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GIS Applications in Urban Environments

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GIS applications in urban environments
Sponsored by the GISci study group

Cities – surveilled, highly populated, diverse and complex systems – are the focus of research across many disciplines. Of key concern in geography is the spatial interaction between health, human activity, mobility, and the configurations of the urban form. GIScience has played a key role in modelling and analyzing the role of built environments in shaping and being shaped by human activities. Among the many examples that illustrate the value of rigorous GIScience for improving cities, traditional GIS applications have been used extensively to measure and model economic growth, health outcomes, population growth, and mobility.

Over the course of the last decade, however, new technologies have emerged that are fundamentally reshaping the ways that cities are researched, planned, and managed. The rise of citizen science and volunteered geographic information have resulted in a growth of different kinds of data. The rise of interdisciplinary methods have resulted in new ways of predicting and analyzing human movement and urban configurations. A proliferation of urban sensors have also resulted in the smart city movement, where a variety of data is being brought together to form new insights about how we move, live, and work. Making sense of this data is the crux of GIScience; new GISystems are analyzing how the cities we live in shape and are shaped by us. Different representations of cities are allowing us to understand the structure of urban environments; various models and methods of analysis are allowing us to explore complex relationships between urban environments and health outcomes; city growth and new developments are analyzed as different kinds of urban environments altogether.

In this session, we aim to bring together diverse scholarly perspectives motivated by GIScience to present a balanced approach to urban livability and health, highlighting both the opportunities and pervasive problems associated with this field of study. As such, we welcome empirically grounded, conceptually motivated papers on topics such as, but not limited to:

- IoT, monitoring in sensor-laden urban settings
- Open, volunteered and/or big data of the smart city
- Persistent inequalities in access and use of smart technologies
- Social determinants of health
- Walk, bike, and transit analysis
- Accessibility of the built environment
- Longitudinal studies of capturing changes in urban environments
- Mobility and human activity in urban environments (ageing populations, children, other subpopulations)
- Comparisons between urban, rural, periurban, suburban environments
- Representations of urban environments (topological, morphological, fractal)
- Ontologies and methodologies of measuring the built environment
- Urban science, complexity science, other interdisciplinary methods

We are especially excited to meet fellow researchers (and students!) in geography and other disciplines who are applying geospatial techniques in novel ways to understand and improve urban environments.

To participate in this session, please send your abstract to Aateka Shashank <ashashan@sfu.ca> and Victoria Fast <victoria.fast@ucalgary.ca> by March 14th, 2019.