• Neutrality on reviews of Airbnb and Couchsurfing may not have a neutral meaning

    Neutrality on reviews of Airbnb and Couchsurfing may not have a neutral meaning

    Evaluative comments, also known as reviews, are crucial for the sharing economy systems, such as Airbnb, and Couchsurfing. We reveal by studying reviews in different systems of the hosting segment that there is a considerable imbalance towards more positive reviews in the sharing economy systems. We discuss possible implications for this fact, with the help of…

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  • Public/Private Thresholds

    Public/Private Thresholds

    line Population formetics and the circulation of urban forms This research project looks deeper into the evolution of threshold spaces in the built environment to help us understand the forces that contribute to their adaptation and reproduction in cities. Fueled by the current resurgence in both cultural value and range of activities afforded by them,…

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  • New article published: The Spatial Articulation of Urban Political Cleavages

    New article published: The Spatial Articulation of Urban Political Cleavages

    line Cities as ecological niches A central question in the Urban Genome Project concerns the processes by which features of urban life reproduce themselves over time according to characteristic spatial patterns. One of the surprisingly enduring features of many cities is their characteristic political order: political alliances and oppositions expressed in their geographies. Our recently published…

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  • Exploring LA’s Restaurant Niches

    Exploring LA’s Restaurant Niches

    LA’s Mexican and Chinese Restaurant Niches A niche, as Popielarz and Neal say in their 2007 article is a set of environmental conditions under which a species thrives. As part of the Urban Genome Project, we are searching for the characteristics of ‘niches’ that allow for urban forms to reproduce, and how these characteristics may have changed…

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  • Piccard: Workshop material and cross city comparison

    line Mapping the evolution of cities The project workshop on Nov 2, 2018 includes a presentation about Piccard and related efforts to understand urban data. The presentation can be found here . Related internal resources: http://uoft.me/piccard – The Piccard interface for in-depth exploration of Census data, http://ug.daniels.utoronto.ca/~diasf/xcity/ – (Temporary link) Cross-city interface for Piccard results, allowing the discovery of similar…

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