Analysis of Urban Space Networks for Recreational Purposes based on Mobile Sports Tracking Application Data

Even though studies of the built environment’s impact on citizens’ physical activity have become an aspiring topic in the recent years, up to now the most investigated topic is transport-related walking or cycling. However, little is known about the patterns of leisure-related physically active travels. One of the reasons behind this lack of research is the matter of collecting ground truth data for validation. Yet the data suitable for this kind of research is voluntary produced by people using sports tracking applications. Thus the aim of this research is to develop a method to acquire, manage and process the data from sports tracking applications in such a way that it would serve as a ground truth not only for examining urban recreational travel patterns but also for modelling the phenomena. In other words, the goal is being able to define where recreational actvities happen, where they do not and finally, use this knowledge to give an indication to every space of how likely it is that the space is or will be used for recreation. The Master Thesis report describes methods used for mobile sports tracking application data acquisition and processing in tandem with OpenStreetMap and Eurostat Urban Atlas datasets. The processed data is used as a ground truth in order to calibrate and validate the developed Runability Index, which has been introduced as an indication of space potential to be used for recreation, based on the well-known measure of walkability. The developed method for acquiring ground truth urban recreational travel data has proved to be suitable for investigation of related matters in European cities with sufficient application users. Even though, the Runability Index has not provided enough correlation with the collected data to be validated, it has ascertained that transport-based active travels have different characteristics than leisure-based ones and therefore need to be explored separately.GeomaticsGeomaticsArchitecture and The Built Environmen

Geographies of Waste: Significance, Semantics and Statistics in pursuit of a Circular Economy

Environmental Technology and Desig

3D city models for urban mining: Point cloud based semantic enrichment for spectral variation identification in hyperspectral imagery

Urban mining aims at reusing building materials enclosed in our cities. Therefore, it requires accurate information on the availability of these materials for each separate building. While recent publications have demonstrated that such information can be obtained using machine learning and data fusion techniques applied to hyperspectral imagery, challenges still persist. One of these is the so-called 'salt-And-pepper noise', i.e.The oversensitivity to the presence of several materials within one pixel (e.g. chimneys, roof windows). For the specific case of identifying roof materials, this research demonstrates the potential of 3D city models to identify and filter out such unreliable pixels beforehand. As, from a geometrical point of view, most available 3D city models are too generalized for this purpose (e.g. in CityGML Level of Detail 2), semantic enrichment using a point cloud is proposed to compensate missing details. So-called deviations are mapped onto a 3D building model by comparing it with a point cloud. Seeded region growing approach based on distance and orientation features is used for the comparison. Further, the results of a validation carried out for parts of Rotterdam and resulting in KHAT values as high as 0.7 are discussed. Environmental Technology and DesignUrban Data ScienceBuilding Physic

Impact Modelling for Circular Economy: Geodesign Discussion Support Environment

Transitioning towards circular economy requires changes in the current system which yield a number of impacts on such fundamental values as human health, natural environment, exhaustible resources, social well-being and prosperity. Moreover, this process involves multiple actors and requires careful considerations of ample spatial information. While plenty of systems have already been developed to support the decision-making process, up to date no standardized framework exists for spatial modelling of impacts. The poster is based on the ongoing research and aims to suggest a standardized, yet flexible approach for impact modelling using the core concepts of GIS. The framework is expected to ensure consistency and comparability between outputs of automated simulations and elicitation of impacts defined by stakeholders and prepare impact modelling guidelines that aim to overcome the characteristics of a single project and be reused in other GDSEs.Environmental Technology and Desig

The responsibility of waste production: Comparison of European waste statistics regulation and Dutch National Waste Registry

The announcement of a new Circular Economy Action Plan as part of the European Green Deal policy has created an urgent need for the reliable information on resource flows to monitor and support the transition. An updated Monitoring Framework is set to rely as much as possible on European Statistics, however at this point there are no changes introduced in supranational statistics regulations. This raises a question whether regulations that have been created before the paradigm shift are still able to supply us with statistics necessary to inform policy makers about current successful practices, remaining barriers, positive and negative impacts of the transition and overall progress towards the set goals. This paper focuses on the Waste Statistics Regulation, specifically the relationship between the types of waste and economic activities which are considered to be the waste producers. Dutch National Waste Registry is used as a case study to compare the guidelines on pan-European waste data collection to the actual waste reports. The task of this publication is to explore to which extent the guidelines available in the Waste Statistics Regulation correspond to the operational reality. To do so it presents a computational method to link waste producers to their economic activities using a national Trade Registry. An extensive discussion of the results provides insights and recommendations for the future guidelines of waste statistics to support circular economy transition.Environmental Technology and Desig

Simulating natural ventilation in large sports buildings: Prediction of temperature and airflow patterns in the early design stages

In large sport’s buildings, a big part of energy can be saved by providing natural instead of mechanical ventilation. However, additional challenges arise while controlling airflow and temperatures in different zones. These measureshighly depend on the shape, construction and ventilation openings, which are mostly decided in the early design stages. Computational optimization can support these early stages of design, but needs to be performed in efficient ways. In this respect, the project proposes rapid assessment of temperature and airflow patterns using customized Grasshopper components, which would be able to evaluate a given model using CONTAM and EnergyPlus software assimulation engine. The proposed method integrates these simulations within an environment, which is familiar to architects and is largely used for parameterization of design in its early stages. A case study (Jiangmen Sports Center, Jiangmen, China) is used to test the developed process for a large indoor sports hall.Design Informatic

A refined waste flow mapping method: Addressing the material and spatial dimensions of waste flows in the urban territory through big data: the case of the Amsterdam Metropolitan Area

Fundamental changes in the societal use of biophysical resources are required for a sustainable transformation. Current (urban) metabolism research traces flows of energy and materials and products to capture resource use along valuechains from resource extraction to production and consumption and the discharge of wastes and emissions. However, spatial relation, local carrying capacity and qualitative characteristics of the urban landscape are only featured in very few studies, even if they are becoming crucial elements towards future sustainable development. Simultaneously, spatial studies tend to neglect the dimension of processes of flows and the generated stocks that influence the construction and performance of space. Big data and GIS technologies have thepotential to leverage the integration between the two fields of knowledge. Therefore, the article explores the development of an innovative method - Activity-based Spatial Material Flow Analysis -that integrates qualitative and quantitative flow specifications in material content and geographical space, starting from the analysis of waste flows relative to the Amsterdam Metropolitan Area (NL). Lastly, the article reflects on the results of the application of the AS-MFA method, namely a series of flow maps. Each flow map is a significant data-based network representation of a part of the urban metabolism within the AMA in a specific period of time.Environmental Technology and DesignClimate Design and Sustainabilit

Introducing spatial variability to the impact significance assessment

The concept of Circular Economy has gained momentum during the last decade. Yet unsustainable circular systems can also create unintended social, economic and environmental damage. Sustainability is highly dependent on a system’s geographical context, such as location of resources, cultural acceptance, economic, environmental and transport geography. While in some cases an impact of the proposed change may be considered equally significant under all circumstances (e.g. increase of carbon emissions as a main contributor to the global climate change), many impacts may change both their direction and the extent of significance dependent on their context (e.g. land consumption may be positively evaluated if applied to abandoned territories or negatively if a forest needs to be sacrificed). The geographical context, (i.e. its sensitivity, vulnerability or potential) is commonly assessed by Spatial Decision Support Systems. However, currently those systems typically do not perform an actual impact assessment as impact characteristics stay constant regardless of location. Likewise, relevant Impact Assessment methods, although gradually becoming more spatial, assume their context as invariable. As a consequence, impact significance so far is also a spatially unvarying concept. However, current technological developments allow to rapidly record, analyse and visualise spatial data. This article introduces the concept of spatially varying impact significance assessment, by reviewing its current definitions in literature, and analysing to what extent the concept is applied in existing assessment methods. It concludes with a formulation of spatially varying impact significance assessment for innovation in the field of impact assessment.Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository 'You share, we take care!' - Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.Environmental Technology and Desig

Modelling Spatial Patterns of Outdoor Physical Activities using Mobile Sports Tracking Application Data

The paper presents a workflow for collecting, structuring and processing geo-referenced recreational mobility data from a sports tracking application as to monitor recreational usage of urban spaces. The data collected include GPS trajectories of people walking, jogging, and running for recreational purposes in European cities. The presented workflow includes systematic steps for aggregating the trajectories and attributing them to a spatial network model called Urban Space Network. The nodes of this network are the navigable spaces or streets and its links are the connections between them. A method is proposed to find a fuzzy notion of recreational space usage, using the number of distinct application users whose trajectories have been accounted for the space in question. The fuzzified space usage values are then attributed to the nodes of the network. This model can be used primarily used to observe actual patterns of space usage and has the potential to be used as ground truth data for validating and calibrating network-based models of recreational mobility. Patterns revealed by the workflow can be used to study where outdoor physically active mobility happens and where it is absent. Thus the proposed workflow can provide spatial and objective insight useful in planning, management and governance of cities in promoting active mobility that is already a rather global trend in urbanism.OTBArchitecture and The Built Environmen

Computational Design for Sport Building

The design of sport buildings has great impact on top-sport as well as on recreational sport-activities. It implies challenging tasks in meeting the performance-requirements. This includes the control of factors like daylight/lighting, air flow, thermal conditions, just to name a few. Such factors impact the performance of athletes and are hard to control in large sport halls; their control is even harder when the public/audience is located within the halls and require different climate conditions. While mechanical installations are often needed during competitions in order to guarantee constant conditions, relaying on mechanical installations during the daily and recreational use of the venues challenges their medium/long term sustainability. Computational form finding approaches can favour the achievement of high-performing and sustainable sport buildings. In this light, the paper tackles the use of Multi-objective and Multidisciplinary design optimization. The paper presents the concept of Multi-objective Multidisciplinary design optimization techniques to support trade-off decisions between multiple conflicting design objectives and interdisciplinary design methodology, during the conceptual design of sport buildings. The proposed method is based on parametric modelling, performance simulation tools and algorithms for computational optimization, for which the paper tackles three specific aspects. First of all, due to the complexity of large sport buildings, the formulation of the optimization and the screening of the related design variables is crucial in order to obtain a meaningful design space, which helps reducing unnecessary computational burden. Secondly, assessing performance based on measurements and analyses is crucial and can be supported by performance simulations tools; however effectively integrating performance simulations tools in the early phase of the design requires new tools. In this light, a customized computational process for the rapid assessment of temperature and airflow patterns is presented. Thirdly, the process requires the combination of design optimization and design exploration, while searching for well-performing solutions. The importance of design exploration is emphasized also for sub-optimal solutions. In order to facilitate the design exploration, the combination of optimization algorithms, multi-variate analysis algorithms and options for exploring design solutions via an interactive dashboard connected to a database are presented. To exemplify the method, specific case studies are developed as collaboration between Delft university of Technology and South China university of Technology.Design InformaticsEnvironmental Technology and Desig