Urban Findings
by Somwrita Sarkar, Editor Urban Findings
We announce the launch of a new section of Findings: Urban Findings, following the Findings model of short, to-the-point research findings in the broad field of urbanism. The Editorial Board is here, along with an inaugural set of papers here.
At the start of the process, we sent out a call for papers, through our Editorial Board members. We thank them for generously putting in their own time and effort towards these papers, reaching out to their networks and students for contributions, and generously helping out with the review process. This is more so because this process unfolded in a time that was extremely busy for every academic round the globe, as we grappled with the new shifted reality of combining online and face-to-face teaching, and the new reality of virtual conferences.
The papers focus on a diverse set of issues around Urbanism. The application and novel use of new sources of data, and the development of models and methods in quantitative urbanism is growing by leaps and bounds, as these papers demonstrate. A topical theme was COVID-19, to which we all have been witnesses this past year, and which has understandably, and will in the future continue to, change the way in which we think of cities. The papers span broad application and method areas, from model based creation and evaluation of synthetic cities, to empirical research on people, cities, and housing, across Australia, the US, and Canada, large scale survey design and application, and even meta-analyses such as tracking the presence of Urbanism on social media, and the interaction of climate change and housing. Also observed in the papers is the recurring theme of the close interaction between transport and locational behaviours, and the resulting areas of land use and transport interactions – we truly cannot think of cities without thinking of location (urban) and movement (transport) as an integrated whole. This brings us full circle to the reason why we thought Urban Findings should sit under a common umbrella with Transport Findings.
So, along with the launch, this is a call out for regular submissions to Urban Findings (and Transport Findings), for short, to-the-point research focussed on cities. We look forward to some excellent work!