Open-Data and Data Acquisition for Smart Cities and Urban Mobility Studies: Potential Approaches and Current Challenges

The experience of urban users is shaped by cities—by their shapes, components, and how they function. An immense quantity of data is included in the process of how the city functions, how it affects its inhabitants, and how its residents view its components. Researchers need an extensive number of datasets on land use (type & quantification) and geometric dimensions of the built environment (3D, form, & pattern) to fully grasp this relationship. In addition to the need to collect data about users’ experience via using web-based/location-based surveys. The acquisition, exploration, and analysis of these datasets contributes to enabling a better understanding, operation, and monitoring of the city’s systems. Thus, facilitating the design, implementation, and operation of functional, efficient, and reliable smart cities. This paper focuses on transportation and mobility, and how can open-data sources be utilized for data acquisition for urban mobility studies. This highlights possible, simple, and accessible open-data acquisition tools for urban planners. It further outlines the limitations and challenges for data acquisition related to the global south context. The main aim is to explore the potential of integrating different open-data sources, web-based tools, and data analytics in defining travel time map and accessibility with respect to modality of mobility. It examines the accessibility, availability, and obtainability of data from these open-data sources (i.e., OpenStreetMap, Uber Movement, Jupyter Notebook) to be further used in urban studies, specifically in the context of the selected case study area. An exploratory approach is adopted to perform an analysis between the built environment and travel time during mobility, using Isochrone map acquired from open-data sources. The aim is to delineate an approach that could be adopted by urban planners who are not well acquainted with open-data sources, python scripts and codes. This approach could be utilized, modified, and replicated in further urban studies related to other regional contexts similar to the Egyptian context

Investigating The Common Perceptual Qualities of Urban Morphology and Subjective Wellbeing Scales for Urban Mobility Studies: A Literature Review.

The impact of the built environment, urban form, and urban morphology on individual\u27s perception, experience and wellbeing has been the focus of many studies in the past few decades. Additionally, the impact of the built environment and its spatial characteristics has been recently studied from different approaches. Literature review shows that various research has been conducted on the impact of the built environment and travelers’ behavior and modal choice. However, few studies have been conducted on the impact of the built environment on travelers’ perception during mobility. Thus, this manuscript attempts to theoretically establish a link between the epistemology of urban form and morphology, urban mobility and transportation, and subjective wellbeing. A review of the body of literature on urban form, morphology and built environment is carried out. This to identify the main points related to subjective wellbeing which are listed by urban planning and design pioneers. In addition to reviewing literature on transportation, urban mobility, and travel behavior and its relationship with subjective wellbeing. This to highlight the main subjective wellbeing variables that are effective, as long as transportation and urban mobility is concerned. Afterwards, a review is conducted on the field of subjective wellbeing metrics, scales, and schedules. In which each scale is reviewed to identify the fields it was deployed in for further studies. The manuscript concludes by highlighting the subjective wellbeing scales that could be deployed in further studies related to urban form, morphology, built environment characteristics, and urban mobility. The findings could be deployed in further urban studies that target measuring subjective wellbeing in relation to the characteristics of the built environment