[#31] Evaluating urban accessibility: A new approach using fitness and complexity metrics & Trying to survive as a frog in a world of birds
Accessibility, the ease of reaching valued destinations, is crucial for the quality of life and economic well-being of urban residents. It’s a broad and multifaceted concept in urban and transport planning, with numerous methodologies proposed for its measurement. However, a critical aspect of urban accessibility that remains less explored in existing measurement methods is the motivation behind why people travel. Most current approaches primarily focus on quantifying the number of potential destinations or points of interest (POIs) within reach, sometimes implicitly assuming a uniform value or attraction across different types of destinations. This assumption overlooks the nuanced reality that different categories of POIs—whether educational institutions, healthcare facilities, or recreational areas—hold varying degrees of importance and attraction. Consequently, there’s a significant challenge in aggregating these varied attractions into a single, cohesive measure of accessibility. Here, we propose a new method to estimate the weight of different POI categories for computing a generalized measure of accessibility, which we call the Fitness of a given location, using only the spatial distribution of all POIs. We applied this technique to evaluate the Fitness of different regions within a city and construct a hierarchy of Categorical Impedance for POI categories. Our results suggest that our technique can effectively assess the quality of urban systems and provide valuable insights for urban planners, policymakers, and researchers.
‘Some mathematicians are birds, and others are frogs’, is how the legendary mathematician Freeman Dyson starts his talk about Birds and Frogs. When I first came across this talk, it really hit home for me because it shed light on some of the inner struggles I have always had when thinking about where my research career was headed. To be honest, I had to twist, maybe even a lot, Dyson’s original analogy to make it fit my situation. The big question for me has always been whether to dive deep into a single problem, seeing far and wide like a bird, or to hop around from one problem to another like a frog. I’d love to chat about what it means to follow each path, especially from the perspective of a researcher from Latin America.
In the first part of the talk, Hygor shared with us his current research on Urban Accessibility; he proposed a novel method, utilizing spatial distribution, to determine the weighted importance of diverse points of interest categories.
In the second part of the talk, Hygor pointed out how this research topic was one of the many he has explored in his career and that he, paraphrasing the words of Freeman Dyson (in his article), feels like a frog, jumping around from topic to topic.
In the discussion, we highlighted the importance of having both birds and frogs in our research environment. Parallel to the exploration-exploitation paradigm, research can only advance if the two species of researchers work together.
