The ‘Atlas of the new urban and social vulnerability in Spain’ is a research project by 300.000 Km/s in collaboration with the Cotec Foundation (Programa de Innovación Abierta 2022) that seeks to contribute new knowledge about the relationship between city, mobility and urban inequality to support the formulation of public policies and avoid potential risks of social segregation resulting from decarbonization.
Today, we are facing a profound transformation in our society. Climate change accelerated by pandemics or other energy supply crises and technological advances (teleworking, e-commerce, or e-learning) guides us towards reducing mobility in urban environments. Until now, cities have been an ideal mechanism for generating complexity and social inclusion.
However, the new low-mobility urban models (that promote health and social well-being) entail the risk of population clustering due to the new spatial dynamics that reduce interaction between different social groups (with diverse demographic and economic characteristics). At the same time, the relationship with the urban environment that contains uses and defines public spaces in cities is crucial to mitigating or exacerbating these impacts.
The research is based on advanced techniques for analyzing massive data (resulting from a unique context in Europe) that allow us to describe the citizens’ movements through mobile network origin-destination data, socioeconomic level, and urban fabrics and their uses.
In this context, the results of the project (which will be progressively published in the form of open data, a replicable methodology, an interactive narrative, and a recommendations document) aim to generate a description of this phenomenon that allows us to understand which areas of the territory will be able to transition more easily towards this new model of social and productive organization and where there are risks of stratification.
These new metrics will allow us to analyze and anticipate this transition. This change of model must be addressed through urban planning and public policies to ensure that it occurs successfully, in the shortest possible time, and strengthens society.