Title: Urban Vibrancy and Safety in Philadelphia,
Abstract: Statistical analyses of urban environments have been recently improved
through publicly available high resolution data and mapping technologies that
have been adopted across industries. These technologies allow us to create
metrics to empirically investigate urban design principles of the past
half-century. Philadelphia is an interesting case study for this work, with its
rapid urban development and population increase in the last decade. We outline
a data analysis pipeline for exploring the association between safety and local
neighborhood features such as population, economic health and the built
environment. As a particular example of our analysis pipeline, we focus on
quantitative measures of the built environment that serve as proxies for
vibrancy: the amount of human activity in a local area. Historically, vibrancy
has been very challenging to measure empirically. Measures based on land use
zoning are not an adequate description of local vibrancy and so we construct a
database and set of measures of business activity in each neighborhood. We
employ several matching analyses to explore the relationship between
neighborhood vibrancy and safety, such as comparing high crime versus low crime
locations within the same neighborhood. As additional sources of urban data
become available, our analysis pipeline can serve as the template for further
investigations into the relationships between safety, economic factors and the
built environment at the local neighborhood level.