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We are back with the series of articles about the “Urban analytics” module. The topics of our last posts were “Private cars map” and “Road accidents” tools.
Today’s article is about a tool that helps distribute city benefits among its residents. When managing the development of a city, it is important to have demographic data available. Urban planners need to know the city’s population density, as well as the number of inhabitants in each house or apartment building.
Getting hold of this information can solve some city-wide issues like designing the best possible layout of public transport, grid street plans, landscaping of parks, squares and avenues, building of educational, sports and cultural facilities. Local-scale issues are also easier to solve as this information can guide the placement of household waste containers or relocation of parking spots.
The tool we developed allows visualization of the number of inhabitants in each residential building on a map. The data originates from a variety of sources. Most open to the public is the data coming from “Housing and Utilities Reform” automated system. Data resulting from calculations is also considered open source.
Automated system “Housing and Utilities Reform” is a system used by the employees of property management companies, Housing Reform Fund, local governments and state authorities, as well as the State Housing Inspection. The system holds data on the number of people living in all apartment buildings in the city.
There are regular updates of data stored in the “Housing and Utilities Reform” automated system. When data in the “Housing and Utilities Reform” system is brought up to date and imported into our system, map layer showing number of city residents is synchronized with it.
The tool generates estimated number of residents directly in the Geometa system. This estimate derives from data on buildings and structures, as well as statistical data: the average living space per person and the average family size for a certain city area. So we derived the number of residents in apartment buildings from the total building area, and in case of private housing buildings — the average family size, based on the assumption that only one family lives in one private housing building.
You can get a general idea of how densely the city is populated in different areas from reading the medium-scale map.
It makes sense to combine both sources. This means using the data of the “Housing and Communal Services Reform” for multi-apartment buildings, but taking calculated values of the average family size for private housing buildings. This way you will get more reliable information, since it’s common for luxury housing to provide more square meters per person than economy class apartments. Typically, data on housing classes in municipalities is not maintained, so the calculated values for some houses will differ significantly from the real situation.
Next article will be about “Availability of social facilities” tool.
For the information about all the capabilities of Geometa please read the “Solutions” section.
