Urban Planning Software
City planning fosters positive interactions between people and places, creating a vibrant urban neighborhood. Massachusetts Institute of Technology MIT presents the Urban Network Analysis UNA, which is software that uses links, nods, and buildings to connect people and places. The UNA is designed to maximize interactions between people and businesses while minimizing frictions. City planning to create patterns of connecting people by optimizing locations and paths in dense urban populations stimulates social, economic, and environmental benefits.
City planners, managers, and politicians use UNA to compile complex data to compute metrics which is impossible to calculate manually automatically. UNA combines various types of data and utilized special analysis approaches to calculate proximity between people and places. UNA can be used to enumerate location proximities and commuter behaviors that can be essential in determining traffic patterns and policy incentives (City Form Lab, 2021). Reach, closeness, and betweenness are some of the metrics used by UNA to estimate accessibility and trajectories to different locations. Spatial configurations using the UNA tool help city planners increase city patronage using automatically calculated metrics.
Maximizing interactions with people while minimizing frictions have social, economic, and environmental benefits. Reshaping urban landscape to manage cities with high population favorable environments for low, medium, and high-income individuals to live in one area. Improving interactions in the cities generates economic value by maximizing exposure and minimizing cost (Bibri et al., 2020). The UNA creates proximities for facilities and amenities that people can use to satisfy needs while reducing cost. UNA also informs city planners and politicians on environmental concerns to establish sustainable development (City Form Lab, 2021). Effective city planning using tools such as UNA impart healthy social coexistence, strengthen the economy and foster sustainable development.
The clarity of data from UNA makes the accesibility of city resources easy and equitable. UNA computes all the city resources and calculates the spatial proximity to reveal the closest facility. Using UNA, people can easily locate businesses, residencies, and employment opportunities (City Form Lab, 2021). The search for location information gives the closest destination the individual can obtain the services they are looking for. For instance, people can track the location of the nearest stores, transit, jobs, residents, and public amenities. Street networks by geographical links of different geographical areas improve the accesibility of goods and services.
Volumes of data generated in contemporary cities also establish equitable access to city resources. Effective city planning by establishing interaction between people enables the government to establish fair spatial allocation to ensure equitable access to socio-economic facilities (Bibri et al., 2020). All location destinations have equal opportunities to sell goods and services despite their popularity and attractiveness (Kalvo et al., 2017). Through UNA, for example, people have access to the same level of accessibility to goods, services, and amenities (City Form Lab, 2021). Analyzing urban network establish an inclusive urban society by enhancing equitable distribution of services and amenities.
By MIT offering UNA free of charge will make it available for developing cities. Developing and poor towns are the most scourged by poor planning (Kalvo et al., 2017). Growing cities can utilize the UNA to design the most effective distribution of city resources to improve the interaction of the people with minimal friction. Poor, emerging, and medium-sized cities can leverage UNA free of charge to generate the most effective city development strategies that are socially, economically, and environmentally sustainable.
MIT developed the UNA that is a city planning tool that utilizes data to facilitate sustainable urban planning. Links, nods, and buildings are the three essential elements that the UNA uses to summarize a complex built environment such as cities. The UNA has social, economic, and environmental bene fits to residents of the urban population. Establishing patterns of human activities and travel habits to establish easy accessibility of locations reduce commuting cost and develop sustainable dense urban environment.
References
City Form Lab. (2021). Urban network analysis toolbox for ArcGIS — City form lab. https://cityform.mit.edu/projects/urban-network-analysis
Kalvo, R., Sevtsuk, A., & Harvard, G. S. D. (2017). Patronage of urban commercial clusters: a network-based extension of the Huff model for balancing location and size.
Bibri, S. E., Krogstie, J., & Kärrholm, M. (2020). Compact city planning and development: Emerging practices and strategies for achieving the goals of sustainability. Developments in the built environment, 4, 100021.