Projects

Mobilising Gender Data — Timeline: June 2024 - February 2025 — ESRC

This project aims to experiment with new ways to measure gender differences in everyday mobility using (geographic) digital footprint data, which is collected from people’s interactions with mobile phones and other devices. While these data provide detailed information about people’s movement, they only rarely have information on their gender. The project will develop new methods for disaggregating these data based on gender and explore how travel patterns differ at an unprecedented level of spatio-temporal resolution. The project will work with data sources available from the Urban Big Data Centre at the University of Glasgow, combining detailed movement data with evidence on the relationship between gender and transport. With a focus on active travel, it will look at what differences might be detected in the data based on gender. The process will allow for a reproducible method to examine these gender differences from new forms of mobility data. The outputs and knowledge generated can be useful to academic researchers in transportation, climate change, urban design, landscape architecture, and policy studies. Knowing how systems function presently and how they change in reaction to new policies can help decision-makers understand who benefits and who does not as cities and countries attempt to shift mobility patterns to combat environmental and climate change.

ITINERANT: InequaliTies IN Experiencing uRbAn fuNcTion — Timeline: August 2021 - May 2022 — EPSRC - ATI

The ITINERANT (InequaliTies IN Experiencing uRbAn fuNcTion) project will develop AI methods, open data products, and policy-relevant insights on which urban functions different population groups experience. We will use new forms of data and machine learning to develop our understanding around how different socio-economic groups experience, access and benefit from the wide array of functions cities offer. Urban function, in this context, is understood in a broad sense and includes residence, employment, retail, public services and amenities. Such u nderstanding is key to develop policies to ensure these benefits are fairly shared across society. Findings from this project will inform policy makers on the patterns of inequality in how residents of the same city benefit and access different functions. ITINERANT will also develop methods and tools that empower future research in this area.

Related Activities: Workshop on using Mobility Data in Urban Science, Talks are accessible HERE and a full report is available HERE

Liveable Liverpool City Region: Active Travel and Liveable Neighbourhoods to support the Liverpool City Region’s post-COVID economic recovery — Timeline: October 2020 - July 2021 — Partnership Recovery and Resilience Fund

The aim of this project is to expand collaborative links between the University of Liverpool (UoL) and the Liverpool City Region Combined Authority (LCRCA) to create a low carbon, inclusive and resilient city-region which supports the LCRCA’s post COVID-19 economic recovery. It will do this through support for policy analysis within LCR, focusing on LCRCA’s ability to use the Setting City Area Targets and Trajectories for Emissions Reduction tool in its decision making.

Specifically, the project will focus on possible LCRCA interventions related to:

  1. Ongoing active travel activity in LCRCA made through Tranches 1&2 of the UK Government’s Emergency Active Travel Fund, which has, in broad terms, led to the creation of ‘pop up’ bike lanes.
  2. A scenario premised on the ’15-minute city’ – broadly put: all daily needs/services should be a maximum of a 15-minute walk/cycle from your house – currently popularised by the Mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo.

First Life — Timeline: Team member from 2014 - 2018

First Life is a georeferenced civic social network. It is baseline technology for several projects. I was specifically involved in the following:

  • PIUMA, Personalized Interactive Urban Maps for Autism project aims at helping people with the Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) move and live within cities by means of a new digital service that provides interactive personalized maps.

  • Food Atlas, a participatory mapping project of the Turin metropolitan city food system.

  • EsploraTo/TeenCarto, an action-research project carried out in Turin, which involved more than 600 teenagers from 16 high schools, in a massive process of community mapping aiming at producing a representation of their urban geography. Data collected has been analyzed to make evident the way teenagers use the city as well as how they imagine a better city.

  • MiraMap, carried out in the Mirafiori District, one of the deprived neighborhoods in Turin (Italy), our project leveraged on the social and economic transformative potential of the area. New methods and IT solutions have been experimented to facilitate citizens-city councillors interaction for the reporting and managing of issues and proposals concerning the area.