: COVID-19 is an emergent infectious disease that has spread geographically to become a global pandemic. While much research focuses on the epidemiological and virological aspects of the COVID-19 transmission, there remains a gap in knowledge regarding the drivers of geographical diffusion between places. Here, we use quantile regression...

This paper estimates the effect of a major skilled visa programme in Australia on the wages and occupation-specific skills performed by native workers. We combine data from the full population of approved Temporary Work Visa applications with the nationally representative Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) longitudinal surve...

Together, globalisation and urbanisation are accelerating the densification of cities while disruptive technologies such as micro-mobility and ride-hailing are transforming urban mobility. Amidst this change, urban planning officials and practitioners typically remain constrained to the same urban footprint, left to grapple with earlier car-oriente...

Background: COVID-19 is an emergent infectious disease that has spread geographically to become a global pandemic. While much research focuses on the epidemiological and virological aspects of the COVID-19 transmission, there remains a gap in knowledge regarding the drivers of geographical diffusion between places. Here, we use quantile regression...

The estimation of temporary populations is a well-established field, but despite growing interest they are yet to form part of the standard suite of official population statistics. This systematic review seeks to review the empirical literature on temporary population estimation and identify the contemporary “state of the art”. We identify a total...

Levels of internal migration have declined since the 1980s in many advanced economies. Australian studies remain largely descriptive, making it difficult to ascertain the extent to which the decline in aggregate levels of migration is due to shifts in the socio‐demographic composition of the Australian population or driven by deeper behavioural cha...

Responding to labour and skills shortages, Australia has developed a comprehensive immigration framework to attract and retain overseas graduates. While prior work has explored the post-graduation settlement patterns and work outcomes of overseas graduates, much less is known about the role of their country of origin on their labour market performa...

The rise of the sharing economy has had transformative impacts on extant service delivery models, with wide ranging implications for existing firms, regulators, and the workforce at large. This paper draws upon firm-level data to better understand how new forms of service delivery have accompanied the diffusion of the sharing economy. Unlike previo...

A scientific consensus has recently emerged suggesting that the dominant twentieth century paradigm of solving transportation congestion problems by building more freeways failed. The legacy of the freeway construction era is clearly visible in polluted and congested cities worldwide. To battle these ills, planning academics have been promoting mor...

There is considerable demand for official statistics on temporary populations to supplement statistics on resident and working populations. Progress has been slow, with temporary population statistics not part of the standard suite of measures produced by national statistical offices. This article adopts the framework for official statistics propos...

Background: The existing smartphones' technology allows for the objective measurement of a person's movements at a fine-grained level of geographic and temporal detail, and in doing so, it mitigates the issues associated with self-report biases and lack of spatial details. This study proposes and evaluates the advantages of using a smartphone app...

Cellular automata (CA) are discrete dynamic systems in which space is tessellated into regular spatial cells and time progresses in discrete steps; the state of the cell changes over time in response to the impact of its neighboring cells and external forces through a set of transition rules, generating meaningful patterns of the system being simul...

The study of land use change in urban and regional systems has been dramatically transformed in the last four decades by the emergence and application of cellular automata (CA) models. CA models simulate urban land use changes which evolve from the bottom-up. Despite notable achievements in this field, there remain significant gaps between urban pr...

Bus stops are considered “risky places” given their propensity to generate opportunities for crime and attract would-be offenders. In this study we examine crime across a large network of bus stops (n = 7170) in Brisbane, Australia. We use smart card and land use data to measure the influence of passenger presence and features of the immediate bus...

‘Park ‘n’ Ride’ facilities (PnR) initially emerged to accommodate motorists that would otherwise exhaust the local supply of parking around train stations and other rapid high occupancy vehicle nodes but increasing became a planning strategy to provide commuters from auto-dependent suburbs with access to rapid high occupancy vehicle to reduce their...

The spatial decisions of land developers are known to play a significant role in driving urban expansion into previously undeveloped areas. This is especially the case in developing country contexts. Using the Jakarta Metropolitan Area (JMA) as the case study context, we model the impact of capital possession by land developers on locational select...

In the provision of urban residential areas, private land developers play critical roles in nearly all stages of the land development process. Despite their important role little is known about how the spatial decisions of individual developers collectively influence urban growth. This paper employs an agent-based modelling approach to capture the...

This study maps and models the effect of weather on cycling in New York whilst controlling for several built and natural environment characteristics and temporal factors. To this end, we draw on 12 months of disaggregate trip data from the Citibike public bicycle sharing scheme (PBSP) in New York, currently the largest public bicycle sharing system...

Well established in criminological scholarship is the way that crime is neither spatially nor temporally uniformly distributed. Rather crime is distributed in a manner that means it is both particular places and particular times that are subject to the majority of crime events. Furthermore, we know that crime varies over the course of a day and wee...