Citywide scale: The Public Motion Explorer
In today’s world, wireless mobile communication devices establish and support permanent interconnectedness between people, places and urban infrastructure.
Urban planning urgently requires information regarding the population distribution and mobility patterns: For example,
- the diurnal population movement to observe traffic infrastructure usage during the day, or
- population access to certain areas like parks, pedestrian zones, nature areas to identify population sojourn preferences or lack of accessibility.
Mobile communication services allow the exploration of communication traces, describing human sojourn and activity patterns. Note: All data used in this project is provided by telecom companies in an anonymised form, so that no privacy terms are infringed.
In the example given above, the mobile communication device locator allows describing activity dynamics within a city during a day.
Using this application it is possible to interactively assess the impact of land use and urban infrastructure as response of population activities. The visualisation is made by means of a 2D/3D web mapping client within the urbanAPI system for full public access to explore the sojourn/activity distribution maps over time. Larger scale explorations will allow monitoring access preferences of public places in detail.
Opinion polls of the local population and the visitors of the web maps can provide further information about the features of the public space which they find more attractive than others, thereby supporting city authorities in making public space more attractive for residents.
The Public Motion Explorer will be realised for the cities of Bologna, Vitoria-Gasteiz, Sofia and Vienna.
| Neighbourhood API | Factsheet |
|---|---|
| Aim | Assess public motion patterns as response to urban infrastructure |
| Data Inputs | Mobile phone: logged user events with time stamp and coordinates Geographic interaction elements: selected spatial entities |
| System requirements | 2D/3D web client: standard web browser |
| Outputs | 2D/3D visualizations of population distribution and mobility patterns; Hourly origin-destination matrices, describing urban-wide population motion |
| Contact |
