Animating the cities...Dynamic exploration of harmonized urban databases (United-States, France 1800-2000)

This paper presents a generic visual tool for mapping and analyzing the evolution of a system of cities on a long-term period (2 centuries), in France and United States. The project started in 2008 in the framework of an a national grant (Action Nationale de la Recherche Corpus et Outils de la Recherche en SHS Harmonie-cités : construction de bases de données harmonisées sur les populations, les activités et les réseaux des villes). The conception of a visual tool for exploring the database represents the last part of this project and has been developed recently. Three main objectives were challenged: Designing a generic tool, that could be possibly used in the future for several countries under study, allowing a dynamic exploration of the different databases, which raises a range of difficulties as they are spatio-temporal and multi-level (cities themselves and systems of cities), giving an interactive application, that could be used by a large range of Internet users, from pupils to researchers or urban planners. The resulting interface combines time, location and attributes (population, area). The application integrates interactivity in order to propose an exploratory and animated cartography of urban dynamics, according to an evolutive conception of the urban system. It enables a large variety of possibilities for exploring city trajectories

Premiers pas vers une proposition de sémiologie graphique animée : un outil d'expérimentation

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Multilevel comparison of large urban systems

For the first time the systems of cities in seven countries or regions among the largest in the world (China, India, Brazil, Europe, the Former Soviet Union (FSU), the United States and South Africa) are made comparable through the building of spatio-temporal standardised statistical databases. We first explain the concept of a generic evolutionary urban unit ("city") and its necessary adaptations to the information provided by each national statistical system. Second, the hierarchical structure and the urban growth process are compared at macro-scale for the seven countries with reference to Zipf's and Gibrat's model: in agreement with an evolutionary theory of urban systems, large similarities shape the hierarchical structure and growth processes in BRICS countries as well as in Europe and United States, despite their positions at different stages in the urban transition that explain some structural peculiarities. Third, the individual trajectories of some 10,000 cities are mapped at micro-scale following a cluster analysis of their evolution over the last fifty years. A few common principles extracted from the evolutionary theory of urban systems can explain the diversity of these trajectories, including a specific pattern in their geographical repartition in the Chinese case. We conclude that the observations at macro-level when summarized as stylised facts can help in designing simulation models of urban systems whereas the urban trajectories identified at micro-level are consistent enough for constituting the basis of plausible future population projections.Comment: 14 pages, 9 figures; Pumain, Denise, et al. "Multilevel comparison of large urban systems." Cybergeo: European Journal of Geography (2015

Modéliser la vitesse différentielle des réseaux de transport collectifs et son évolution : retours d’expériences

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Modéliser la vitesse différentielle des réseaux de transport collectifs et son évolution : retours d’expériences

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La Belgique, un laboratoire pour l’étude des effets-frontières

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Des échelles inédites pour appréhender le Grand Paris Express : modélisation des gains de vitesse et d’accessibilité au sein du réseau de transports publics francilien (1995-2050)

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Trajectoires Démographiques des villes européennes (1961-2011) (TRADEVE)

TRADEVE project has built a harmonized database on delineations and populations of European urban areas (defined by taking into account continuous build-up areas and minimal population threshold), from 1961 to 2011. More than 3900 urban areas (exactly 3946) are considered for 2011, for 29 countries. We started from a harmonised database that allows studying small and medium urban areas, the Urban Morphological Zones (UMZ). Originally defined by the European Environment Agency from CORINE Land Cover images and continuous built-up areas criteria, UMZ were poorly used for urban studies until they were enriched in the ESPON Database by other indicators, such as a name for each agglomeration and a correspondence dictionary with LAU2 that allows joining other statistical datasets. A population density grid from the Joint Research Centre was used for attributing populations to these urban areas. After an introduction (Section 1), Section 2 focuses on the different methods that have been used for retropolating UMZ to 1961, by using and correcting for some countries the population data collections for the Local Administrative Units database on LAU2 population from Gloersen et al 2013 (Historical Population Database) and by populating the 2000 perimeter with 2011 data. In Section 3, different explorations of the resulting database are presented, for urban growth, urban hierarchy and demographic trajectories (Section 4)