Big Data Applications in Geography and Planning


Book Description

This unique book demonstrates the utility of big data approaches in human geography and planning. Offering a carefully curated selection of case studies, it reveals how researchers are accessing big data, what this data looks like and how such data can offer new and important insights and knowledge.




Big Data Applications in Geography and Planning


Book Description

This unique book demonstrates the utility of big data approaches in human geography and planning. Offering a carefully curated selection of case studies, it reveals how researchers are accessing big data, what this data looks like and how such data can offer new and important insights and knowledge. Contributions from key scholars working in the field bring together an international series of case studies on demography and migration, retail and consumer analytics, health care planning, urban planning and transport studies. Chapters also discuss how data sets leveraged from commercial and public agency sources can greatly improve the data traditionally worked with in academic geography, regional science and planning. While addressing the challenges and limitations of big data, the book also demonstrates the usefulness of data sets held by commercial agencies and explores data linkage between big data and traditional public domain data sources. Focusing on the applications of big data to investigate issues in a spatial context, this book will be an essential guide for scholars and students of planning, mobility and human geography, particularly those who specialise in economic and transport geography. Its use of key case studies to demonstrate the applications of big data analytics in planning will also be useful for planners in these fields.




Urban Informatics


Book Description

This open access book is the first to systematically introduce the principles of urban informatics and its application to every aspect of the city that involves its functioning, control, management, and future planning. It introduces new models and tools being developed to understand and implement these technologies that enable cities to function more efficiently – to become ‘smart’ and ‘sustainable’. The smart city has quickly emerged as computers have become ever smaller to the point where they can be embedded into the very fabric of the city, as well as being central to new ways in which the population can communicate and act. When cities are wired in this way, they have the potential to become sentient and responsive, generating massive streams of ‘big’ data in real time as well as providing immense opportunities for extracting new forms of urban data through crowdsourcing. This book offers a comprehensive review of the methods that form the core of urban informatics from various kinds of urban remote sensing to new approaches to machine learning and statistical modelling. It provides a detailed technical introduction to the wide array of tools information scientists need to develop the key urban analytics that are fundamental to learning about the smart city, and it outlines ways in which these tools can be used to inform design and policy so that cities can become more efficient with a greater concern for environment and equity.




Big Data Support of Urban Planning and Management


Book Description

In the era of big data, this book explores the new challenges of urban-rural planning and management from a practical perspective based on a multidisciplinary project. Researchers as contributors to this book have accomplished their projects by using big data and relevant data mining technologies for investigating the possibilities of big data, such as that obtained through cell phones, social network systems and smart cards instead of conventional survey data for urban planning support. This book showcases active researchers who share their experiences and ideas on human mobility, accessibility and recognition of places, connectivity of transportation and urban structure in order to provide effective analytic and forecasting tools for smart city planning and design solutions in China.




Applied Data Analysis for Urban Planning and Management


Book Description

With contributions from academics across the globe, this book showcases how you can use data analysis for better and more effective urban planning and management.




The Rise of Big Spatial Data


Book Description

This edited volume gathers the proceedings of the Symposium GIS Ostrava 2016, the Rise of Big Spatial Data, held at the Technical University of Ostrava, Czech Republic, March 16–18, 2016. Combining theoretical papers and applications by authors from around the globe, it summarises the latest research findings in the area of big spatial data and key problems related to its utilisation. Welcome to dawn of the big data era: though it’s in sight, it isn’t quite here yet. Big spatial data is characterised by three main features: volume beyond the limit of usual geo-processing, velocity higher than that available using conventional processes, and variety, combining more diverse geodata sources than usual. The popular term denotes a situation in which one or more of these key properties reaches a point at which traditional methods for geodata collection, storage, processing, control, analysis, modelling, validation and visualisation fail to provide effective solutions. >Entering the era of big spatial data calls for finding solutions that address all “small data” issues that soon create “big data” troubles. Resilience for big spatial data means solving the heterogeneity of spatial data sources (in topics, purpose, completeness, guarantee, licensing, coverage etc.), large volumes (from gigabytes to terabytes and more), undue complexity of geo-applications and systems (i.e. combination of standalone applications with web services, mobile platforms and sensor networks), neglected automation of geodata preparation (i.e. harmonisation, fusion), insufficient control of geodata collection and distribution processes (i.e. scarcity and poor quality of metadata and metadata systems), limited analytical tool capacity (i.e. domination of traditional causal-driven analysis), low visual system performance, inefficient knowledge-discovery techniques (for transformation of vast amounts of information into tiny and essential outputs) and much more. These trends are accelerating as sensors become more ubiquitous around the world.




COVID-19 and Similar Futures


Book Description

This volume provides a critical response to the COVID-19 pandemic showcasing the full range of issues and perspectives that the discipline of geography can expose and bring to the table, not only to this specific event, but to others like it that might occur in future. Comprised of almost 60 short (2500 word) easy to read chapters, the collection provides numerous theoretical, empirical and methodological entry points to understanding the ways in which space, place and other geographical phenomenon are implicated in the crisis. Although falling under a health geography book series, the book explores the centrality and importance of a full range of biological, material, social, cultural, economic, urban, rural and other geographies. Hence the book bridges fields of study and sub-disciplines that are often regarded as separate worlds, demonstrating the potential for future collaboration and cross-disciplinary inquiry. Indeed book articulates a diverse but ultimately fulsome and multiscalar geographical approach to the major health challenge of our time, bringing different types of scholarship together with common purpose. The intended audience ranges from senior undergraduate students and graduate students to professional academics in geography and a host of related disciplines. These scholars might be interested in COVID-19 specifically or in the book’s broad disciplinary approach to infectious disease more generally. The book will also be helpful to policy-makers at various levels in formulating responses, and to general readers interested in learning about the COVID-19 crisis.




Advances in the Leading Paradigms of Urbanism and their Amalgamation


Book Description

This book explores the recent advances in the leading paradigms of urbanism, namely compact cities, eco-cities, and data–driven smart cities, and the evolving approach to their amalgamation under the umbrella term of smart sustainable cities. It addresses these advances by investigating how and to what extent the strategies of compact cities and eco-cities and their merger have been enhanced and strengthened through new planning and development practices, and are being supported and leveraged by the applied solutions pertaining to data-driven smart cities. The ultimate goal is to advance sustainability and harness its synergistic effects on multiple scales. This entails developing and implementing more effective approaches to the balanced integration of the three dimensions of sustainability, as well as to producing combined effects of the strategies and solutions of the prevailing approaches to urbanism that are greater than the sum of their separate effects in terms of the tripartite value of sustainability. Sustainable urban development is today seen as one of the keys towards unlocking the quest for a sustainable world. And the big data revolution is set to erupt in cities throughout the world, heralding an era where instrumentation, datafication, and computation are increasingly pervading the very fabric of cities and the spaces we live in thanks to the IoT. Big data and the IoT technologies are seen as powerful forces that have tremendous potential for advancing urban sustainability. Indeed, they are instigating a massive change in the way sustainable cities can tackle the kind of special conundrums, wicked problems, and significant challenges they inherently embody as complex systems. They offer a multitudinous array of innovative solutions and sophisticated approaches informed by groundbreaking research and data–driven science. As such, they are becoming essential to the functioning of sustainable cities. Besides, yet knowing to what extent we are making progress towards sustainable cities is problematic, adding to the fragmented, conflicting picture that arises of change on the ground in the face of the escalating rate and scale of urbanization and in the light of emerging ICT and its novel applications. In a nutshell, new circumstances require new responses. This timely and multifaceted book is intended for a wide readership. As such, it will appeal to researchers, academics, urban scientists, urbanists, planners, designers, policy-makers, and futurists, as well as all readers interested in sustainable cities and their ongoing and future data-driven transformation.




Challenges Towards Ecological Sustainability in China


Book Description

This book includes a selection of the best papers presented at the Jinan Forum on Geography and Ecological Sustainability held in Guangzhou, China, from 17 to 19 February 2017, as well as several invited papers. It discusses concepts, methods, and applications in geography and ecology with an emphasis on various issues challenging ecological sustainability in China. Chapters are written by leading scholars and researchers from a variety of disciplines including geography, ecology, environmental science and policy, and economics. Case studies are predominantly drawn from Southern China, where nearly four decades of dramatic urbanization has caused economic and ecological strains on land and people. This book will appeal to a wide readership including researchers, upper-division undergraduate and graduate students, and professionals in the fields of sustainability science, geography, ecology, and environmental science and policy.




Applied Data Analysis for Urban Planning and Management


Book Description

This book showcases the different ways in which contemporary forms of data analysis are being used in urban planning and management. It highlights the emerging possibilities that city-regional governance, technology and data have for better planning and urban management - and discusses how you can apply them to your research. Including perspectives from across the globe, it’s packed with examples of good practice and helps to demystify the process of using big and open data. Learn about different kinds of emergent data sources and how they are processed, visualised and presented. Understand how spatial analysis and GIS are used in city planning. See examples of how contemporary data analytics methods are being applied in a variety of contexts, such as ‘smart’ city management and megacities. Aimed at upper undergraduate and postgraduate students studying spatial analysis and planning, this timely text is the perfect companion to enable you to apply data analytics approaches in your research.