Next week I’ll be in Montreal for the 18th International Conference on Computational Urban Planning and Urban Management (CUPUM). I have been involved in this biennial global conference since attending the 2013 conference, held at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Each event connects a unique global community of researchers who work on the intersection of computational technologies and urban problems, in areas such as urban analytics and big data, planning support systems, urban modeling, and smart cities.

Since 2013, each conference has been accompanied by an edited volume of papers to be presented at the conference, published by Springer. This year I served as lead editor of this volume, which we titled, “Intelligence for Future Cities: Planning Through Big Data and Urban Analytics.” the book’s 17 chapters contain fascinating contributions on digital cities, mobility futures, and fine-scale urban analysis. The book is available through SpringerLink through many institutional subscriptions, as well as for purchase in hardcover and softcover versions.

All of the chapters are well worth a read, and instead of picking out highlights I have decided to provide a full listing of the chapters here, grouped by section:

Digital Cities

• Hybrid Smartness: Seeking a Balance Between Top-Down and Bottom-Up Smart City Approaches (Mennatullah Hendawy, Iasmin Fernanda Kormann da Silva)
• Interpreting the Smart City Through Topic Modeling (Zhibin Zheng, Renée E. Sieber)
• The Venue Code: Digital Surveillance, Spatial (Re)organization, and Infrastructural Power During the Covid Pandemic in China (Xiaoling Chen)
• The Platformization of Public Participation: Considerations for Urban Planners Navigating New Engagement Tools (Pamela Robinson, Peter Johnson)

Mobility Futures

• Shared Micro-mobility: A Panacea or a Patch for Our Urban Transport Problems? (Zhenpeng Zou)
• Understanding Bikeability: Insight into the Cycling-City Relationship Using Massive Dockless Bike-Sharing Records in Beijing (Enjia Zhang, Wanting Hsu, Ying Long, Scott Hawken)
• Disclosing the Impact of Micro-level Environmental Characteristics on Dockless Bikeshare Trip Volume: A Case Study of Ithaca (Qiwei Song, Wenjing Li, Jintai Li, Xinran Wei, Waishan Qiu)
• A Planning Support System for Boosting Bikeability in Seoul (Madiha Bencekri, Donggyun Ku, Doyun Lee, Seungjae Lee)
• Integrating Big Data and a Travel Survey to Understand the Gender Gap in Ride-Hailing Usage: Evidence from Chengdu, China (Si Qiao, Anthony Gar-On Yeh, Mengzhu Zhang)
• Urban Airspace Route Planning for Advanced Air Mobility Operations (Xi Wang, Perry Pei-Ju Yang, Michael Balchanos, Dimitri Mavris)

Fine-Scale Urban Analysis

• “Eyes on the Street”: Estimating Natural Surveillance Along Amsterdam’s City Streets Using Street-Level Imagery (Timo Van Asten, Vasileios Milias, Alessandro Bozzon, Achilleas Psyllidis)
• Automatic Evaluation of Street-Level Walkability Based on Computer Vision Techniques and Urban Big Data (Lu Huang, Takuya Oki, Sachio Muto, Hongjik Kim, Yoshiki Ogawa, Yoshihide Sekimoto)
• Promoting Sustainable Travel Through a Web-Based Tourism Support System (Yudai Kato, Kayoko Yamamoto)
• Applying the AURIN Walkability Index at the Metropolitan and Local Levels by Sex and Age in Australia (Arsham Bassiri Abyaneh, Andrew Allan, Johannes Pieters, Sekhar Somenahalli, Ali Soltani)
• Predicting Urban Heat Island Mitigation with Random Forest Regression in Belgian Cities (Mitali Yeshwant Joshi, Daniel G. Aliaga, Jacques Teller)
• A Framework to Probe Uncertainties in Urban Cellular Automata Modelling Using a Novel Framework of Multilevel Density Approach: A Case Study for Wallonia Region, Belgium (Anasua Chakraborty, Ahmed Mustafa, Hichem Omrani, Jacques Teller)

Find links to all here. The prior volumes contain many fascinating chapters on similar topics, and are all also readily available online:

Urban Informatics and Future Cities (2021)
June 8-11, 2021, Helsinki, Finland (virtual event)

Computational Urban Planning and Management for Smart Cities (2019)
July 8-12, 2019, Wuhan, China

Planning Support Science for Smarter Urban Futures (2017)
July 10-14, 2017, Adelaide, Australia

Planning Support Systems and Smart Cities (2015)
July 7-10, 2015, Boston, MA, USA

Planning Support Systems for Sustainable Urban Development (2013)
July 2-5, 2013, Utrecht, Netherlands

Happy reading, and anyone into these topics is invited to join the CUPUM community in Montreal or our next event, to be held in 2025 (location TBA)!