For an innovative insight into using mobile phone data to increase the efficiency of the existing building stock in cities, a team of researchers from the Urban Systems Engineering Lab has won the runner-up award (2nd prize) in the NetMob 2023 Data Challenge. The team included Yuehan Yang, Zhexuan Tang and Markus Schläpfer.
A big data open innovation competition, the NetMob 2023 Data Challenge made anonymized mobile data traffic from 20 large cities in France available to international researchers for the purpose of addressing societal challenges.
The USE-Lab team proposed to couple mobile data traffic with 3D city models to explore the space-use efficiency of cities, which is becoming increasingly important in light of climate change, resource scarcity, and population growth. The team revealed a clear, ‘donut-like’ organization of cities, where the space-use efficiency is surprisingly low in the city center, becomes high in the immediate surroundings, and then low again in the suburbs. This hitherto hidden regularity reveals a large potential to increase the overall resource efficiency of cities by increasing the utilization of under-used spaces in the city centers.
Read the paper “Assessing the space-use efficiency of French cities by coupling 3D city models with mobile data traffic” online (October 6, 2023) [link to be added].
Read more about the Data Challenge, whose results were announced at the NetMob Conference in Madrid on October 6, 2023.
