Flooding through the lens of mobile phone activity

Natural disasters affect hundreds of millions of people worldwide every year. Emergency response efforts depend upon the availability of timely information, such as information concerning the movements of affected populations. The analysis of aggregated and anonymized Call Detail Records (CDR) captured from the mobile phone infrastructure provides new possibilities to characterize human behavior during critical events. In this work, we investigate the viability of using CDR data combined with other sources of information to characterize the floods that occurred in Tabasco, Mexico in 2009. An impact map has been reconstructed using Landsat-7 images to identify the floods. Within this frame, the underlying communication activity signals in the CDR data have been analyzed and compared against rainfall levels extracted from data of the NASA-TRMM project. The variations in the number of active phones connected to each cell tower reveal abnormal activity patterns in the most affected locations during and after the floods that could be used as signatures of the floods - both in terms of infrastructure impact assessment and population information awareness. The representativeness of the analysis has been assessed using census data and civil protection records. While a more extensive validation is required, these early results suggest high potential in using cell tower activity information to improve early warning and emergency management mechanisms.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Global Humanitarian Technologies Conference (GHTC) 201

Performance Measures to Assess Resiliency and Efficiency of Transit Systems

Transit agencies are interested in assessing the short-, mid-, and long-term performance of infrastructure with the objective of enhancing resiliency and efficiency. This report addresses three distinct aspects of New Jersey’s Transit System: 1) resiliency of bridge infrastructure, 2) resiliency of public transit systems, and 3) efficiency of transit systems with an emphasis on paratransit service. This project proposed a conceptual framework to assess the performance and resiliency for bridge structures in a transit network before and after disasters utilizing structural health monitoring (SHM), finite element (FE) modeling and remote sensing using Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR). The public transit systems in NY/NJ were analyzed based on their vulnerability, resiliency, and efficiency in recovery following a major natural disaster

Plan in progress: a critique of the selective coproduction of the Spatial Policy Plan for Flanders (Belgium)

In recent years, so-called coproductive, radical strategic planning has become a synonym for integrative and holistic public sector-led planning processes and the alleged integrating qualities of representative democracies. However, these views remain framed by the specific discourses, perspectives and path dependencies of governments, obstructing opportunities for radical reorientations as intended above. In this paper, we want to illustrate how these restrained views affect concrete planning practices through the specific case of the region of Flanders (Belgium). For decades, the holistic model of the Dutch neighbours has largely inspired planning dynamics in Flanders (Belgium). As such, in 1997, most concerned Flemish authorities accepted the first overarching spatial policy plan for the region. Fifteen years later, however, original commitments have eroded and the original plan has largely lost its credibility. In 2011 a new process was launched, aiming to develop a new policy plan (the future Spatial Policy Plan for Flanders). However, this new process builds only limited support and credibility outside the select group of involved actors. We argue that today in Flanders the borrowed methodology of coproductive planning is insufficiently adapted to the institutional context and is therefore mainly delivering an aura of sustainability optimism to on-going policies, while a variety of spatial developments that are recognized as fundamental or problematic are omitted from the debate. We show this by putting forward some major missing pieces, which are located in the policy fields of large road infrastructure development, “legacy” suburbanization, retail siting, and property taxation. We show that these issues are representative of a number of constraints that are imposed by separate policy levels (located at other ministries, at the federal level, or in neighbouring regions such as Brussels) although these are not accounted for by the current planning process, apart from a number of key issues that are kept deliberately outside the process after labelling these “already decided”. Finally, we sketch some opportunities for improvement, consisting of developing a more contextualized process model, putting the stress on more concrete planning issues, involving independent stakeholders in strategic alliances, and taking a co-evolutionary approach from the start

Training of Crisis Mappers and Map Production from Multi-sensor Data: Vernazza Case Study (Cinque Terre National Park, Italy)

This aim of paper is to presents the development of a multidisciplinary project carried out by the cooperation between Politecnico di Torino and ITHACA (Information Technology for Humanitarian Assistance, Cooperation and Action). The goal of the project was the training in geospatial data acquiring and processing for students attending Architecture and Engineering Courses, in order to start up a team of "volunteer mappers". Indeed, the project is aimed to document the environmental and built heritage subject to disaster; the purpose is to improve the capabilities of the actors involved in the activities connected in geospatial data collection, integration and sharing. The proposed area for testing the training activities is the Cinque Terre National Park, registered in the World Heritage List since 1997. The area was affected by flood on the 25th of October 2011. According to other international experiences, the group is expected to be active after emergencies in order to upgrade maps, using data acquired by typical geomatic methods and techniques such as terrestrial and aerial Lidar, close-range and aerial photogrammetry, topographic and GNSS instruments etc.; or by non conventional systems and instruments such us UAV, mobile mapping etc. The ultimate goal is to implement a WebGIS platform to share all the data collected with local authorities and the Civil Protectio

Seeing the invisible: from imagined to virtual urban landscapes

Urban ecosystems consist of infrastructure features working together to provide services for inhabitants. Infrastructure functions akin to an ecosystem, having dynamic relationships and interdependencies. However, with age, urban infrastructure can deteriorate and stop functioning. Additional pressures on infrastructure include urbanizing populations and a changing climate that exposes vulnerabilities. To manage the urban infrastructure ecosystem in a modernizing world, urban planners need to integrate a coordinated management plan for these co-located and dependent infrastructure features. To implement such a management practice, an improved method for communicating how these infrastructure features interact is needed. This study aims to define urban infrastructure as a system, identify the systematic barriers preventing implementation of a more coordinated management model, and develop a virtual reality tool to provide visualization of the spatial system dynamics of urban infrastructure. Data was collected from a stakeholder workshop that highlighted a lack of appreciation for the system dynamics of urban infrastructure. An urban ecology VR model was created to highlight the interconnectedness of infrastructure features. VR proved to be useful for communicating spatial information to urban stakeholders about the complexities of infrastructure ecology and the interactions between infrastructure features.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2019.102559Published versio