Lunch with Yuji Yoshimura, Researcher in Urban Ecology

Summary of the pointer shared during my last week meeting with Urban Ecology Agency of Barcelona researcher/architect/computer scientist Yuji Yoshimura.

While talking about the dark side of technologies and how to use them he mentioned by the work of french sociologist Paul Virilio around technology and accidents (accident is diagnostic of technology).

On my idea to build an experiment around tourists in Barcelona (investigate their navigation in a unknown urban environment with a preset mental model from tourist guides), he referenced me the work of Antonio? Rubio on defining a mental map Barcelona: Rubio,A.(1995): la imatge mental de l’Eixample de Barcelona. en A.Serratisa y otros, Semiotica de l’Eixample Cerda, Barcelona: Edicions Proa, 33-43. Similarly there was an exposition last year sponsored by Telefonica Foundation on mobility called “Mira cómo se mueven. Cuatro ideas sobre movilidad“.

Yuji is working on the modeling and simulation of pedestrian navigation in urban spaces. A very immature field, because it still extremly hard to collect real data and evaluate the models. A few goups work on that subject, the main one being Space Syntax. It is the laboratory at the Bartlett school at University College London. They built a simulation that predicts the relationships between urban morphology and the number of pedestrians. Carlos Rotti question their approach in: Ratti, C. (2004). Space syntax: some inconsistencies. Environment and Planning B – Planning and Design 31(4), 501–511.

Another institution working on that domain is CASA. I was aware of Intelligent Space Partnership.

We talked about spatial annotation and the WikiMap project by the Medialab Madrid. Similarly, there was a project ran a few weeks ago on the “Inaccessible Barcelona” in which 40 people with disabilities used mobile phones to photograph every obstacle they come across on the city’s streets. By means of multimedia messages they create a web map of inaccessible Barcelona. This project is part of a larger initiative called Zexe that allow people with disabilities, prostitutes, gypsies and taxi drivers broadcast from mobile phones. We talked about the incentives of spatial annotations and why it sometimes (often) fails.

Spatial annotation (pictures + comments) done by disabled people with mobile phones on the inaccessible spaces in Barcelona.

That lead use into talking about the difficulties of urban data collection and projects such as traffic noise mapping.

Relation to my thesis: First lunch already lead to common project ideas. I also plan on Yuji’s support to help me contextulize my experiments in a real-world urban environments. He has a lot of experience in that domain.