PhD School Workshops and Academic Lecture
Academic lecture by Prof. Andres Sevtsuk (MIT)
“Modelling Pedestrian Mobility in Cities: Tools for Sustainable Urban Design”
The global challenges of climate change, public health, and urban economic competitiveness have highlighted the urgent need for analytical tools that link city design to sustainable mobility. This presentation introduces the Urban Network Analysis (UNA) framework—a modelling approach for examining land-use and transportation interactions at the pedestrian scale. The UNA framework enables planners, designers, and policymakers to assess and enhance walkability by simulating how land-use configurations and infrastructure investments influence pedestrian movement. By integrating spatial design and behavioural insights, such analyses can guide urban interventions that promote sustainable mobility, reduce carbon emissions, and improve urban livability.
Workshops
PhD School offers four parallel hands-on workshops, where participants will develop their analytical skills in mobility research using either Urban Network Analysis tools, smartphone GPS/location data, origin-destination data, or public transport data.
Participants will discuss the conceptual, methodological, and ethical aspects of big data collection, processing, analysis, visualisation, management, and decision-making. Each workshop will include an introduction session, time for working with the data and methods in groups and individually, as well as presenting and discussing the results.
Workshop 1 – “Correcting Biases in Mobile-Phone Mobility Data: The DEBIAS Framework” by Professor Francisco Rowe and Assistant Professor Carmen Cabrera, Geographic Data Science Lab, University of Liverpool
Mobile phone and app-based data have transformed how we study population mobility. Yet they are affected by biases that limit their representativeness. This workshop introduces DEBIAS, an open framework and R package designed to identify and correct such biases to produce more reliable human mobility estimates derived from digital traces collected via Internet Protocol, GPS records or Call Detail Records. Participants will learn how to measure the extent of bias coverage, diagnose representational biases due to population differences in access to and use of digital technologies, apply correction methods to mitigate these biases, and validate the resulting outputs against benchmark mobility data. The workshop blends conceptual grounding with practical data analysis and group exercises, enabling doctoral researchers to critically assess and improve digital mobility data for urban, transport and demographic research applications.
Workshop 2 – “Data Science for Transport Planning: from origin-destination to route network datasets” by Professor Robin Lovelace and PhD Candidate Juan P. Fonseca-Zamora, Leeds Institute for Transport Studies, University of Leeds
This workshop uses the large open-access dataset from the Spanish Ministry of Transport made available for participants of the course to download, and is also downloadable via the spanishoddata R package, the development of which started during Mobile Tartu 2024. OpenStreetMap data for the road network and local routing will be used as well.
Students will work through a workbook that guides them through how to work with these datasets and generate meaningful transport planning-related results. Exercises will stretch more advanced attendees.
Workshop 3- “Pedestrian modelling with Urban Network Analysis” by Assistant Professor Andres Sevtsuk, City Form Lab, MIT
This workshop will introduce participants to the concepts of modelling pedestrian flows over spatial networks using Urban Network Analysis (UNA) tools in Rhinoceros 3D and the Python Madina package. The workshop will describe the capabilities and application areas of UNA tools in walkability planning and design, provide hands-on tutorials of the different software functionalities, and introduce participants to training exercises using pre-prepared datasets. Participants will examine how built environments produce pedestrian mobility and how changes in built environments can alter pedestrian mobility, with applications in urban design, architecture, city planning, and sustainable mobility.
Workshop 4 – “Regional Inequities in Accessibility: Comparative Analysis of GTFS and Passenger Counts” by Associate Professor Anto Aasa, PhD Candidate Ago Tominga and PhD Candidate Martin Haamer, Mobility Lab, University of Tartu
Access to services and employment is inherently hierarchical, with functional regions forming around central places that act as gravity centres for surrounding catchment areas. While public transport is promoted as an alternative to private cars, low population density poses significant challenges for providing high-quality transit services in peripheral areas.
This workshop examines how the accessibility of central places via public transport (measured using GTFS data) correlates with actual travel patterns (measured through passenger counts between stops). Participants will work with real-world data to identify spatial disparities and assess whether public transport supply matches observed mobility needs in urban functional areas.
