Understanding the Interdependency of Land Use and Mobility for Urban Planning

Abstract

Urban planners and economists alike have strong interest in understanding the inter-dependency of land use and people flow. The two-pronged problem entails systematic modeling and understanding of how land use impacts crowd flow to an area and in turn, how the influx of people to an area (or lack thereof) can influence the viability of business entities in that area. With cities becoming increasingly sensor-rich, for example, digitized payments for public transportation and constant trajectory tracking of buses and taxis, understanding and modelling crowd flows at the city scale, as well as, at finer granularity such as at the neighborhood level, has now become possible. Integrating such understanding with heterogeneous data such as land use profiles, demographics, and social media, enables richer studies on land use and its interdependence on mobility. In this work, we share findings from our preliminary efforts and identify key lines of research inquiry that can help urban planners towards data-driven policy decisions.