Tag Archives: spatial theory

how to measure access to parks

Two simple measures of park access are the total area of parks in a city and the average distance of residences from a park. You can divide the former by population to get a normalized stat that can be compared across cities or tracked over time, and you can look at various stats on the latter such as the percent of households within 10 minutes of a park. Here are a few more ideas from a guy in Singapore.

  • length of walking and/or cycling trails
  • length of waterfronts (not sure exactly how this was defined, if it included Singapore’s concrete drainage channels in addition to oceanfront, lakes and ponds)
  • area of dense vegetation within parks
  • “supply of of park area to residential buildings” based on a decay factor (some sort of weighted average I suppose based on how much people of willing to travel – paper here)

This all makes some sense to me. I might add some measure of tree canopy. None of this does anything about the weather in Singapore. If you want to enjoy parks there, I recommend getting up very very early. Then take a nice long afternoon nap, stop by the pool if you have access to one (but if you are light skinned realize you are at the equator and you still need sunscreen late in the afternoon), and go enjoy the more urban amenities (like food, very large bottles of beer which are meant to be shared, and a variety of less family friendly entertainments I have only heard about) after dark, which is around 7 p.m. year round. One thing about Singapore is it is safe to be out at any time of night, and street food is available all night.

Tobler’s first law of geography

Since I seem to be on a kick of writing about key theories I didn’t learn in school (and perhaps I am a bit burned out thinking about politics and climate change, and I don’t have any amazing new technologies to share today), here is the first law of geography:

The first law of geography was developed by Waldo Tobler in 1970 and it makes the observation that ‘everything is usually related to all else but those which are near to each other are more related when compared to those that are further away’.  This observation which Tobler made is closely related to the ‘Law of Universal Gravitation’ and the ‘Law of Demand’ as well. The concept was first applied by Tobler to urban growth systems and was not popularly received when it was first published.  It wasn’t until the 1990s when this formulation of the concept of spatial autocorrelation became an important underlying concept in the field of GIS.