| Author: | Guo, Zijian |
| Title: | Exploring urban mobility and sustainability from a complexity perspective |
| Advisors: | Liu, Xintao (LSGI) Shi, Wenzhong (LSGI) |
| Degree: | Ph.D. |
| Year: | 2024 |
| Subject: | Urban transportation -- Planning Sustainable development Hong Kong Polytechnic University -- Dissertations |
| Department: | Department of Land Surveying and Geo-Informatics |
| Pages: | xiii, 169 pages : color illustrations |
| Language: | English |
| Abstract: | Due to the influx of large numbers of people into cities, cities become more and more vital. However, alongside this positive aspect, various challenges are arising that affect the long-term sustainability of cities. As a subsystem of cities, urban mobility is also a complex system that plays a key role in urban management and sustainability. The complexity of urban mobility mainly encompasses three aspects: 1) Multiplicity— urban mobility encompasses various tools, operational modes, socioeconomic attributes, etc.; 2) Interactivity—the interactions between entities make their behavior unpredictable; 3) People—people possess a certain degree of behavioral flexibility that can be influenced by different factors. Three evidence-based case studies are conducted to model urban mobility at three levels, which are further used to discuss urban sustainability. At the individual level, travel intention is simulated using Vector Field to evaluate the environmental exposure risk of COVID-19 and to explore sustainability factors related to environment and social equity. At the transportation level, from the perspective of spatial heterogeneity, the completing and complementary relationships among multiple transportation modes (i.e., public transit and shared e-scooters) are assessed, and the impact of excessive competition on the sustainability of public budgets is discussed. At the regional level, a shared freight network is constructed to study the structural characteristics of urban shared freight, with a focus on social care and the sustainable growth of urban operational efficiency. Overall, three case studies show that urban mobility can be hierarchically structured, i.e., at the individual, transportation, and region levels. Each level of urban mobility can be described from a complex perspective and therefore, this thesis abstracts the basic particles from each mobility level and explains their interactions. Furthermore, this thesis provides a literature review on simulation methods, a distinct research method from evidence-based research. Such reviews inspire thoughts about the linkages between different levels. Lastly, a conceptual framework is proposed to explore the possible mechanisms of shifting from a lower level to a higher one. This framework suggests that complex systems collaborate with mechanical systems, and they alternate in the process of hierarchical ascent, manifesting as a cycle of “interaction-emergence-collaboration”. Additionally, there exists a “many-to-many” relationship between complex systems and mechanical systems, i.e., one complex system collaborates with multiple mechanical systems and one mechanical system corresponds to multiple complex systems. This thesis argues that this structure has some similarities to the structure of artificial neural networks. In summary, this thesis introduces the complexity of urban mobility and consequently identifies its hierarchical structure. At each level, urban mobility is modeled at the corresponding scale and various aspects of urban sustainability are discussed. Inspired by the mentioned evidence-based research and a literature review for the simulation study, a conceptual framework is presented, which explains each mobility level from a complex system’s perspective and discusses the possible mechanisms of connections between different levels. Policy suggestions are provided for different urban mobility scales to enhance urban sustainability in specific aspects. Exploring urban mobility from a complex systems perspective would potentially deepen the understanding of urban study and transport research. |
| Rights: | All rights reserved |
| Access: | open access |
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