Beyond city size : characterizing and predicting the location of urban amenities
Name
930615801-MIT.pdf
Description
Full printable version
Size
6.4 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
2f71158c0d87a2ed975bc29c8000a1f9
Author(s)
Ensenat, Elisa Castaner
Advisor(s)
Cesar A. Hidalgo.
Alternative Title
Beyond city size : the spatial laws of urban micro-agglomerations
Characterizing and predicting the location of urban amenities
Spatial laws of urban micro-agglomerations.
Date Issued
2015
Publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Abstract
Intercity studies have shown that a city's characteristics -ranging from infrastructure to crime-scale as a power of its population. These studies, however, have not been extended to the intra-city scale, leaving open the question of how urban characteristics are distributed within a city. Here we study the spatial organization of one important urban characteristic: its amenities, such as restaurants, cafes, and libraries. We use a dataset summarizing the position of more than 1.2 million amenities disaggregated into 74 distinct categories and covering 47 U.S. cities to show that: (i) the spatial distribution of amenities within a city is characterized by dense agglomerations of amenities (which we call micro-clusters), (ii) that unlike in the intercity case, size is a poor predictor of the amenities of each type that locate in each micro-cluster, and (iii) that the number of amenities of each type in a micro-cluster is better predicted using information on the collocation of amenities observed across all micro-clusters than using the micro-cluster's size. Finally, we use these findings to create a recommendation algorithm that suggests amenities that are missing in a micro-cluster and can inform the efforts of developers and planners looking to construct and regulate the development of new and existing neighborhoods.
Description
Thesis: M. Eng., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2015.
This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.
Title as it appears in MIT Commencement Exercises program, June 5, 2015: Beyond city size : the spatial laws of urban micro-agglomerations. Cataloged from student-submitted PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (pages 67-69).
Subjects
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
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