Tuesday, 09/17/2024
2:00 PM
Steinman Hall #312
Dr. Matteo Bruno, SONY CSL – Rome
“From the 15-Minute City to Distant Opportunities: How Inequalities of Accessibility Shape Our Cities”
ABSTRACT
The concept of the “15-minute city” has emerged as a vision for creating more equitable and accessible urban environments, where essential services and opportunities are within a short walk or bike ride from residents’ homes. However, while some cities are already adherent to this concept, others might find a transition to proximity services challenging. Based on open data, we developed a POI relocation algorithm to show how, in an “ideal” scenario where services in a city are distributed as equally as possible, different cities have a different potential to become 15-minute cities.
Furthermore, many opportunities cannot be easily adapted to the 15-minute city concept: disparities in transportation contribute to unequal access to both close and far opportunities. A “city of opportunities” concept can better describe the essential reasons we decide to live in cities. A new index, measuring how much urban life is dependent on cars, will help us understand why cars have become so dominant in modern cities and how we can think of transitioning to more sustainable solutions.
BRIEF ACADEMIC/EMPLOYMENT HISTORY:
A mathematician by training, Matteo obtained a PhD in network science in 2021 from IMT – School for Advanced Studies in Lucca, where he studied bipartite networks models and their applications to different disciplines. Since 2021 he has been an associate researcher at Sony CSL – Rome, a no-profit Sony research laboratory in Rome, where he is one of the main researchers of the Sustainable Cities research line. He has specialized in the science of cities and develops novel models for creating sustainable and healthy urban environments, creating data-based tools for policy makers to make smarter, more informed decisions.
MOST RECENT RESEARCH INTERESTS:
Matteo has two main research interests: city science and network science. Within the field of science of cities, his research interests are leaning towards accessibility, socio-economic inequalities, mobility and geospatial data science. The goal of his work is to develop data-based models and digital twins to understand the current challenges and propose novel solutions. His research explores cities at different scales, and applies methods from complex systems and complex networks to gain new insights on urban life and how to create a more sustainable environment. In the field of network science, he’s still actively interested in bipartite networks models and applications, using null models to explain real-world features such as ecological nestedness, modularity and economic complexity.
