Australian Urban Research Infrastructure Network

The journey to school is a vital part of a child’s physical, psychological, and social development, offering them an opportunity to interact and engage with the world around them, building self-possession and independence. As such, developing safe and sustainable mobility options that safeguard the right of children to access their daily destinations without being dependent on cars needs to be an essential component of local planning policy. However, this cannot happen without an understanding of the various factors that enable or constrain how children travel to school. A study by researchers Hulya Gilbert and Dr Ian Woodcock, 'Is School Travel Too Complex to Handle Without a Car? Assessing “Child-Friendliness” as a Pathway to Reducing Private Car Use for Children’s Transport', aims to provide this understanding. Using 10 schools across Melbourne and Adelaide, Gilbert and Woodcock examined the role of neighbourhoods and school catchment areas in encouraging or inhibiting private car use. In their analysis, they introduced and tested a Child-Friendliness index (CFI), which assessed the different social and physical environmental features that impact how a child gets to school and the link between child-friendly infrastructure and private car usage. This process included accessing AURIN tools such as the walkability index, connectivity, diversity index, and neighbourhood generator tools, in addition to data around street connectivity, population density, land use mix, housing diversity, cycling infrastructure and street networks. You can learn more about their findings, as well as a link to the full paper, via our website! #NCRISimpact #transport #planning #data #urbandata #childrenstransport #commute #commuting #schooltransport #spatialdata #geospatialdata

I'm thrilled to be joining the Australian Delegation heading off this week to the Smart City Expo World Congress in Barcelona, thanks to the efforts from IoT Alliance Australia, IPWEA, Digital Twin Partnership and the Australian Smart Communities Association. Special mention to our Head of Delegation, the incredible Meredith Hodgman! The Australian Urban Research Infrastructure Network is the only National Digital Research Infrastructure (#NDRI) facility funded by the Australian Government to support public research in urban and infrastructure systems, as well as to enhance collaborations between academia, government and industry for more sustainable and resilient cities. We co-invest in partnerships aiming at unlocking hard-to-get data and tackling 'everyone's problem, no one's solution' issues, with strong focus on Urban Digital Twins (#UDTs). I look forward to hear and learn from most advanced smart cities/regions, as well as to discover and discuss latest technology innovations.

From July to September 2024, AURIN was cited in a wide variety of material, including nine papers published in peer-reviewed journals in addition to several masters theses and book chapters. It was exciting to see that data available through AURIN has been used by researchers across Australia and internationally to inform their analysis on electric vehicle uptake, housing for workers in the education sector, developing a nationally standardised spatial layer for greenspace, and more. We’d like to congratulate all researchers who had their work published this quarter, and look forward to seeing what comes next! #data #research #australianresearch #electricvehicles #transport #asthma #airpollution #greenspace #spatialdata #geospatialdata #ausresearch #ncrisimpact

We're looking forward to next week's eResearch Australasia Conference in Melbourne, where we'll have several AURIN team members participating and presenting! If you're attending, please make sure to say hi to one of our team at the AURIN exhibition booth – or join us during breakout sessions on Tuesday 29th October, when Emma Joughin and Loren Bruns will be contributing to conversations on hackathons, cyber-security and communicating research impact. For more on these sessions and AURIN's activities during the conference, see our site! #eResearch #ausresearch #digitalresearch #spatialdata #data #urbandata #climatedata #cybersecurity

SNAMUTS is back on AURIN! It is my pleasure to announce that updated SNAMUTS geodata for Australia's five largest capital cities in the census years 2011, 2016 and 2021 is now available through the AURIN portal: https://lnkd.in/gfvEY6fx Data for eight SNAMUTS indicators can be downloaded at SA1 level and for the geocoded reference points of each activity node (some 600-650 per year in total). The output aligns with the popular SNAMUTS maps and network diagrams, which are most easily accessed through our blog post on public transport accessibility in Australiasian cities (alongside some commentary): https://lnkd.in/ga6uFAP6 Thanks to the AURIN team for making this release possible. Enjoy!

We're very excited that updated SNAMUTS (Spatial Network Analysis for Multi-Modal Urban Transport Systems) data is now available via the AURIN Data Provider! This data covers census years 2011, 2016 and 2021, with eight SNAMUTS indicators available for download at SA1 level: https://lnkd.in/gJi9wXQA These indicators determine transport accessibility performance from a user perspective, and include service intensity, closeness centrality, degree centrality, public transport network coverage and more. SNAMUTS is a collaborative international research project headed by Carey Curtis and Jan Scheurer. For more about SNAMUTS and their work on public transport accessibility in Australasian cities, see their site: https://lnkd.in/gnStKP43

As Australia’s population ages, the HAVEN (Healthy Ageing/Vulnerable Environment) Index evaluates the age-friendliness of suburbs based on access to resources such as healthcare, green spaces, and social support. A recent study, using data accessed via AURIN, has analysed the efficacy of this tool in identifying vulnerable ageing areas and empowering policymakers to enhance age-friendly neighbourhoods. To learn more about the study, see our latest Impact Story! #NCRISImpact #ageing #ageingpopulation #policy #publicpolicy #environment #urbanplanning #urbanpolicy #greenspaces #healthcare

Nearly 80 years on, Arup still has this edge that make them unique. I thoroughly enjoyed contributing to their #Digital_Horizons webinar series focused on urban digital twins. Australian Urban Research Infrastructure Network

Fantastic to host Arup’s Digital Horizons session today on the extent to which digital twins are being used in the built environment. It was great to hear perspectives from experts across industries and the public/private sector, so a big thank you to Alexandra Luck, Victor Khoo, James Morgan and Pascal Perez, and Rick Guo for sharing: A few things that surfaced from the discussion:   1. We need the right tools and importantly the right data at the right time to feed those tools.   2. We need to continue to lower the barriers to adoption, this means understanding the ethics, culture and skills. We need to take care that the resources needed to power technology is not detrimental to our planet.   3. We can learn a lot through collaboration across industry, academia and government - each has a role to play and setting the standards is important. Digital Twins have fantastic potential as tools for planning, measuring and reducing embodied and operational decarbonisation across sectors, and it was fascinating to explore how we can accelerate and scale their impact in this area.  Thank you also to the Arup team for making this event possible including the introduction by Will Cavendish, panel facilitation from Simon Evans and ongoing support from Jingfeng Xu, Renée Wood, Chiraag Amarnani, Tim Hunt - image from behind the scenes we will release the full recording very soon!

Great to see this important research, supported by AURIN, achieve impact!