How well do NDVI and OpenStreetMap data capture people’s visual perceptions of urban greenspace?

The study of urban greenspaces typically relies on three types of data: people’s subjective perceptions collected via questionnaires, vegetation indices derived from satellite imagery, such as the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), and Land Use or Land Cover maps, such as OpenStreetMap (OSM). Data on people’s perceptions are...

Adopting a child perspective for exposome research on mental health and cognitive development - Conceptualisation and opportunities

Mental disorders among children and adolescents pose a significant global challenge. The exposome framework covering the totality of internal, social and physical exposures over a lifetime provides opportunities to better understand the causes of and processes related to mental health, and cognitive functioning. The paper presents a conceptual...

Measuring children's and adolescents' accessibility to greenspaces from different locations and commuting settings

Recent evidence underscores the importance of greenspace exposure in promoting physical activity, and in having a positive impact on mental health and cognitive development. Accessibility has been identified to be the primary motivating factor when it comes to encouraging greenspace use and, correspondingly, exposure. Existing quantitative...

Is it safe to be attractive?: Disentangling the influence of streetscape features on the perceived safety and attractiveness of city streets

City streets that feel safe and attractive motivate active travel behaviour and promote people’s well-being. However, determining what makes a street safe and attractive is a challenging task because subjective qualities of the streetscape are difficult to quantify. Existing evidence typically focuses on how different street features influence...

“Eyes on the Street”: Estimating Natural Surveillance Along Amsterdam’s City Streets Using Street-Level Imagery

Neighborhood safety and its perception are important determinants of citizens’ health and well-being. Contemporary urban design guidelines often advocate urban forms that encourage natural surveillance or “eyes on the street” to promote community safety. However, assessing a neighborhood’s level of natural surveillance is challenging due to its...

Early environmental quality and life-course mental health effects: The Equal-Life project

Background: <br/>There is increasing evidence that a complex interplay of factors within environments in which children grows up, contributes to children’s suboptimal mental health and cognitive development. The concept of the life-course exposome helps to study the impact of the physical and social environment, including social inequities, on...

Complementing studies on vulnerable youths with reddit data

Social web data increasingly complement studies of various social phenomena, especially when the availability of traditional data is limited. One such case is that of vulnerable young populations that are disengaged from employment, education, or training; usually referred to as NEETs. This paper explores the extent to which social media data...

Cities and infectious diseases: Assessing the exposure of pedestrians to virus transmission along city streets

As cities resume life in public space, they face the difficult task of retaining outdoor activity while decreasing exposure to airborne viruses, such as the novel coronavirus. Even though the transmission risk is higher in indoor spaces, recent evidence suggests that physical contact outdoors also contributes to an increased virus exposure....

Detecting, classifying, and mapping retail storefronts using street-level imagery

Up-to-date listings of retail stores and related building functions are challenging and costly to maintain. We introduce a novel method for automatically detecting, geo-locating, and classifying retail stores and related commercial functions, on the basis of storefronts extracted from street-level imagery. Specifically, we present a deep...

ST-Sem: A Multimodal Method for Points-of-Interest Classification Using Street-Level Imagery

Street-level imagery contains a variety of visual information about the facades of Points of Interest (POIs). In addition to general mor- phological features, signs on the facades of, primarily, business-related POIs could be a valuable source of information about the type and iden- tity of a POI. Recent advancements in computer vision could...

Crowd-Mapping Urban Objects from Street-Level Imagery

Knowledge about the organization of the main physical elements (e.g. streets) and objects (e.g. trees) that structure cities is important in the maintenance of city infrastructure and the planning of future urban interventions. In this paper, a novel approach to crowd-mapping urban objects is proposed. Our method capitalizes on strategies for...

A time-varying p-median model for location-allocation analysis

Location models have traditionally played an important role in suggesting sites for the placement of facilities, so that efficient service delivery is ensured. A common formulation of several location models is associated with the p-median problem, which aims to minimize the travel distance between support facilities and demand in a region....

Regionalization of Social Interactions and Points-of-Interest Location Prediction with Geosocial Data

Traditional methods for studying the activity dynamics of people and their social interactions in cities require time-consuming and resource-intensive observations and surveys. Dynamic online trails from geosocial networks (e.g. Twitter, Instagram, Flickr etc.) have been increasingly used as proxies for human activity, focusing on mobility...

Social Smart Meter: Identifying Energy Consumption Behavior in User-Generated Content

Having a thorough understanding of energy consumption behavior is an important element of sustainability studies. Traditional sources of information about energy consumption, such as smart meter devices and surveys, can be costly to deploy, may lack contextual information or have infrequent updates. In this paper, we examine the possibility of...

Harnessing heterogeneous social data to explore, monitor, and visualize urban dynamics

Understanding the complexity of urban dynamics requires the combination of information from multiple city data sources. Besides traditional urban data, geo-localized social media provide human-generated content, which may reflect in (near) real time the activities people undertake in cities. The challenge is to devise methods and tools that...