1.2 Reading – “A human-scaled GIS”

In the article, “A human-scaled GIS: measuring and visualizing social interaction in Barcelona’s Superilles” (Speranza 2018), factors that impact social interaction spatially are categorized, measured, and visualized using GIS and parametric tools such as those available through Grasshopper and Rhino. The factors that affect social interaction on such a granular level as the street scale are mostly thorough, and I look forward to taking a deeper dive into examining the data. The measurement of the data and the matrixes used to weigh the data could be impacted by the researchers’ own biases, and this would be an exciting thing to dissect to come up with a more robust data set that is repeatable by others. Additionally, I hope the same study can be done in other Superilles neighborhoods to compare to the two in the published research.

Once the other Superillas are studied, there will hopefully be enough data to suggest which factors are essential to city and neighborhood health and which, combined, would be the essential goods and services needed to facilitate more connected, active, and thriving places. Another way for this methodology to be applied to test its applicability would be to study these factors on a whole city and small-town scale within Spain.

Additionally, I think these factors identified would be a good starting point to build a study in the U.S. We are in Eugene, Oregon for this class, which is currently at just over 175k population as of the 2020 Census data. Calculating a similar 15,000 or 30,000-inhabitant district to define the downtown study area(s) would be interesting. Primarily, downtown is purely commercial and public services and not residential. I expect this study boundary would not correlate to the city’s neighborhood definition of downtown. First, examining the culture of Oregon’s cities and settlements would help determine if this methodology could be used similarly.

CITATION

Philip Speranza (2018) A human-scaled GIS: measuring and visualizing social interaction in Barcelona’s Superilles, Journal of Urbanism: International Research on Placemaking and Urban Sustainability, 11:1, 41-62, DOI: 10.1080/17549175.2017.1341426