Domani alle Oche parliamo del traffico urbano con Antonio Lima. Mentre mi preparo, capito su Daniele Quercia, dei Bell Labs a Cambridge, e amici – quelli di “The shortest path to happiness: recommending beautiful, quiet, and happy routes in the city”– che lavorano con un’ampia gamma di Big Data.
L’anno scorso avevano pubblicato (traduco) “Mappe odorose: la vita digitale dei paesaggi olfattivi urbani”, e ora su Royal Society Open Science, esce il seguito: “Mappe chiacchierone: costruire le mappe sonore delle aree urbane a partire dai dati dei social media”. L’articolo si legge come un romanzo, o una sua recensione – c’è anche una parte lessicale – già dall’abstract
Urban sound has a huge influence over how we perceive places. Yet, city planning is concerned mainly with noise, simply because annoying sounds come to the attention of city officials in the form of complaints, whereas general urban sounds do not come to the attention as they cannot be easily captured at city scale. To capture both unpleasant and pleasant sounds, we applied a new methodology that relies on tagging information of georeferenced pictures to the cities of London and Barcelona. To begin with, we compiled the first urban sound dictionary and compared it with the one produced by collating insights from the literature: ours was experimentally more valid (if correlated with official noise pollution levels) and offered a wider geographical coverage. From picture tags, we then studied the relationship between soundscapes and emotions. We learned that streets with music sounds were associated with strong emotions of joy or sadness, whereas those with human sounds were associated with joy or surprise. Finally, we studied the relationship between soundscapes and people’s perceptions and, in so doing, we were able to map which areas are chaotic, monotonous, calm and exciting. Those insights promise to inform the creation of restorative experiences in our increasingly urbanized world.
Qui c’è anche la mappa chiacchierona di New York. Con ricercatori della fondazione Bruno Kessler et al., su arXiv Daniele Quercia ha messo un altro lavoro che trovo fantastico, forse perché la Jacobs è mitica:
The Death and Life of Great American Cities was written in 1961 and is now one of the most influential book in city planning. In it, Jane Jacobs proposed four conditions that promote life in a city.
(link aggiunto) Una, in sostanza, la diversità.
Diversity, in turn, requires four essential conditions: (i) mixed land uses, that is, districts should serve more than two primary functions, and that would attract people who have different purposes; (ii) small blocks, which promote contact opportunities among people; (iii) buildings diverse in terms of age and form, which make it possible to mix high-rent and low-rent tenants; and (iv) sufficient dense concentration of people and buildings.
Despite their importance, those conditions have not been empirically tested all together until recently, mainly because it is hard to collect data about which neighborhoods have full urban life and which have little of it.
L’hanno verificato empiricamente loro:
We extracted human activity measurements from mobile phone records in six Italian cities – Bologna, Florence, Milan, Palermo, Rome, and Turin. These cities are very different from the places in which Jacobs’s conditions were spelled out (i.e., great American cities) and from the places in which they were recently tested (i.e., the Asian city of Seoul). Despite that, our results showed that the four conditions for promoting urban life do hold for Italian cities as well.
E’ una proposta metodologica:
By collecting bread crumbs from cell phones, social media, and participatory platforms, researchers will increasingly rely on data sets orders of magnitude richer than previous urban studies data sets and, consequently, they will be able to test traditional urban theories in fine-grained detail – a totally new way to look at cities.
Comunque la teoria di Jane Jacobs sulle condizioni necessarie per una città viva e vivibile regge. Letture da raccomandare ai candidati sindaco.
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E’ uscito Nature Climate Change di aprile, speciale quinto anniversario, con molti articoli in open access; e Paolo C. segnala “Anthropogenic carbon release rate unprecedented during the past 66 million years” di Richard Zeebe et al. su Nature Geoscience – com. stampa.
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Sul fronte FuF calma piatta, ma ci sono novità sulla fusione calda.