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SUMMARY:Urban wealth modelling:  individual effects analysis of planning a
 nd design - Professor Chris Webster
DTSTART:20140219T160000Z
DTEND:20140219T170000Z
UID:TALK50825@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Joanna Laver
DESCRIPTION:Professor Webster will talk about the ESRC Transformative Rese
 arch funded project: Urban Whealth Modelling. The transformative idea is t
 hat with big data\, massively powerful computing and modern advancements i
 n spatial and statistical analysis\, we should be able to detect the effec
 ts of urban planning interventions on individuals. This would help overcom
 e two major obstacles to current evaluation methodologies: the Modifiable 
 Areal Unit Problem and the Ecological Fallacy. We experiment in two impact
  domains: health and wealth. In this talk\, Professor Webster describes an
  experiment that attempts to detect the independent effects of urban desig
 n - street and services configuration - on individually measured obesity a
 nd mental health. \nThe results are surprising to planners but not to publ
 ic health professionals and scientists: urban configuration is a significa
 nt public health intervention. Shape matters. More precisely\, accessibili
 ty matters. The findings reported indicate that general and special access
 ibility (respectively\, connectivity to everything and everyone else and c
 onnectivity to specific health reducing and enhancing facilities) have an 
 independent correlation with both obesity (Body Mass Index)\, and mental h
 ealth. Professor Webster will discuss the extension of the reported study 
 to (a) the world's largest gene-social-built environment study of public h
 ealth and (b) individual-effects modelling of urban policy impacts.\n\nChr
 is Webster is Professor of Urban Planning and Head of the School of Planni
 ng and Geography at Cardiff University where he has been teaching and rese
 arching since 1984. Before taking up a university post he worked as an urb
 an planner in London and as an economic modeller in a development bank in 
 Bangkok. He is often regarded as an economist because of his style of anal
 ysis\, but most of his economics has\, in fact\, been learnt on the job. H
 e is committed to interdisciplinary research\, believing that triangulatio
 n across paradigms and methods leads to greater insight than is often foun
 d in mono-disciplinary scholarship. Since 1999 he has co-organised a multi
 -disciplinary network investigating the global spread of gated communities
  and private urban governance.\n
LOCATION:Mill Lane Lecture Room 7
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