Shopping centre siting and modal choice in Belgium: a destination based analysis

Although modal split is only one of the elements considered in decision-making on new shopping malls, it remarkably often arises in arguments of both proponents and opponents. Today, this is also the case in the debate on the planned development of three major shopping malls in Belgium. Inspired by such debates, the present study focuses on the impact of the location of shopping centres on the travel mode choice of the customers. Our hypothesis is that destination-based variables such as embeddedness in the urban fabric, accessibility and mall size influence the travel mode choice of the visitors. Based on modal split data and location characteristics of seventeen existing shopping centres in Belgium, we develop a model for a more sustainable siting policy. The results show a major influence of the location of the shopping centre in relation to the urban form, and of the size of the mall. Shopping centres that are part of a dense urban fabric, measured through population density, are less car dependent. Smaller sites will attract more cyclists and pedestrians. Interestingly, our results deviate significantly from the figures that have been put forward in public debates on the shopping mall issue in Belgium

Using Geometry to Evaluate Strategic Road Proposals in Orbital-Radial Cities

This paper uses geometry to evaluate major road proposals in cities with road networks consisting of orbital and radial routes. The type of geometry used is a development of the Karlsruhe or Moscow metric after the cities where it was identified, although the results have wider applicability. The paper begins with a detailed consideration of the relationship between route speeds, junction access and service areas. New urban patterns are presented using optimal space filling techniques in which the aim is to maximise drive-time coverage with the minimum number of junctions. The method is then refined to allow for effects such as congestion and interstitial access. The results are then used in a case study to evaluate a well-known strategic road plan for London first proposed in the 1940s. There follows a general discussion about the policy and planning implications for London and further possible developments of the techniques presented

Co-evolution of density and topology in a simple model of city formation

We study the influence that population density and the road network have on each others' growth and evolution. We use a simple model of formation and evolution of city roads which reproduces the most important empirical features of street networks in cities. Within this framework, we explicitely introduce the topology of the road network and analyze how it evolves and interact with the evolution of population density. We show that accessibility issues -pushing individuals to get closer to high centrality nodes- lead to high density regions and the appearance of densely populated centers. In particular, this model reproduces the empirical fact that the density profile decreases exponentially from a core district. In this simplified model, the size of the core district depends on the relative importance of transportation and rent costs.Comment: 13 pages, 13 figure

Delineating Geographical Regions with Networks of Human Interactions in an Extensive Set of Countries

Large-scale networks of human interaction, in particular country-wide telephone call networks, can be used to redraw geographical maps by applying algorithms of topological community detection. The geographic projections of the emerging areas in a few recent studies on single regions have been suggested to share two distinct properties: first, they are cohesive, and second, they tend to closely follow socio-economic boundaries and are similar to existing political regions in size and number. Here we use an extended set of countries and clustering indices to quantify overlaps, providing ample additional evidence for these observations using phone data from countries of various scales across Europe, Asia, and Africa: France, the UK, Italy, Belgium, Portugal, Saudi Arabia, and Ivory Coast. In our analysis we use the known approach of partitioning country-wide networks, and an additional iterative partitioning of each of the first level communities into sub-communities, revealing that cohesiveness and matching of official regions can also be observed on a second level if spatial resolution of the data is high enough. The method has possible policy implications on the definition of the borderlines and sizes of administrative regions.National Science Foundation (U.S.)Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technolog

Modelling Hierarchy and Specialization of a System of Cities from an Evolutionary Perspective on Firms' Interactions

Despite their great diversity, most systems of cities show remarkably similar patterns when comparing the size distribution and the economic specialization of their constitutive cities. The universality of these patterns sparked the interest of geographers, economists and physicists. However, until now, no economic model has relied on a micro-based and evolutionary approach to reproduce these regularities. In this chapter, we intend to fill this gap by proposing a model where the micro dynamics of localized firms generate the two macro regularities of size distribution and economic specialization. The model is based on boundedly rational firms’ competition and path dependent innovation. We discuss the possible emergence of macro properties from these micro behaviors of firms

Service robotics: do you know your new companion? Framing an interdisciplinary technology assessment

Service-Robotic—mainly defined as “non-industrial robotics”—is identified as the next economical success story to be expected after robots have been ubiquitously implemented into industrial production lines. Under the heading of service-robotic, we found a widespread area of applications reaching from robotics in agriculture and in the public transportation system to service robots applied in private homes. We propose for our interdisciplinary perspective of technology assessment to take the human user/worker as common focus. In some cases, the user/worker is the effective subject acting by means of and in cooperation with a service robot; in other cases, the user/worker might become a pure object of the respective robotic system, for example, as a patient in a hospital. In this paper, we present a comprehensive interdisciplinary framework, which allows us to scrutinize some of the most relevant applications of service robotics; we propose to combine technical, economical, legal, philosophical/ethical, and psychological perspectives in order to design a thorough and comprehensive expert-based technology assessment. This allows us to understand the potentials as well as the limits and even the threats connected with the ongoing and the planned implementation of service robots into human lifeworld—particularly of those technical systems displaying increasing grades of autonomy

Redrawing the Map of Great Britain from a Network of Human Interactions

Do regional boundaries defined by governments respect the more natural ways that people interact across space? This paper proposes a novel, fine-grained approach to regional delineation, based on analyzing networks of billions of individual human transactions. Given a geographical area and some measure of the strength of links between its inhabitants, we show how to partition the area into smaller, non-overlapping regions while minimizing the disruption to each person's links. We tested our method on the largest non-Internet human network, inferred from a large telecommunications database in Great Britain. Our partitioning algorithm yields geographically cohesive regions that correspond remarkably well with administrative regions, while unveiling unexpected spatial structures that had previously only been hypothesized in the literature. We also quantify the effects of partitioning, showing for instance that the effects of a possible secession of Wales from Great Britain would be twice as disruptive for the human network than that of Scotland.National Science Foundation (U.S.)AT & TAudi AGUnited States. Dept. of Defense (National Defense Science and Engineering Fellowship Program

Digital strategies to a local cultural tourism development: Project e-Carnide

Digital humanities and smart economy strategies are being seen as an important link between tourism and cultural heritage, as they may contribute to differentiate the audiences and to provide different approaches. Carnide is a peripheral neighbourhood of Lisbon with an elderly population, visible traces of rurality, and strong cultural and religious traditions. The academic project e-Carnide concerns its tangible and intangible cultural heritage and the data dissemination through a website and a mobile app, with textual and visual information. The project aims to analyse the impact of technological solutions on cultural tourism development in a sub-region, involving interdisciplinary research in heritage, history of art, ethnography, design communication and software engineering and the collaboration between the university and local residents in a dynamic and innovative way. Framed by a theoretical approach about the role of smart economy for the cultural tourism development in peripheral areas, this paper focuses on a case study, dealing with documents, interviews and observations, in order to understand how the e-Carnide project evolves. The study comprises an analysis about the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT analysis) of the project in view to realize its social and cultural implications and to appreciate how it can be applied in other similar and enlarged projects. Results of the research indicates that the new technological strategies can promote the involvement of the population in the knowledge of its own heritage as a factor of cultural and creative tourism development centred on an authentic and immersive experience of the places