Papers by Alessandro Venerandi
Cities, 2021
Most urban growth is taking place in the developing countries of the Global South through informa... more Most urban growth is taking place in the developing countries of the Global South through informal settlements. This form of development is usually strongly opposed by governments and local administrations. However, several works compared them to vernacular urban centres, such as medieval towns, and praised their human- scale qualities. If this similarity were to be systemically assessed on a larger scale, informal settlements would gain more recognition and legitimation. This, in turn, can potentially impact policy making. In this paper, we propose a replicable methodology based on the use of open data to investigate similarities between informal and medieval settlements, through statistical comparison of metrics of urban form and correlation analysis between densities of amenities and street centrality (a fundamental relationship at the basis of city functioning). This methodology is tested on three informal settlements in Sub-Saharan Africa and three Italian medieval towns. Statistical similarities were found, especially for what concerned aspects of the urban fabric, configurational features, and the relationship between densities of amenities and street centrality. These findings add to the studies that recognise the value of informal settlements. Furthermore, the proposed methodology can be replicated to increase the generalisability of this result and further legitimise informal urban development.
MDPI Urban Science, 2020
Few studies have investigated the urban morphology of informal settlements at fine-grain level, l... more Few studies have investigated the urban morphology of informal settlements at fine-grain level, limiting effective urban planning and policies targeting such areas. This study presents a high-resolution morphological analysis of five informal settlements located in central areas of major cities in East Africa. The analysis is based on indicators of urban form, statistical comparison, and field interviews on household conditions. The method improves the replicability and increases the spatial granularity compared to previous studies. Outcomes show that all case studies are characterised by organic street layouts. Three settlements form a comparable group with denser urban fabrics (small block size, high coverage ratios, and small private spaces), while the remaining two cases have less compact forms. The field interviews show high rates of tenancy, overcrowding, and inadequate access to water and sanitation in the first group and low rates of these conditions in the second group. We suggest that these differences are partially an outcome of levels of informal land supply. We argue that decreased informal land supply leads to increased competition and higher prices of accommodation, leaving fewer household resources for infrastructure investments and consequent compromised livelihoods. Accordingly, we argue that some modes of informal urban development should be accepted in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Understanding what aspects of the urban environment are associated with better socioeconomic/live... more Understanding what aspects of the urban environment are associated with better socioeconomic/liveability outcomes is a long standing research topic. Several quantitative studies have investigated such relationships. However, most of such works analysed single correlations, thus failing to obtain a more complete picture of how the urban environment can contribute to explain the observed phenomena. More recently, multivariate models have been suggested. However, they use a limited set of metrics, propose a coarse spatial unit of analysis, and assume linearity and independence among regressors. In this paper, we propose a quantitative methodology to study the relationship between a more comprehensive set of metrics of the urban environment and the valorisation of street segments that handles non-linearity and possible interactions among variables, through the use of Machine Learning (ML). The proposed methodology was tested on the French Riviera and outputs show a moderate predictive capacity (i.e., adjusted R 2 = 0.75) and insightful explanations on the nuanced relationships between selected features of the urban environment and street values. These findings are clearly location specific; however, the methodology is replicable and can thus inspire future research of this kind in different geographic contexts.
This article reviews the evidence on links between value and built form or use in a range of sepa... more This article reviews the evidence on links between value and built form or use in a range of separate categories related to streets: patterns, types and uses. The aim is to examine the evidence around these categories, to help answer the question about how best to inter-weave connectivity and accessibility with everyday life in a way that would appear to work for most residents most of the time and also deliver value to investors and owners in the medium to long term. Some key lessons emerge from the literature review of relationships between place and value that tend to be true most of the time. Ultimately, most people will pay more for a well-connected property away from too much noise, pollution and one way-streets and within walking distance of local amenities.
The world is undergoing a process of fast and unprecedented urbanisation. It is reported that by ... more The world is undergoing a process of fast and unprecedented urbanisation. It is reported that by 2050 66% of the entire world population will live in cities. Although this phenomenon is generally considered beneficial, it is also causing housing crises and more inequality worldwide. In the past, the relationship between design features of cities and socioeconomic levels of their residents has been investigated using both qualitative and quantitative methods. However, both sets of works had significant limitations as the former lacked generalizability and replicability, while the latter had a too narrow focus, since they tended to analyse single aspects of the urban environment rather than a more complex set of metrics. This might have been caused by the lack of data availability. Nowadays, though, larger and freely accessible repositories of data can be used for this purpose. In this paper, we propose a scalable method that delves deeper into the relationship between features of cities and socio-economics. The method uses openly accessible datasets to extract multiple metrics of urban form and then models the relationship between urban form and socioeconomic levels through spatial regression analysis. We applied this method to the six major conurbations (i.e., London, Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool, Leeds, and Newcastle) of the United Kingdom (UK) and found that urban form could explain up to 70% of the variance of the English official socioeconomic index, the Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD). In particular, results suggest that more deprived UK neighbourhoods are characterised by higher population density, larger portions of unbuilt land, more dead-end roads, and a more regular street pattern.
In this paper, we investigate whether text from a Community Question Answering (QA) platform can ... more In this paper, we investigate whether text from a Community Question Answering (QA) platform can be used to predict and describe real-world attributes. We experiment with predicting a wide range of 62 demographic attributes for neighbourhoods of London. We use the text from QA platform of Yahoo! Answers and compare our results to the ones obtained from Twitter microblogs. Outcomes show that the correlation between the predicted demographic attributes using text from Yahoo! Answers discussions and the observed demographic attributes can reach an average Pearson correlation coefficient of ρ = 0.54, slightly higher than the predictions obtained using Twitter data. Our qualitative analysis indicates that there is semantic relatedness between the highest correlated terms extracted from both datasets and their relative demographic attributes. Furthermore, the correlations highlight the different natures of the information contained in Yahoo! Answers and Twitter. While the former seems to offer a more encyclo-pedic content, the latter provides information related to current sociocultural aspects.
Research in Urban Morphology has long been exploring the form of cities and their changes over ti... more Research in Urban Morphology has long been exploring the form of cities and their changes over time, especially by establishing links with the parallel dynamics of these cities' social, economic and political environments. The capacity of an adaptable and resilient urban form to provide a fertile environment for economic prosperity and social cohesion is at the forefront of discussion. Gentrification has emerged in the past few decades as an important topic of research in urban sociology, geography and economy, addressing the social impact of some forms of urban evolution. To some extent, these studies emphasize the form of the environment in which gentrification takes place. However, a systematic and quantitative method for a detailed characterization of this type of urban form is still far from being achieved. With this article, we make a first step towards the establishment of an approach based on 'urban morphometrics'. To this end, we measure and compare key morphological features of five London neighbourhoods that have undergone a process of piecemeal gentrification. Findings suggest that these five case studies display similar and recognizable morphological patterns in terms of their built form, geographical location of main and local roads and physical relationships between street fronts and street types. These initial results, while not implying any causal or universal relationship between morphological and social dynamics, nevertheless contribute to (a) highlight the
In Northern Italy, more and more historic countryside villas are abandoned due to globalization. ... more In Northern Italy, more and more historic countryside villas are abandoned due to globalization. In this article, I provide a visual and written essay on the current situation.
There are some amenities in London that tend to be present where gentrification takes place. This... more There are some amenities in London that tend to be present where gentrification takes place. This article is a visual and written exploration of these different kind of amenities, what they sell and how they look like.
Many socioeconomic studies have been carried out to explain the phenomenon of gentrification. Alt... more Many socioeconomic studies have been carried out to explain the phenomenon of gentrification. Although results of these works shed light on the process around this phenomenon, a perspective which focuses on the relationship between city form and gentrification is still missing. With this paper we try to address this gap by studying and comparing, through classic methods of mathematical statistics, morphological features of five London gentrified neighbourhoods. Outcomes confirm that areas which have undergone gentrification display similar and recognizable morphological patterns in terms of urban type and geographical location of main and local roads as well as businesses. These initial results confirm findings from previous research in urban sociology, and highlight the role of urban form in contributing to shape dynamics of non-spatial nature in cities.
Thesis Chapters by Alessandro Venerandi
Defining the attributes of urban form which relate to city liveability has long been the research... more Defining the attributes of urban form which relate to city liveability has long been the research topic of a wide range of experts such as architects, urbanists, geographers, and, more recently, computational social scientists. Both qualitative and quantitative approaches have been developed to study this matter; however, the former often lack of generalizability, as results are mainly based on personal views, and replicability, as no systematic methodology has ever been presented. The latter, although being more generalizable, are still geographically constrained to relatively small regions (e.g., a neighbourhood, a city). Moreover, they focus on single aspects of urban form (e.g., density) rather than on multiple ones (e.g., accessibility, density, connectivity), as Urban Morphology predicates. In this thesis, I propose a quantitative approach to study the relationship between multiple aspects of urban form and city liveability indexes that is replicable and applicable to areas of arbitrarily large size. Metrics of urban form are derived from urban theories and extracted from openly accessible datasets such as census data and OpenStreetMap (OSM). These metrics are then used as independent variables in a linear regression model with a liveability index as dependent one. To test the proposed approach, I apply it to different urban regions of the United Kingdom (UK) to understand the relationship between urban form and different aspects of city liveability such as socio-economic deprivation, life expectancy, and childhood obesity. Models show adjusted R squared values up to 0.76, suggesting good model fit overall. Interpretations of model outcomes and regression coefficients, for the specific geographic context of the UK, suggest that neighbourhoods with worse liveability are characterised by tower block developments, low connectivity, and a predominantly regular street layout. Conversely, more liveable neighbourhoods tend to be characterised by more connectivity, a denser urban fabric, and an above-average presence of historic buildings.
Conference Presentations by Alessandro Venerandi
ISUF 2020 Virtual Conference Proceedings
Approximately 13% of the world population lives in informal settlements, characterized by limited... more Approximately 13% of the world population lives in informal settlements, characterized by limited state control, inadequate infrastructure provision, and lack of planning. While the relevance of studies of informal settlements is widely acknowledged, the urban morphology of such areas is understudied, compromising the development of effective planning and policy targeting such areas. In this paper, we present a taxonomic study at a fine level of spatial granularity of the urban form of five informal settlements, located in major cities of Sub-Saharan Africa. More specifically, a k-means clustering is applied to eight indicators of urban form computed at block level, for each of the settlements under examination. The best clustering identified ten different block types associated with distinctive features, such as blocks on public spaces (small, densely built, abundant public open space), fringe blocks (medium-sized, sparsely built, low local connectivity), blocks in the making (large, sparsely built, high levels of through movement at settlement level). We argue that this taxonomy provides detailed information about the case studies under examination, which can potentially inform design strategies aimed at their upgrading. Finally, it presents some of the first attempts at establishing replicable quantitative data driven descriptions of the urban form of informal settlements.
Measuring socioeconomic deprivation of cities in an accu-
rate and timely fashion has become a p... more Measuring socioeconomic deprivation of cities in an accu-
rate and timely fashion has become a priority for governments around the world, as the massive urbanization process we are witnessing is causing high levels of inequalities which require intervention. Traditionally, deprivation indexes have been derived from census data, which is however very expensive to obtain, and thus acquired only every few years. Alternative computational methods have been proposed in recent years to automatically extract proxies of deprivation at a fine spatio-temporal level of granularity; however, they usually require
access to datasets (e.g., call details records) that are not publicly available to governments and agencies. To remedy this, we propose a new method to automatically mine deprivation at a fine level of spatio-temporal granularity that only requires access to freely available user-generated content. More precisely, the method needs access to datasets describing what urban elements are present in the physical environment; examples of such datasets are Foursquare and OpenStreetMap. Using these datasets, we quantitatively describe neighborhoods by means of a metric, called Offering Advantage, that reflects which urban elements are distinctive features of each neighborhood. We then use that metric to (i) build accurate classifiers of urban deprivation and (ii) interpret the outcomes through thematic analysis. We apply the method to three UK urban areas of different scale and elaborate on the results in terms of precision and recall.
Previous works in architecture and social science found that aspects of the built environment suc... more Previous works in architecture and social science found that aspects of the built environment such as density, connectivity, and house typologies are related to crime. However, these studies are qualitative , and thus hardly repeatable at larger scales. In this work, we overcome this limitation by offering a quantitative approach that explores the relationship between the configuration of the built environment and the activity of criminal groups in city areas. The method extracts a wide set of metrics related to aspects of urban form from openly accessible datasets. We then input these metrics in a step-wise logistic linear model, using presence of gang activity as dependent variable, and obtain a parsimonious model with an excellent fit when applied to the metropolitan area of London, UK. We then use values and slopes of model coefficients to build a narrative of the typical city area characterized by gang activity, reconnecting to previous theories. Outcomes of this research can help policy makers and architects in better understanding the relationship between neighborhood design and criminal activity.
What is the relationship between urban form and citizens' well-being? In this paper, we propose a... more What is the relationship between urban form and citizens' well-being? In this paper, we propose a quantitative approach to help answer this question, inspired by theories developed within the fields of architecture and population health. The method extracts a rich set of metrics of urban form and well-being from openly accessible datasets. Using linear regression analysis, we identify a model which can explain 30% of the variance of well-being when applied to Greater London, UK. Outcomes of this research can inform the discussion on how to design cities which foster the well-being of their residents.
Prompted by an application in the area of human geography using machine learning to study housing... more Prompted by an application in the area of human geography using machine learning to study housing market valuation based on the urban form, we propose a method based on possibility theory to deal with sparse data, which can be combined with any machine learning method to approach weakly supervised learning problems. More specifically, the solution we propose constructs a possibilistic loss function to account for an uncertain supervisory signal. Although the proposal is illustrated on a specific application, its basic principles are general. The proposed method is then empirically validated on real-world data.
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Papers by Alessandro Venerandi
Thesis Chapters by Alessandro Venerandi
Conference Presentations by Alessandro Venerandi
rate and timely fashion has become a priority for governments around the world, as the massive urbanization process we are witnessing is causing high levels of inequalities which require intervention. Traditionally, deprivation indexes have been derived from census data, which is however very expensive to obtain, and thus acquired only every few years. Alternative computational methods have been proposed in recent years to automatically extract proxies of deprivation at a fine spatio-temporal level of granularity; however, they usually require
access to datasets (e.g., call details records) that are not publicly available to governments and agencies. To remedy this, we propose a new method to automatically mine deprivation at a fine level of spatio-temporal granularity that only requires access to freely available user-generated content. More precisely, the method needs access to datasets describing what urban elements are present in the physical environment; examples of such datasets are Foursquare and OpenStreetMap. Using these datasets, we quantitatively describe neighborhoods by means of a metric, called Offering Advantage, that reflects which urban elements are distinctive features of each neighborhood. We then use that metric to (i) build accurate classifiers of urban deprivation and (ii) interpret the outcomes through thematic analysis. We apply the method to three UK urban areas of different scale and elaborate on the results in terms of precision and recall.
rate and timely fashion has become a priority for governments around the world, as the massive urbanization process we are witnessing is causing high levels of inequalities which require intervention. Traditionally, deprivation indexes have been derived from census data, which is however very expensive to obtain, and thus acquired only every few years. Alternative computational methods have been proposed in recent years to automatically extract proxies of deprivation at a fine spatio-temporal level of granularity; however, they usually require
access to datasets (e.g., call details records) that are not publicly available to governments and agencies. To remedy this, we propose a new method to automatically mine deprivation at a fine level of spatio-temporal granularity that only requires access to freely available user-generated content. More precisely, the method needs access to datasets describing what urban elements are present in the physical environment; examples of such datasets are Foursquare and OpenStreetMap. Using these datasets, we quantitatively describe neighborhoods by means of a metric, called Offering Advantage, that reflects which urban elements are distinctive features of each neighborhood. We then use that metric to (i) build accurate classifiers of urban deprivation and (ii) interpret the outcomes through thematic analysis. We apply the method to three UK urban areas of different scale and elaborate on the results in terms of precision and recall.