Landscape of logistics and the time present

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 2011.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 152-155).Upon arrival in Memphis by air, a sign welcomes passengers to "Memphis - America's Distribution Center", a reflection of one's place in the city, and the country. Rather than a romantic reflection of the cultural heritage of the city with Elvis Presley and B.B. King, the statement places passengers not at the destination of their travels, vis a vis a "welcome to", but en route somewhere else. Memphis International Airport, identified via its aviation code "MEM", is not a place of arrival-a terminal, from "terminus", the end-but a location to be passed through-a state of being in transit or colloquially "passing through". Few passengers and goods conclude their travel here; MEM's raison d'etre is as a layover, as travelers are being distributed elsewhere as a result of the efficiency of the hub-and-spoke model of aviation. As a result, MEM is the world's busiest cargo airport. At its peak, an upwards of six flights arriving a minute carrying Apple computers, Mickey Mouse plush toys, cooking items from William-Sonoma, and the variety of other goods to and from all corners of the world destined for FedEx's so-called SuperHub. Because of the presence of such a facility, MEM has arisen as an economic capital in an improbably location within the interior of the United States replete with its own sprawling developments. MEM, as an airport city, challenges the social and cultural norms of what one considers a traditional city, as its reasons for being is the economy of moving goods and founded on the way we do business and not the way we live. This thesis proposes an urban form for MEM's surrounding city that serves as a means of regeneration of the surrounding, decaying area as well as accepts the condition of being in transit for goods and people as a primary condition of existence. In Brophy's character's words, it is an urbanism that "[perpetually remains] in the present moment, in at least semi-sempiternal transit between departure from the past and arrival in the future" and is more appropriate than the status quo within the context of MEM with regard to the transitory nature of goods, passengers and employees. The urban logic is thus a metaphor of FedEx in the transposition of technological logics, such as the flow of bodies and the interface of machine, the parcel, and the human occupant.by Anthony P. Vanky.S.M

Digital data-driven analyses of pedestrian mobility in urban spaces

Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Urban Studies and Planning, 2017.Page 157 blank. Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (pages 135-156).Understanding how environmental attributes can influence the behavior of pedestrians is of concern for public health officials, transportation engineers, and urban planners. To what degree, if any, do these various environmental characteristics influence how much and for how long people walk? To answer these questions, this thesis analyzes large-scale spatiotemporal pedestrian activity records collected from the users of a mobile phone application in Greater Boston, Massachusetts and the San Francisco Bay Area, California. The dataset contains the locative traces of recreational and utilitarian pedestrian walking activities which include the GPS and temporal records of individuals. In sum, this dissertation considered over 2.2 million trips from 135,000 people. This thesis addresses the topic in three parts. The first study examines the impacts of climate and environment on active transportation trips, and finds varying effects of different types of weather. However, these associated effects are influenced by a trip's purpose, as well as by season and location. The second study analyzes the impact of built environment characteristics on walking activities at the urban scale. These characteristics are generally defined as components of the density, diversity, and design of urban spaces. The study finds that activity characteristics are moderated by the features of location, and that infrastructure for walking, transportation access, and destinations have a positive influence on walking volume. Walking durations are largely invariant to these factors. The third study explores the effects of urban attributes on the aggregated route choices of individuals through the use of revealed preferences. The study's findings suggest that pedestrians are sensitive to the presence of retail destinations and transit availability in their choice of path. Despite this, architectural and street-level design features have mixed effects. These analyses contribute a new approach to understanding the interrelationships between the built environment and pedestrian activity, and how those effects contribute to the walkability of communities. This thesis also tests the usefulness of passive, pervasive mobile devices in evaluating urban space, and considers their potential to aid in the development of human-centered urban design-from an analysis of the quantified self toward the understanding of the quantified community.by Anthony P. Vanky.Ph. D