Urban Analytics

Driving urban transitions to a healthier, fairer, and sustainable future for everyone

Cities around the world are expected to meet the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as well as WHO’s and UN-Habitat’s public health equity goals. Planners, designers, and policy-makers are faced with the challenge of creating livable, sustainable, and attractive urban spaces that promote the well-being of all. This requires radical changes in every possible sector—from mobility and energy to food and land use. But how can we help cities frame the priorities and track progress toward these goals in a consistent manner? What kinds of globally applicable indicators can facilitate the transition to healthier, fairer, and more sustainable cities and societies?

At the Urban Analytics Lab, we develop human-centred metrics and indicators for benchmarking cities toward achieving sustainability, health, and equity goals. Spatial accessibility is at the heart of our work as a useful conceptual framework for the design of integrated and equitable distribution of opportunities and urban mobility. We focus on active mobility (walking, biking) and look at how different population groups (children, seniors, women) perceive and experience the urban environment and how this affects their accessibility, mobility, and health outcomes.

Our work is organized around three pillars: (1) we co-create novel metrics and indicators of urban environment qualities such as accessibility, walkability, playability, co-accessibility, and perceived attributes of the physical environment; (2) we integrate these metrics into open-source tools to support the delivery of interventions at every level; and (3) we provide evidence-based measurable standards for various health, equity, and sustainability indicators. To achieve this, we combine open-source location data with cutting-edge spatial analysis techniques.

Through our research and education, we hope to develop the necessary skills and tools to accelerate the much-needed urban transformations toward a healthy, sustainable, and equitable future for our cities.

Our research in a nutshell

Urban Analytics News:

[May 25, 2023] | Vasileios Milias and Roos Teeuwen lead the workshop on “What Factors Impact Access to Public Spaces and for Whom?“, with the support of the American Planning Association. Read here.

[May 25, 2023] | Roos Teeuwen and Vasileios Milias present CTwalk Map and how to map walking accessibility of different population groups at the National Program for Sustainable Digital Information Management Demo Day. Read here.

[May 15, 2023] | Dr. Achilleas Psyllidis spoke at Stanford University’s “Designing for Future Mobility” symposium on pedestrian accessibility and was part of an IDE delegation to develop research and education partnerships with UC Berkeley, Stanford University, UC Davis, and MIT. Read the blog here.

[May 8, 2023] | Roos Teeuwen and Achilleas Psyllidis publish a short news article on measuring greenspace accessibility. Read here.

[April 26, 2023] | Dr. Achilleas Psyllidis speaks at MIT’s City Form Lab on unlocking new measurements of pedestrian accessibility and how to factor human experiences into these metrics.

[April 20, 2023] | Roos Teeuwen and Vasileios Milias exhibit posters of their latest research at ICT Open 2023. Download the posters of Roos and Vasilis.