The IN3 is pleased to invite you to the second session of the series IN3 Interdisciplinary Seminars: "Quantifying imbalances in public space distribution: technical, scientific and social challenges". This new session will be promoted by the Complex Systems @ IN3 (CoSIN3), Urban Transformation and Global Change Laboratory (TURBA Lab) and Scene Understanding & Artificial Intelligence (SUnAI) research groups.
Venue
Room -1A, UOC Castelldefels building (Parc Mediterrani de la Tecnologia, B3 building)
Av. Carl Friedrich Gauss, 5
08860 Castelldefels (Barcelona)
Espanya
When
06/11/2017 11.00h
Organized by
Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, IN3
Contact
Program
When we think about public space, we picture parks, greenways and seaside, but overlook the largest single public space asset in any city: streets. Prosperity scales with land dedicated to street pattern, and particularly, with space allotted to pedestrians. While coarse estimations of public land use are at hand, fine-grained information about the size of sidewalks and bike lanes (per street, per block, per neighborhood) are currently unavailable –nor their impact on people’s life. Such measure is key to urban long-term challenges, as an indicator for (a) urban accessibility and walkability; (b) of areas that are specifically problematic for their confluence (traffic risk); and (c) of the urban configuration to empower community interaction and integration. We propose a civic technology project aiming at performing such measure at scale. To do so, the project will first advance from current remote sensing techniques and deep-learning image segmentation, exploiting Geographic Big Data (orthoimagery) to quantify space distribution in streets (asphalt, sidewalk, buildings, etc.). Profiling every street in a selected number of cities (in Catalonia, Europe and the Mediterranean region), we will then design the analytical tools to assess «intra-city» connectivity and walkability. Finally, the identification of imbalances in the space division will boost, via the implication of local associations, public intervention and the recovery of citizen participation, following the example of "Eix Pere IV".
After the presentation, a space for dialogue with the other research groups of the IN3 and the researchers taking part in the session will be opened on various aspects discussed.
This series of informal seminars aims to break the dynamics of such serious activities, as well as promote team building and exchanges between research groups from different disciplines in a relaxed atmosphere.
Upon closure of the session, all the UOC professors and researchers are invited to enjoy some refreshments.
We hope to see you there!