Improved City Planning is a Really Good Idea.

It’s been estimated that 50 percent of the world’s population now lives in cities, with another two billion expected to move to already overcrowded urban areas in the next twenty years. The pressures of rapid urbanization often mean that careful urban planning is difficult, and may be completely overlooked in ad-hoc situations like slums.

In the hopes of helping urban planners and designers make better decisions in the face of such constraints, researchers at MIT’s City Form Research Group have launched the Urban Network Analysis (UNA) toolbox, an open-source software that uses mathematical network analysis to describe spatial patterns of cities. Often used to study social networks like Facebook, network analysis methods can also be used to better examine urban issues like accessibility, spatial patterns, urban growth and change…

Continue reading… “MIT Researchers launch software to help plan cities better — using social network analysis”