Best paper award on Spatial Analysis for Ruth Nelson

Ruth Nelson, a PhD researcher in the department of Multi-Actor Systems and the Centre for Urban Science and Policy (CUSP), was awarded the Best Paper on Spatial Analysis at the annual Geographical Information Systems Research Conference United Kingdom (GISRUK) on the 12th of April 2024. The paper focuses on integrating ethical principles into urban planning with an emphasis on neighbourhood accessibility. An extended abstract can be accessed here. The award was granted to Ruth due to the innovative application of ethical theories to spatial analytics, co-authored by Martijn Warnier and Trivik Verma.

About the paper

Research in accessibility has advanced our understanding of social and spatial inequalities in the distribution of urban resources globally. As a result, there's a growing focus on integrating justice into urban planning. However, there's a lack of clear measures in planning for spatial justice linked to specific ethical principles at a neighbourhood level. In this study, we propose a reproducible framework to evaluate neighbourhood accessibility based on three different ethical principles of fairness. We use urban network models, created from open-source transportation, land use, and street network data to evaluate neighbourhood access to opportunities (places of employment) in cities based in the Netherlands, Mexico, and South Africa. Our results highlight the scale, value, and context dependent nature of spatial justice. Overall, this framework and associated metrics provide a tool for ethically informed urban planning and facilitates comparisons across different urban settings to identify universal or context specific factors influencing spatial justice.