2022 SEA Keynote
Making it easy for regional scientists to consider (urban) form & function
Dani Arribas-Bel​
5 July 14.00-15.00

This talk will introduce the Urban Grammar, a project using data science and machine learning to build a detailed, consistent, and scalable characterization of urban form and function in Britain. How we spatially arrange cities matters. Their building blocks include the different elements of the built and natural environments of which cities are composed, but also the purpose they serve. Understanding the former thus requires us to consider urban form, while grasping the latter invites us to examine its function. Urban form and function is relevant for a variety of areas in regional science because, on the one hand, their fabric encodes the socio-economic history, technology and values of the society that has built them; and, on the other, once in place, form and function have direct implications for a wide range of outcomes, from productivity and job access to social inclusion and mobility, deprivation, service provision, energy consumption or carbon emissions, to name just a few. Despite its relevance, the measurement of urban form and function has been hampered by the availability of meaningful spatial units, good data, and meaningful metrics, as well as by the complexity of bringing together their multi-dimensional nature. In this talk, we will introduce a new data product -the spatial signatures- that leverages state-of-the-art data science to facilitate access to granular descriptions of urban form and function in Britain for regional scientists and urbanists alike. We will cover its design, implementation, and some of the most interesting things it can teach us about the British urban landscape. We will conclude with some thoughts on where the project is headed to develop the temporal dimension of the data product.

Short bio
​Dani Arribas-Bel is interested in computers, cities, and data. He is Professor in Geographic Data Science at the the University of Liverpool, and Deputy Programme Director for Urban Analytics at the Alan Turing Institute, where he is also an ESRC Fellow. Prior to arriving at Liverpool in 2015, Dani held positions at the University of Birmingham (UK), the VU University in Amsterdam (Netherlands), Arizona State University (US), and Universidad de Zaragoza (Spain). He holds honorary positions at the University of Chicago's Center for Spatial Data Science, and the Center for Geospatial Sciences of the University of California Riverside. Dani's research combines modern computation with new forms of data to shed light on the spatial structure of cities. His research is published in journals such as PLOS ONE, Demography, Geographical Analysis, or Environment and Planning (A/B/C), and he is also member of the development team of PySAL, the Python library for spatial analysis. Dani currently serves as co-editor of the journal "Environment and Planning B - Urban Analytics & City Science” and the "Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A - Statistics in Society”, and chairs the Quantitative Methods Research Group of the Royal Geographical Society.