IN-PERSON London. Section A
Abstract
Under the rhetoric of sustainable mobility and the fight against climate change, we have witnessed the pedestrianization of streets across cities. These interventions aim to reduce environmental pollution and promote active mobility for more livable cities. While this new aesthetic repertoire of sustainable urbanism is presented as innovative, it actually reopens a traditional debate within urban studies, which seeks to understand the complex interaction between the built environment and forms of sociability. This study aims to contribute to this debate with a novel conceptual approach to studying public space and pedestrian mobility as a social construct. Through an interdisciplinary synthesis of urban planning, architecture, ethnography, and data science, it proposes a methodological framework to study pedestrianized streets as the outcome of the interplay between their morphological dimensions and the activities of the users who animate them. To achieve this, it takes the pedestrianized street Consell de Cent (Barcelona) as a case study, internationally recognized as an example of good urban practice. It proposes a quantitative-qualitative methodology which combines interviews with architects involved in the urban plan, on-site observations to identify stationary activities and user profiles, video observations, and automated processes to detect the number of users in motion. The results aim to provide a behavioral mapping, revealing how pedestrian interactions shape the redesigned environment inseparably. The conclusions could inform urban policies interested in recognizing pedestrian dynamics as a key factor in achieving sustainable cities.
María Gabriela Navas Perrone – Postdoctoral researcher at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, where she is a member of the Complex Systems group (CoSIN3) and TURBA) at the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute. Gabriela, an architect and PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Barcelona, has focused her academic career on exploring the interactions between built environments and people’s lived dimensions in urban spaces. Her research primarily focuses on the political economy of architecture, urbanism from a gender perspective, and mobility infrastructures as a social factor.
Javier Borge-Holthoefer is a Ramón y Cajal fellow and is currently leading the Complex Systems group (CoSIN3) (https://cosin3.rdi.uoc.edu/) at the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3) at Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (Barcelona, Spain). He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Universitat Rovira i Virgili (URV) in Tarragona (Spain) in 2011. His research on urban topics combines complex systems modelling, computer vision techniques, GIS and network analysis to approach, among others, pedestrian and vehicle mobility challenges in urban settings.
Davoud Omarzadeh is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Networks and Information Technology at Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, as part of the Complex Systems group (CoSIN3) at the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute. He received his master’s degree in GIS and Remote Sensing from the University of Tabriz (Iran) and as a visiting student at the University of Salzburg (Austria). With a strong background in remote sensing and GIS, Davoud specializes in geospatial data and image processing integrated with computer vision techniques and deep learning. Mostly, his research is focused on urban settings analysis and environmental monitoring.
11:00 am - 12:30 pm
Thursday 27th June, 2024