Pulse of the City

The conceptual framework of the project revolves around the interplay between human mobility and activity levels in urban spaces. The project team will investigate how mobility patterns and the urban spaces usage may be interlinked and correlate in the event of climate shocks. The project will build on prior team experience to refine the methodology for processing and analyzing mobility data to generate activity level indicators, as introduced in the Support for Türkiye Earthquake Impact Analysis.

The methodology consists of generating a series of telemetry-derived metrics to understand and quantify activity levels in urban space in space – visits to points of interest such as medical centers, schools, parks – and in time – point in time comparison. The metrics will be generated from longitudinal mobility data and will include the (i) baseline and ongoing device density, (ii) percent change and (iii) z-score compared to the baseline. Similar approaches have been adopted, such as in [Maa19]. Mobility trends in the sampled population may indicate more or less activity in specific areas and may inform the population’s needs and response to climate shocks, for instance, in the event of a heatwave. Each metric will be determined for each tile and for each period, as defined by data standards and the spatial and temporal aggregations below.

Bibliography

Maa19

Paige Maas. Facebook Disaster Maps: Aggregate Insights for Crisis Response & Recovery. KDD '19. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 2019. ISBN 9781450362016. URL: https://doi.org/10.1145/3292500.3340412, doi:10.1145/3292500.3340412.