I recently concluded 2 urban #datascience projects that I dreamt of doing since a long time, with 2 super talented MSc students who visited us @nerdsitu last year from Germany, Carlson @cbueth and Henrik Wolf.

superblockify: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.15062
CoolWalks: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.01225

superblockify: A Python Package for Automated Generation, Visualization, and Analysis of Potential Superblocks in Cities

superblockify is a Python package for partitioning an urban street network into Superblock-like neighborhoods and for visualizing and analyzing the partition results. A Superblock is a set of adjacent urban blocks where vehicular through traffic is prevented or pacified, giving priority to people walking and cycling. The Superblock blueprints and descriptive statistics generated by superblockify can be used by urban planners as a first step in a data-driven planning pipeline, or by urban data scientists as an efficient computational method to evaluate Superblock partitions. The software is licensed under AGPLv3 and is available at https://superblockify.city.

arXiv.org
@nerdsitu @cbueth @supergrobi Carlson implemented "superblockify" - a Python library for partitioning an urban street network into Superblock-like neighborhoods and for visualizing and analyzing the partition results. Try it out at: https://superblockify.city - submitted to @joss, funded by #juststreets
superblockify documentation — superblockify 1.0.0 documentation

@nerdsitu @cbueth @supergrobi Henrik studied "CoolWalks" - the potential for shaded walking, using building footprints and street networks from both synthetic and real cities. It is an intricate problem, but super important for climate adaptation, since using shadow from existing buildings is very effective but quite understudied.
@mszll This looks really cool - thank you for sharing
@mszll @nerdsitu @cbueth @supergrobi Also would be good to look at Japan, which has tons of streets with awnings that extend over the sidewalk. Shōtengai are the most prototypical example of this https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sh%C5%8Dtengai
Shōtengai - Wikipedia