SORS: ATG: a framework to characterize accessibility to public green in urban environments

Abstract: As the share of the worldwide population living in cities is rising up, urban greening interventions are increasingly relied upon to improve the health outcomes and the well-being of urban communities and to mitigate the environmental footprint of cities. On one side, the use of public green areas by local communities -for physical activity, leisure, and social exchange- has been associated with healthier lifestyles and increased social cohesion. On the other side, public green areas are effective solutions to pressing environmental challenges, providing biodiversity support and carbon storage but also acting as soil protectors and temperature regulators. In this seminar, we will introduce a large-scale computational framework to characterize accessibility to urban green areas at a high resolution leveraging a wide set of spatial open data. We will discuss the role of the structural characteristics of the cities, unveiling the impact of small green areas as accessibility enhancers. At last, we will provide a hint on how the framework can be used to simulate the impact of different urban interventions, from the addition of a new public green area to infrastructural interventions to the street network, to help policymakers to shape transitions toward more sustainable and accessible urban environments.

Short Bio: Rossano Schifanella is an Associate Professor in Computer Science at the University of Turin, and a Researcher at ISI Foundation, where he is a member of the Data Science for Social Impact and Sustainability group. His research embraces the creative energy of a range of disciplines across machine learning, urban science, computational social science, complex systems, and data visualization. He leverages data-driven approaches to model the behavior of (groups of) individuals and their interactions, aiming at understanding the interplay between online and offline social behavior. He is also passionate about building interactive interfaces to explore urban spaces, providing access to human knowledge through geography.