Research themes

Our dynamic society is shaped by interactions between people, and between people and their surrounding environment, both social and physical. The mobility of people is a key proxy for indicating socio-spatial interactions, and thus for understanding how societies function, and change in time and space. Mobility is linked with the underlying spatial patterns of accessibility, a prerequisite for potential encounters. 

We at the Digital Geography Lab are particularly interested in the use of novel data sources complemented with traditional data to analyse population flows and dynamics, individuals’ mobility and activity spaces, spatial accessibility, and how these change in time. We combine mobility analytics with social media content analysis to enhance our understanding on spatial (in)equalities and integration, cross-border interactions and transnationalism, linguistic landscapes, urban sustainability, and health and wellbeing related questions. Our work contributes to the fields of urban geography and regional studies, transport and spatial planning, tourism, and health research. 

Related projects:

• Enhanced URBAN planning for AGE-friendly cities through disruptive technologies (URBANAGE)
• The rhythms, places and customer groups of multi-local dwelling / Monipaikkaisen asumisen rytmit, paikat ja asiakasryhmät (MOPA)
• Equality in suburban physical activity environments / Yhdenvertainen liikunnallinen lähiö (YLLI)
• Tracing Interactions and Mobilities Beyond State Borders: Towards New Transnational Spaces (BORDERSPACE)
• Sporttia stadiin / Urban exerciser 
• Mapping the linguistic landscape of the Helsinki metropolitan area: From linguistic groups to discourse communities (MAPHEL)
• Socio-spatial dialogues in the city: Tracing spatial mobilities, social engagement and integration using big data
• Whose city? Investigating modal equity and parallel realities of accessibility in urban environments with big data
• Cycling as part of sustainable urban mobility in Helsinki region
• MetropAccess -  Accessibility analyses in a metropolitan context

Sustaining good environmental conditions is crucial for the health and wellbeing of both the planet and humankind. The possibility to access, use, and enjoy green areas is also an issue of social justice. At the Digital Geography Lab, we study human-nature interactions from various perspectives: how do people use green areas, how equal are their opportunities for being exposed to nature and how can we ensure a sustainable co-existence of biodiversity and people? We use various big and small data in our analyses, ranging from satellite images to social media data, GPS tracks, street view imagery, expert assessments combined with various environmental data layers such as air quality data and noise pollution data. We apply a wide range of methods including various GIS approaches, spatial prioritization, environmental exposure analysis and expert elicitation. Through our analyses, we address key issues in sustainable land use planning, biodiversity conservation, and environmental health research. 

Related projects:

• Greener Urban Travel Environments for Everyone: From measured wellbeing impacts to Big Data analytics (GREENTRAVEL)
• Mobile Big Data for Understanding People in Nature: detecting short and long term changes and their implications to biodiversity conservation (MOBICON)
• HOPE – Healthy Outdoor Premises for Everyone
• Social media for conservation science
• Spatial Planning of Urban Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services
• Sustainable conservation outcomes for protected areas

Related tools:

• Green Paths Routing Tool

The amount of data being collected about individuals and the environment, either actively or passively, is growing exponentially. Open data movement has made many publicly produced datasets easily available for research. Private companies are collecting unprecedented amounts of data on individuals through apps and mobile devices, which we seek to use for the common good. Taking full advantage of the growing body of data resources for increased understanding of spatial phenomena requires novel data mining, analysis and visualisation methods. In our work, we take advantage of the recent advancements in the fields of (geo) data mining, geoinformatics, Artificial Intelligence and visualisation techniques to develop tools and data products that can help to study socio-spatial interactions and human–nature interactions. Whenever possible, we share our tools and data openly. We have extensive global data resources collected from social media platforms (Twitter, Instagram and Flickr) and have published a widely used Travel Time Matrix for the Helsinki region in 2013, 2015 and 2018.  We have also recently published a public Green Paths routing tool for finding pleasant walking and cycling routes in the Helsinki region.

Data and tools:

• 24-hour population distribution dataset for Helsinki Metropolitan Area
• Helsinki Region Travel Time Matrix -dataset
• Tools for measuring accessibility by different travel modes
• Tools for mining and analyzing social media data
• Green Paths routing tool
• Green view dataset for Helsinki
• tweetsearcher: A Python tool to download Tweets using Academic Research credentials

GitHub:

• https://github.com/digitalgeographylab
• https://github.com/AccessibilityRG

Related projects:

• Zonation & RobOff: for conservation planning