Jorge Gil

Chalmers University of Technology · Department of Architecture and Civil Engineering

The use of typomorphology as a means of understanding urban areas has a long tradition amongst academics but the reach of these methods into urban design practice has been limited. In this paper we present a method to support the description and prescription of urban form that is context- sensitive, multi-dimensional, systematic, exploratory, and q...

This chapter presents the process of building a multimodal urban net- work model using Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) and in particular OpenStreetMap (OSM). The spatial data model design adopts a level of simplifi- cation that is adequate to OSM data availability and quality, and suitable to the measurement of the sustainable accessibilit...

Over the last fifty years, research into street networks has gained prominence with a rapidly growing number of studies across disparate disciplines. These studies investigate a wide range of phenomena using a wealth of data and diverse analytical techniques. Starting within the fields of transport or infrastructure engineering, street networks hav...

Cities worldwide are pursuing policies to reduce car use and prioritise public transit (PT) as a means to tackle congestion, air pollution, and greenhouse gas emissions. The increase of PT ridership is constrained by many aspects; among them, travel time and the built environment are considered the most critical factors in the choice of travel mode...

The digitalization of the urban development process is driven by the need for informed, evidence-based, collaborative and participative urban planning and decision-making, epitomized in the concept of Smart Cities. This digital transformation is enabled by information technology developments in fields such as 3D city models, Digital Twins, Urban An...

The development of multimodal urban network models, integrating public transport and the street network, is crucial for achieving more integrated and precise spatial analysis, supporting research and practice towards understanding and creating sustainable environments. Despite their importance, building these models still faces challenges. While a...

Urban Digital Twins (UDTs) promise to facilitate the transition to a smarter planning and decision-making process, but they face many challenges to meet stakeholders’ expectations and to support delivering a better living environment for citizens. Their full potential can only be reached through more flexible sharing and integration of data and dat...

Open science aspires to contribute with transparency, inclusivity, reproducibility and collaboration to research quality and the advancement of knowledge. The space syntax community has historically engaged in open-access publication, open training material and open-source software, with benefits to the wider dissemination and application of its th...

Socio-spatial segregation is the physical separation of different social, economic, or demographic groups within a geographic space, often resulting in unequal access to resources, services, and opportunities. The literature has traditionally focused on residential segregation, examining how individuals' residential locations are distributed differ...

Segregation is a key challenge in promoting more diverse and inclusive cities. Research based on smartphone data has revealed that segregation can extend beyond residential areas into everyday activities like visiting shops and restaurants. The impact of these activities on segregation, however, is unclear. Some studies suggest that they promote mi...

Keynote presentation for the plenary session "Future Directions of Space Syntax". Summary: Open science aspires to contribute with transparency, inclusivity, reproducibility and collaboration to research quality and the advancement of knowledge. The space syntax community has historically engaged in open-access publication, open training material...

Accessibility and mobility are key concerns of sustainable cities, especially in the Global South, due to the strong social inequalities. This paper contributes to the literature on mobility segregation by focusing on the potential movement of social groups in the city. We conceptualize potential movement as a network centrality, acting as an indic...

Urban public space is often provided for freight delivery operations in the form of on-street (un)loading zones (LZ). Since public space is scarce and demanded by several users, city authorities have the challenge of managing LZ by gaining knowledge about freight curbside needs and utilization. Although technological solutions and enforcement pract...

Addressing housing deficits and inequalities remains a key challenge for cities in promoting more sustainable urban development. In response to these challenges, governments around the world, particularly in the Global South, have made substantial investments in housing policies for middle- and low-income individuals. Nevertheless, while these init...

Understanding the mode substitution of shared micro-mobility systems is essential for assessing their societal and environmental impact and developing improvement planning instruments. This study carries out a fine-grained analysis of the mode substitution of dockless bike sharing (DLBS) in relation to other transport modes at the trip level, lever...

The current division between urban and transport planning is a significant obstacle to achieving sustainable urban development. To transform cities towards sustainability, both fields must adopt shared or at least compatible models of the urban systems, namely transport, street and public space networks for all users and urban activities. Although...

This paper analyzes truck parking patterns in urban freight loading zones by jointly modeling the vehicle arrival rates and the parking durations. Three models were explored: 1) Count data (Negative Binomial) for vehicle arrivals, 2) Survival (Weibull) model for parking duration and 3) A joint model for arrivals and duration. The count data model e...

Knowing how much people travel is essential for transport planning. Empirical mobility traces collected from call detail records (CDRs), location-based social networks (LBSNs), and social media data have been used widely to study mobility patterns. However, these data suffer from sparsity, an issue that has largely been overlooked. In order to exte...

PPT for the SBE Conference 22.

Territorial capital is a policy concept that emphasizes the endogenous development and regional competitiveness of particular territories, calling for place-based territorial approaches and greater convergence between spatial planning and regional development policies. However, spatial thinking and imaging are still missing when this concept is app...

This paper presents partial results of ongoing research that aims at revealing gains and losses in the spatial capital of everyday life of individuals who moved into housing estates financed by public housing programmes, as well as the possible effects of these gains and losses on social and urban issues. The spatial capital of everyday life is a t...

The Construction and demolition (C&D) sector mobilise a significant number of resources and at the same time is responsible for a large fraction of waste worldwide (40%-60%). Although, the environmental impact of these by-products is low, waste generated finishes in landfills, is downgraded and because of its volume it has become a priority at diff...

Transport accounts for 24% of global CO2 emissions from fossil fuels. Governments face challenges in developing feasible and equitable mitigation strategies to reduce energy consumption and manage the transition to low-carbon transport systems. To meet the local and global transport emission reduction targets, policymakers need more realistic/sophi...

The Construction and demolition (C&D) sector mobilise a significant number of resources and at the same time is responsible for a large fraction of waste worldwide (40%-60%). Although, the environmental impact of these by-products is low, waste generated finishes in landfills, is downgraded and because of its volume it has become a priority at diff...

Considering the current climate emergency, improving how resources are being used has never been as crucial. The linear economic model, based on a 'take-consume-dispose' logic is close to produce irreversible damage to our planet and in order to the reduce the probability of experiencing adverse climate conditions it is imperative to meet the Paris...

Considering the current climate emergency, improving how resources are being used has never been as crucial. The linear economic model, based on a ‘take-consume-dispose’ logic is close to produce irreversible damage to our planet and in order to the reduce the probability of experiencing adverse climate conditions it is imperative to meet the Paris...

Industrial Symbiosis (IS) can reduce industrial waste and the need for virgin material extraction by utilizing waste generated by one industry as a raw material for another. Input-output matching is a commonly used approach for identifying potential IS partnerships. Usually, to collect necessary data for input-output matching, companies are asked t...

Over the past years, cities have become more prone to extreme and frequent heatwaves. In this regard, urban form plays an important role and several typomorphological classifications have been developed to describe the urban form characteristics that can exacerbate heat stress and influence people's health and comfort negatively (i.e. the environme...

Travel demand estimation, as represented by an origin–destination (OD) matrix, is essential for urban planning and management. Compared to data typically used in travel demand estimation, the key strengths of social media data are that they are low-cost, abundant, available in real-time, and free of geographical partition. However, the data also ha...

Transport infrastructure such as railways, motorways and arterial roads increases regional accessibility for motorised transport but simultaneously can create barriers in local street networks that can decrease accessibility for pedestrians and cyclists. Although several tools for an objective assessment of these barrier effects have been developed...

Mobile Application Data offers a new empirical data source for the study of human mobility. It is different from other established data such as GPS, social media or Call Detail Records, in terms of spatial and temporal resolution, size and coverage. We are looking at how it can be processed and, more importantly, how it can be applied to a range of...

Presentation for promotion to Docent in Urban Analytics and Informatics. Outline: • The urban challenges of sustainability and the digital age • Urban Analytics and Informatics, definition and examples • Bridging across disciplines • Open Science for urban and regional research and education

Waste and resources management is one of the domains where urban and regional planning can transition towards a Circular Economy, thus slowing environmental degradation. Improving waste and resources management in cities requires an adequate understanding of multiple systems and how they interact. New technologies contribute to improve waste manage...

The Local Climate Zone (LCZ) classification scheme, initially designed to distinguish between standard built (urban) and non-built (land cover) types in terms of screen-level air temperature relevant for urban heat island (UHI) studies, has been widely used for land surface temperature (LST) and surface urban heat island (SUHI) studies. However, so...

Sustainable transport systems are a necessary requirement to achieve efficient economic performance, enhance urban quality of life and diminish environmental costs. Congestion, a negative externality of mobility, is responsible for urban pollution, inefficiency and has adverse effects over individuals facing this problem. For these reasons, transpo...

Motorways and railways increase regional accessibility but can at the same time reduce local accessibility by creating barriers in pedestrian and bicycle networks. This can influence several SDGs, such as SDG 5 (gender equality), 10 (reduced inequalities), and 11 (sustainable cities and communities). This paper presents some first principles of how...

The document summarises a study on pedestrian movement and co-presence at Chalmers University's Campus Johanneberg in Gothenburg, Sweden. The study was commissioned by Chalmersfastigheter and Akademiska Hus. A week-long survey was conducted capturing Wi-Fi signals from mobile phones to track pedestrians along paths and at nodes. Spatial analysis wa...

Transport infrastructure can create efficient connections in traffic systems, yet it can also create barriers to movement on a local scale. In transport infrastructure projects there is a need for methods to quantify these barrier effects – also called severance – to assess their impacts on social inclusion, health and viability of businesses. This...

List of activities that can be used in teaching Project Based Courses to scaffold student learning at different stages.

Book review of "Inventing future cities" by Michael Batty, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2018, 282 pp. ISBN 9780262038959 http://www.urbanform.org/online_public/2019_2.shtml

Typologies have always played an important role in urban planning and design practice and formal studies have been central to the field of urban morphology. These studies have predominantly been of a historical-qualitative nature and do not support quantitative comparisons between urban areas and between different cities, nor offer the precise and...

Students and researchers in urban studies require Geographic Information System (GIS) skills to create maps, analyse spatial data, and produce plans, and usually they do not have the time or interest to learn GIS in-depth. However, existing learning resources are comprehensive and technically advanced, targeted at (future) GIS engineers with a quan...

Bikeability of street networks is an issue where space syntax based methods have shown to be useful. The methods include topological analyses calculating the measure choice/betweenness taking angular change into account, in GIS-based analyses of accessibility to particular destinations, and in combining these two in measuring origin-destination bet...

The poster presents a research that stems from a lack of integration between the Impact Assessment (IA) and Geographical Information Science (GIS) domains. While already since a couple of decades GIS has proven to benefit IA, in practice it is used roughly in one out of two assessments. In GIS, the dominance of system commands over information cont...

Typologies have always played an important role in urban planning and design practice and formal studies have been central to the field of urban morphology. These studies have predominantly been of a historical-qualitative nature and do not support quantitative comparisons between urban areas and between different cities, nor offer the precise and...

Cities are complex, perhaps one of the most complex kinds of structure created by humans. Some cities have been planned to a large extent while others have grown organically. The outcome of planning and growth processes is the diverse morphological built form and street patterns observed in cities today. So far, in urban planning and history resear...

For reasons ranging from public health to sustainable urban development, traffic planning as well as urban design aim to increase bicycling at the cost of fossil fuel-based transport. Despite this increasing interest in bicycling, most planning practices handle bicycling schematically, applying methods that rely on fixed speed templates, paying lit...

Urban freight and urban planning co-exist in tension: the current urban paradigm induces freight demand in city centres, but due to restrictions logistic operations become inefficient and costly. For strategic planning there is a need to better understand the interactions between urban form and freight demand. We need freight demand models that int...

This research aims to incorporate urban form characteristics in freight trip generation (FTG) models, and thus enable more interaction between practitioners through integration of their instruments and policies. From this perspective, the research addresses two questions: • To what extent does the urban form profile of a location influence the frei...

For reasons ranging from public health to sustainable urban development and carbon emissions, traffic planning as well as urban design aim to increase the modal share of bicycling at the cost of fossil fuel based transport. Despite this increasing interest in bicycling, most planning practices handle bicycling schematically, applying methods that r...

Cities concentrate intensive human activities requiring highly complex networked infrastructure for movement, public transport and myriad other spatial interactions. The planning and management of multi-modal street networks for diverse users therefore requires an understanding of urban layout beyond motorised vehicle networks as simple linear cond...

Outline - Why public transport matters - Public transport and street networks - Applications of integrated multi-modal models - Some challenges ahead

The concept of Circular Economy has gained momentum during the last decade. Yet unsustainable circular systems can also create unintended social, economic and environmental damage. Sustainability is highly dependent on a system’s geographical context, such as location of resources, cultural acceptance, economic, environmental and transport geograph...

Urban metabolism is a multidisciplinary approach to qualitatively and quantitatively evaluate resource flows in urban systems, which aims to provide important insights into the dynamics of cities to make them more ecologically responsible. It has been also introduced into the urban design domain, however most of the attempts concern only tracking o...

A shift of scientific inquiries towards the urban domain has taken place due to significant urbanisation processes around the globe. Many urban transition instruments are linked to sustainable development, which emphasizes the study of urban energy and material flows, e.g. urban resources efficiency and waste management. Resource flows which are pr...

Traditional urban planning processes have limited interaction between different silos: urban environments and land-use ordinance are designed to fulfil community and economic needs; and infrastructure is planned to satisfy future residents demands based on existing and expected demographics. Some consequences of this lack of integration are the dis...

Angular segment analysis is one of the most fundamental analyses in space syntax practice that helps understand movement, land-use and other socioeconomic patterns. It was initially applied in axial segment maps and later was used in road centre line maps as an attempt to overcome the 'segment problem' (Turner, 2005). Furthermore, the growing need...

This paper reviews an idea of vital local high-street places with their walking spaces and economies founded in interfaces between neighbourhood and city (between walking and public transport/bicycle movement infrastructures). It then extends this idea to higher scales, considering interfaces between city and region, which have already been theoris...

Cities are complex, perhaps one of the most complex kinds of structure created by humans. Some cities have been planned top-down to a large extent while others have grown organically on their own. The outcome of these planning and growth processes are the various morphological building and street patterns seen in cities. There are strong reasons to...

It has been argued that different urban configurations-planned vs. organic, treelike vs. grid like-perform differently when it comes to the intensity and distribution of pedestrian flows, built density and land uses. However, definitions of urban configurations are often rather abstract, ill-defined and at worse end in fixed stereotypes hiding unde...

For numerous reasons related to energy demand, emissions, public health as well as liveable and attractive cities, a frequently stated aim in contemporary discussions on urban development is to increase amount and modal share of bicycling. In recent years, space syntax based methods have shown to be useful for providing informed premises for these...

We propose a GIS-based method to enable the understanding of how global street-network properties emerge from the temporal accumulation of individual street-network increments. The method entails the adoption of quantitative descriptions of individual street-patterns and of classification algorithms, in order to obtain numerically defined typomorph...

This research: - Proposes a hybrid methodology with elements from urban form (i.e., street network analysis such as centrality measurements, connectivity, and density) and freight transportation engineering (i.e., freight trip generation data and models). - Assesses the role of urban form on freight trip generation using the metropolitan area of Go...

With increased interest in the use of network analysis to study the urban and regional environment, it is important to understand the sensitivity of centrality analysis results to the so-called “edge effect”. Most street network models have artificial boundaries, and there are principles that can be applied to minimise or eliminate the effect of th...

Outline: 1. OSM data qualities and problems 2. OSM/RCL model problems 3. Typical solutions 4. An integrated modelling approach 5. Extracting weights - Extending data 6. A graph for each purpose 7. A network analysis setup for each purpose 8. Conclusion

Set of 10 propositions accompanying the thesis "Urban Modality: Modelling and evaluating the sustainable mobility of urban areas in the city-region", prepared for the PhD defense at the TU Delft, on the 22nd of February 2016. These propositions are considered opposable and defendable and as such have been approved by the supervisor Prof. Vincent...

This thesis proposes a framework for evaluating the mobility potential and performance of urban areas in the city region, as an instrument to support urban development that contributes positively to regional sustainable mobility objectives. The research takes a quantitative approach, modelling and measuring the characteristics of a city-region and...

This thesis proposes a framework for evaluating the mobility potential and performance of urban areas in the city region, as an instrument to support urban development that contributes positively to regional sustainable mobility objectives. The research takes a quantitative approach, modelling and measuring the characteristics of a city-region and...

The “Space Syntax Toolkit” is a QGIS plug-in for spatial network and statistical analysis. It provides a front-end for the depthmapX software within QGIS, offering user-friendly space syntax analysis workflows in a GIS environment. It is primarily aimed at supporting the space syntax methodology, and enhancing it with GIS data, analysis and visuali...

With the growth of interest in the use of spatial network analysis to study the urban and regional environment, it is important to understand the sensitivity of the centrality analysis results to the so-called “edge effect”. Most spatial network models have artificial boundaries, and there are some principles that can be applied to minimise or elim...

Smart Cities require knowledge-based and performance oriented approaches to urban design and planning, involving stakeholders from different backgrounds and domains of expertise, using and sharing multiple levels of information, at multiple scales of analysis and intervention. While Building Information Modellling (BIM) presents a new paradigm in b...