Street Smarts
Andres Sevtsuk applies new data tools to explore what facilitates social ties and face-to-face interactions on city streets, building stoops, and local businesses in city spaces. His research is partially funded by the HPI–MIT joint research program “Designing for Sustainability,” administered by MAD.
By Peter Dizikes | MIT News
Dec 20, 2024
This article was originally published on MIT News on December 15, 2024.
Dozens of major research labs dot the streets of Kendall Square, a Cambridge, Massachusetts, neighborhood in which MIT partially sits. But for Andres Sevtsuk’s City Form Lab, the streets of Kendall Square themselves, and those in other cities, are subjects for research.
“What resonates with students is that when we look closely at the complex organized systems of cities, we can make sense of how they work,” Andres Sevtsuk says.
Photo: Adam Glanzman
Sevtsuk is an associate professor of urban science and planning at MIT and a leading expert in urban form and spatial analysis. His work examines how the design of built environments affects social life within them. The way cities are structured influences whether street-level retail commerce can thrive, whether and how much people walk, and how much they encounter each other face to face.
Sevtsuk says.
However, many things Sevtsuk studies do not come with much pre-existing data. While some aspects of cities are studied extensively — vehicle traffic, for instance — fewer people have studied how urban planning affects walking and cycling, which most city governments seek to increase.
To counter this trend, several years ago Sevtsuk and some research assistants began studying foot traffic in several cities, as well as Kendall Square — how much people walk, where they go, and why. Most urban walking trips are destination-driven: People go to offices, eateries, and transit stops. But a lot of pedestrian activity is also recreational and social, such as sitting in a square, people-watching, and window-shopping. Eventually Sevtsuk emerged with an innovative model of pedestrian activity, which is based around these spatial networks of interaction and calibrated to observed people counts.
He and his colleagues then scaled up their model and took it to major cities around the world, starting with the whole downtown of Melbourne, Australia. The model now includes detailed street characteristics — sidewalk dimensions, the presence of ground floor businesses, landscaping, and more — and Sevtsuk has also helped apply it to Beirut and, most recently, New York City.
“City environments that allow us to get more things done on foot tend to not only make people healthier, but they are more sustainable in terms of emissions and energy use, and they provide more social encounters between different members of society, which is fundamental to democracy,” Sevtsuk says.
Photo: Adam Glanzman
The project is typical of Sevtsuk’s research, which creates new ways to bring data to urban design. In 2023, Sevtsuk and his colleagues also released a novel open-source tool, called TILE2NET, to automatically map city sidewalks from aerial imagery. He has even studied interactions on the MIT campus, in a 2022 paper quantifying how spatial relatedness between departments and centers affects communications among them.
For his research and teaching, Sevtsuk received tenure at MIT earlier this year.
Growing and living in cities
Sevtsuk is originally from Tartu, Estonia, where his experiences helped attune him to the street life of cities.
Initially interested in studying architecture, Sevtsuk received a BArch degree from the Estonian Academy of Arts, then a BArch from the Ecole d’Architecture de la Ville et des Territoires, in Paris. Over time, he became increasingly interested in city design and planning, and enrolled as a master’s student at MIT, earning his SMArchS degree in 2006 while studying how technology could help us better understand urban social processes.