Teaching on Jupyter - Using notebooks to accelerate learning and curriculum development

The proliferation of large, complex data spatial data sets presents challenges to the way that regional science - and geography more widely - is researched and taught. Increasingly, it is not ‘just’ quantitative skills that are needed, but computational ones. However, the majority of undergraduate programmes have yet to offer much more than a one-off ‘GIS programming’ class since such courses are seen as challenging not only for students to take, but for staff to deliver. Using evaluation criterion of minimal complexity, maximal flexibility, interactivity, utility, and maintainability, we show how the technical features of Jupyter notebooks - particularly when combined with the popularity of Anaconda Python and Docker - enabled us to develop and deliver a suite of three ‘geocomputation’ modules to Geography undergraduates, with some progressing to data science and analytics roles

Shrinking homes? The geographies of small domestic properties in London, 2010-2021

In the last decade, the UK’s media have highlighted an apparent rise in the number of homes below the recommended Nationally Described Space Standard for a one-person, one-bed home. However, evidence for the growth of ‘micro-apartments’ is mixed, with existing data making it difficult to map the geographies of sub-standard homes below the Local Authority scale. Focussing on London, this paper uses Energy Performance Certificates (EPCs) as a source of floorspace data, matching this to the Land Registry’s Price Paid Data (PPD) and information from the London Planning Database. It quantifies the number of sub-standard homes in London registered for an EPC 2010–21, maps their location at the MSOA (neighbourhood) level, and compares property prices for small and larger homes. Focusing on newly-built homes, it shows that the numbers of small homes doubled across this period with growth in select outer London ‘hotspots’ accounting for much of this. It also demonstrates the overall numbers of small homes rose despite the formal incorporation of NDSS in the London Plan 2016, with the by-passing of space standards in property conversions under Permitted Development Rights, 2013–21 appearing relatively insignificant in explaining these temporal and spatial trends. Finally, it shows that the price per square metre of small homes often far exceeds that of much larger homes in the same area. While recognising the limitations of EPC data, our findings point to the need for further exploration of the enforcement of space standards, not least because it is often assumed that building more, smaller homes in the capital will create more affordable homes for Londoners

Revisiting the past : replicating fifty-year-old flow analysis using contemporary taxi flow data

JR wishes to acknowledge the support of the EPSRC (Grant # EP/I018433/1). JR, UD and MB were supported by the European Commission grant COSMIC: Complexity in Spatial Dynamics (Complexity-NET/FP6 ERANET) during the early stages of this work. MB further wishes to thank the European Research Council for support under 249393-ERC-2009-AdG.Over sixty years ago, geography began its so-called quantitative revolution, where for the first time statistical methods were used to explain the spatial nature of geographic phenomena. Computers made some of this possible, but their limited power did not allow for more than relatively small analytic explorations and consequently many of these earlier ideas are now buried in the mists of time. Here we attempt to replicate one of these early analyses using taxi flow data collected in 1962 and originally used by Goddard (1970 Goddard, J. B. 1970. Functional regions within the city centre: A study by factor analysis of taxi flows in Central London. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 49:161–82; then at the London School of Economics) to extract functional regions within London's city center. Our experiment attempts to replicate Goddard's methodology on a modern taxi flow data set, acquired through Global Positioning System tracking. We initially expected that our analysis would be directly comparable with Goddard's, potentially providing insights into temporal change in the spatial structure of the city core. Attempts at replicating the original analysis have proved enormously difficult, however, for several reasons, including the many subjective choices made by the researcher in articulating and using the original method and the specific characteristics of contemporary taxi flow data. We therefore opt to replicate Goddard's approach as closely and as logically as possible and to fill in gaps based on statistically informed choices. We have also run the analysis on two spatial scales—Central London and a wider area—to explore how scales of analyses that were beyond the capacities of Goddard's early computations also help to shape our understanding of the results he obtained.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Urban Mosaic: Visual Exploration of Streetscapes Using Large-Scale Image Data

Urban planning is increasingly data driven, yet the challenge of designing with data at a city scale and remaining sensitive to the impact at a human scale is as important today as it was for Jane Jacobs. We address this challenge with Urban Mosaic,a tool for exploring the urban fabric through a spatially and temporally dense data set of 7.7 million street-level images from New York City, captured over the period of a year. Working in collaboration with professional practitioners, we use Urban Mosaic to investigate questions of accessibility and mobility, and preservation and retrofitting. In doing so, we demonstrate how tools such as this might provide a bridge between the city and the street, by supporting activities such as visual comparison of geographically distant neighborhoods,and temporal analysis of unfolding urban development.Comment: Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nrhk7lb3GU

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

Mapping the ‘space of flows’: the geography of global business telecommunications and employment specialization in the London mega-city-region

Reades J. and Smith D. A. Mapping the ‘space of flows’: the geography of global business telecommunications and employment specialization in the London mega-city-region, Regional Studies. Telecommunications has radically reshaped the way that firms organize industrial activity. And yet, because much of this technology – and the interactions that it enables – is invisible, the corporate ‘space of flows’ remains poorly mapped. This article combines detailed employment and telecoms usage data for the South-east of England to build a sector-by-sector profile of globalization at the mega-city-region scale. The intersection of these two datasets allows a new empirical perspective on industrial geography and regional structure to be developed