The paper was developed in collaboration with Luiz Carvalho Filho and Dr Patrizia Sulis, a former guest researcher in the section of Spatial Planning and Strategy at the Department of Urbanism, Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment at Technische Universiteit Delft and currently working at the Joint Research Centre – European Commission. The paper integrates a special issue of the journal on Data Science for Developing Cities.
The article explores building plinths with restricted visual interaction, accessibility, and public use (VSIs) are an urban feature frequently associated with degrading the public domain, limiting free access, and preventing contact between social groups. Furthermore, VSIs have been defined as products of inequality intended to isolate and impede integration between public and private urban spaces. This study examines VSIs in six cities throughout Brazil, a country known for its significant inequality and sociospatial fragmentation. The primary goals of this study are as follows: (i) to create and test a predictive model for VSIs using socioeconomic factors collected from open-source ground-truth data; and (ii) to discover VSI variance within selected case studies. Data from the city of Recife is used to generate the predictive model during the development phase. The investigation of VSIs in the cities of Fortaleza, Salvador, Belo Horizonte, Curitiba, and Porto Alegre is part of the testing phase. The model has the potential to help urban planners better identify and locate VSIs, as well as mitigate negative impacts.
You can read the open access research article here: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/23998083221093067