Movement Geography & Future Prospects

SPATIAL COLLABORATION WITH HUMAN MOVEMENT: A NEW DIRECTION FOR CITY MANAGERS

One of the most important elements influencing both people and the environment is rapid urbanization. Migration affects both humans and animals, not only those in the animal species. Animals search for alternative locations according to the availability of food, the need to reproduce, and changes in the environment. Similar to how people move between rural and urban areas in search of resources, for them, this movement might occasionally become their permanent home. Millions of people commute daily between their homes and places of employment, which exacerbates the city's socioeconomic problems. Cities that experienced unplanned city growth and high population increases were threatened by infrastructure development in terms of resource quality, equality, and efficiency. There is therefore no other option other than to look into managing these resources in a sustainable manner in order to create a more liveable city.

Metropolitan areas are home to over 55% of the world's population, which worsens threats to the environment and the climate globally (United Nations, 2019). By 2050, this proportion is anticipated to increase by almost 70%. (Singh et al., 2020). One of the main challenges to sustainable urban planning is the burdensome planning of infrastructure and resource allocation triggered by a wrong projection for the future direction of city growth. The projection of current land use and land cover is one of the most commonly used techniques for determining the direction of city growth in the future. Yet, as time goes on, we are introducing increasingly sophisticated spatial strategies for spatio-temporal planning that won't become outdated soon.

People and space are the most important elements of geography, so human behavior or movement plays a crucial role in space. One of the major challenges city managers are dealing with is resource management, as population is increasing by leaps and bounds, which creates scarcity in the supply of resources, i.e., water, food, and energy (Wu et al., 2016). In this regard, strategic infrastructure development is vital to the efficiency of city dwellers, where infrastructure is regarded as a service station for the city. So, the location of these service stations should be where human movement is very frequent. For tracking human movement, cellular networks provide valuable real-time data of their movement through call detail records (Kung et al., 2014), wireless usage behavior from cellular networks, which can be used for traffic management (Gao et al., 2013), and identifying mobility patterns. This helps to establish spatial collaboration, i.e., a strong connection within a neighborhood between human movement and resource management. The less the spatial distance within the neighborhood, the weaker the connection between service points.

High degree node tend to be located in urban area as infrastructure aggregately serve a larger group of population where neighborhoods are concentrated in a small area (a); low degree node tends to be located in rural areas area (b); Source: (Wu et al., 2016)

Heat map between distribution of urban density and service points in urban (a); Position of high degree and low degree nodes where green indicates low degree and red indicates high degree (b); Source: (Wu et al., 2016)

Administrative regions and Community Regions-based infrastructure; Source: (Wu et al., 2016)

Administrative regions and community regions serve different purposes, which are easily distinguished in terms of human movement. Community regions are comprised of shared infrastructure facilities grouped by clusters of people or neighborhoods.

Blue area indicates defined administrative regions and different color indicates community regions-based infrastructure from shared network; Source: (Wu et al., 2016)

Spatial Distribution of different small clusters; Source: (Wu et al., 2016)

The method of analyzing human movement can identify small clusters or activity zones where most human movement occurs based on consumption of resources, i.e., water, food, and so on, which helps city managers prepare a better city plan.

The consumption of services can be easily estimated from these clusters, which leads to more efficient resource management. Such types of spatial collaboration with human movement can drive the future direction of this research field and explore the spatial structure of ecosystems.

References:

Gao, S., Wang, Y., Gao, Y., & Liu, Y. (2013). Understanding urban traffic-flow characteristics: A rethinking of betweenness centrality. Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design, 40(1), 135–153. https://doi.org/10.1068/b38141

Kung, K. S., Greco, K., Sobolevsky, S., & Ratti, C. (2014). Exploring universal patterns in human home-work commuting from mobile phone data. PLoS ONE, 9(6). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0096180

Singh, S., Tanvir Hassan, S., Hassan, M., & Bharti, N. (2020). Urbanisation and water insecurity in the Hindu Kush Himalaya: insights from Bangladesh, India, Nepal and Pakistan. Water Policy, 22(S1), 9-32.

United Nations. 2019. World Urbanization Prospects: the 2018 Revision (ST/ESA/SER.A/420). New York: Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division.

Wu, L., Leung, H., Jiang, H., Zheng, H., & Ma, L. (2016). Incorporating Human Movement Behavior into the Analysis of Spatially Distributed Infrastructure. PLoS ONE, 11(1). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0147216

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