arXiv subjects

Geoff Boeing

Publications and source records attributed to Geoff Boeing.

43 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

arXiv2018

Neighborhood Change, One Pint at a Time: The Impact of Local Characteristics on Craft Breweries

Cities have recognized the local impact of small craft breweries, in many ways altering municipal codes to make it easier to establish breweries and making them the anchor points of economic development and revitalization. Nevertheless, we do not know the extent to which these strategies impacted changes at the neighborhood level across the nation. In this chapter, we examine the relationship between growth and locations of craft breweries and the incidence of neighborhood change across the United States. In the first part of the chapter, we rely on a unique dataset of geocoded brewery locations that tracks openings and closings from 2004 to the present. Using measures of neighborhood change often found in literature on gentrification-related topics, we develop statistical models relying on census tract demographic and employment data to determine the extent to which brewery locations are associated with social and demographic shifts since 2000. The strongest predictor of whether a craft brewery opened in 2013 or later in a neighborhood was the presence of a prior brewery. We do not find evidence entirely consistent with the common narrative of a link between gentrification and craft brewing, but we see a link between an influx of lower-to-middle income urban creatives and the introduction of a craft breweries. We advocate for urban planners to recognize the importance of craft breweries in neighborhood revitalization while also protecting residents from potential displacement.

stat.AP↗

arXiv2018

An Integrated Pipeline Architecture for Modeling Urban Land Use, Travel Demand, and Traffic Assignment

Integrating land use, travel demand, and traffic models represents a gold standard for regional planning, but is rarely achieved in a meaningful way, especially at the scale of disaggregate data. In this report, we present a new pipeline architecture for integrated modeling of urban land use, travel demand, and traffic assignment. Our land use model, UrbanSim, is an open-source microsimulation platform used by metropolitan planning organizations worldwide for modeling the growth and development of cities over long (~30 year) time horizons. UrbanSim is particularly powerful as a scenario analysis tool, enabling planners to compare and contrast the impacts of different policy decisions on long term land use forecasts in a statistically rigorous way. Our travel demand model, ActivitySim, is an agent-based modeling platform that produces synthetic origin--destination travel demand data. Finally, we use a static user equilibrium traffic assignment model based on the Frank-Wolfe algorithm to assign vehicles to specific network paths to make trips between origins and destinations. This traffic assignment model runs in a high-performance computing environment. The resulting congested travel time data can then be fed back into UrbanSim and ActivitySim for the next model run. This technical report introduces this research area, describes this project's achievements so far in developing this integrated pipeline, and presents an upcoming research agenda.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2017

Methods and Measures for Analyzing Complex Street Networks and Urban Form

Complex systems have been widely studied by social and natural scientists in terms of their dynamics and their structure. Scholars of cities and urban planning have incorporated complexity theories from qualitative and quantitative perspectives. From a structural standpoint, the urban form may be characterized by the morphological complexity of its circulation networks - particularly their density, resilience, centrality, and connectedness. This dissertation unpacks theories of nonlinearity and complex systems, then develops a framework for assessing the complexity of urban form and street networks. It introduces a new tool, OSMnx, to collect street network and other urban form data for anywhere in the world, then analyze and visualize them. Finally, it presents a large empirical study of 27,000 street networks, examining their metric and topological complexity relevant to urban design, transportation research, and the human experience of the built environment.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2017

OSMnx: New Methods for Acquiring, Constructing, Analyzing, and Visualizing Complex Street Networks

Urban scholars have studied street networks in various ways, but there are data availability and consistency limitations to the current urban planning/street network analysis literature. To address these challenges, this article presents OSMnx, a new tool to make the collection of data and creation and analysis of street networks simple, consistent, automatable and sound from the perspectives of graph theory, transportation, and urban design. OSMnx contributes five significant capabilities for researchers and practitioners: first, the automated downloading of political boundaries and building footprints; second, the tailored and automated downloading and constructing of street network data from OpenStreetMap; third, the algorithmic correction of network topology; fourth, the ability to save street networks to disk as shapefiles, GraphML, or SVG files; and fifth, the ability to analyze street networks, including calculating routes, projecting and visualizing networks, and calculating metric and topological measures. These measures include those common in urban design and transportation studies, as well as advanced measures of the structure and topology of the network. Finally, this article presents a simple case study using OSMnx to construct and analyze street networks in Portland, Oregon.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2016

Visual Analysis of Nonlinear Dynamical Systems: Chaos, Fractals, Self-Similarity and the Limits of Prediction

Nearly all nontrivial real-world systems are nonlinear dynamical systems. Chaos describes certain nonlinear dynamical systems that have a very sensitive dependence on initial conditions. Chaotic systems are always deterministic and may be very simple, yet they produce completely unpredictable and divergent behavior. Systems of nonlinear equations are difficult to solve analytically, and scientists have relied heavily on visual and qualitative approaches to discover and analyze the dynamics of nonlinearity. Indeed, few fields have drawn as heavily from visualization methods for their seminal innovations: from strange attractors, to bifurcation diagrams, to cobweb plots, to phase diagrams and embedding. Although the social sciences are increasingly studying these types of systems, seminal concepts remain murky or loosely adopted. This article has three aims. First, it argues for several visualization methods to critically analyze and understand the behavior of nonlinear dynamical systems. Second, it uses these visualizations to introduce the foundations of nonlinear dynamics, chaos, fractals, self-similarity and the limits of prediction. Finally, it presents Pynamical, an open-source Python package to easily visualize and explore nonlinear dynamical systems' behavior.

nlin.CD↗

arXiv2016

New Insights into Rental Housing Markets across the United States: Web Scraping and Analyzing Craigslist Rental Listings

Current sources of data on rental housing - such as the census or commercial databases that focus on large apartment complexes - do not reflect recent market activity or the full scope of the U.S. rental market. To address this gap, we collected, cleaned, analyzed, mapped, and visualized 11 million Craigslist rental housing listings. The data reveal fine-grained spatial and temporal patterns within and across metropolitan housing markets in the U.S. We find some metropolitan areas have only single-digit percentages of listings below fair market rent. Nontraditional sources of volunteered geographic information offer planners real-time, local-scale estimates of rent and housing characteristics currently lacking in alternative sources, such as census data.

stat.AP↗

arXiv2016

Honolulu Rail Transit: International Lessons from Barcelona in Linking Urban Form, Design, and Transportation

The city of Honolulu, Hawaii is currently planning and developing a new rail transit system. While Honolulu has supportive density and topography for rail transit, questions remain about its ability to effectively integrate urban design and accessibility across the system. Every transit trip begins and ends with a walking trip from origins and to destinations: transportation planning must account for pedestrian safety, comfort, and access. Ildefons Cerda's 19th century utopian plan for Barcelona's Eixample district produced a renowned, livable urban form. The Eixample, with its well-integrated rail transit, serves as a model of urban design, land use, transportation planning, and pedestrian-scaled streets working in synergy to produce accessibility. This study discusses the urban form of Honolulu and the history and planning of its new rail transit system. Then it reviews the history of Cerda's plan for the Eixample and discusses its urban form and performance today. Finally it draws several lessons from Barcelona's urban design, accessibility, and rail transit planning and critically discusses their applicability to policy and design in Honolulu. This discussion is situated within wider debates around livable cities and social justice as it contributes several form and design lessons to the livability and accessibility literature while identifying potential concerns with privatization and displacement.

physics.soc-ph↗