Looking for Human Footprint in Nature: Collaborative Mapping for Monitoring of Self-organized Patterns in Human Trail Systems
ISBN 978-85-88783-11-9
Authors
1Vahidi, H.; 2Mobasheri, A.; 3Wanglin, Y.
1KEIO UNIVERSITY Email: vahidi@sfc.keio.ac.jp
2UNIVERSITY OF HEIDELBERG Email: amin.mobasheri@geog.uni-heidelberg.de
3KEIO UNIVERSITY
Abstract
Desire path also known as a desire line or social trail is a technical term which has been applied for a path that formed as a consequence of pedestrians walking in the formal urban environment by urban planners for almost a hundred year. A desire path is normally formed by people based on a bottom-up process , in the absence of a designed sidewalk or an official route to the desired destination of pedestrians in the urban areas. Furthermore when an existed designed rout cannot meet the general principles of human logic in path formation, a desire path may be formed based on human preference. In this case, usually a shortcut is emerged as a consequence of pedestrians’ footprints in the urban environment.Bottom up process of growth in trail system is initiated from the different daily behaviours of human in the context of an environment and is influenced by various social, economical and physical factors. The emergence of the spatio-temporal patterns in the human trail systems are originated from the presence of collective behavioural patterns evolving from the pedestrians’ actions and interactions in the environment. Clear understanding of trail formation dynamic enables the architects and urban planners to: 1- design the formal paths in the open spaces based on the logic of human path formation to stop the formation of informal shortcuts in the planned environment, 2-develop a robust model to simulate the growth pattern of informal infrastructure (trail system) and subsequently growth direction in the informal settlements. Up to now, not enough attention has been paid to understand the different social, economical and physical factors that may influence the complex dynamic of trail formation. So, to understand the role of the different driving forces in trail formation dynamic and the performance mechanism of them clearly, mapping and monitoring of the complex trail patterns seems to be necessary.The trail system may form at the different spatial scale anywhere, in the planned environment (e.g. open spaces in the street, park, university campus, etc) or in the unplanned environment (e.g. wild nature, informal settlement) on the grass, bare soil or snow. To map the different emergent spatial patterns in the context of human trail system, and record the different scenarios and driving forces that impacted trail formation dynamic, a collaborative mapping approach has been used in this study. However, capturing and collection of the data on the formed trail patterns and the respective contexts in the environment is a time and energy consuming task.To reduce the above-mentioned problems we adopted a decentralized and distributed approach to aggregate the user-generated spatio-temporal contents on the observed trail systems in the nature, from a group of volunteers. So in this context, we used the functionalities of “5D World Map System” (5DWM) platform that was developed at Keio University, Japan to conduct this task. 5DWM is a location-based knowledge creation and sharing system which enables semantic, temporal and spatial analysis of multimedia, integrates and visualizes the analyzed the location-based information as a 5-dimentional dynamic temporal atlas.The main feature of this system is to create various context-dependent spatio-temporal patterns of environmental and social phenomena according to a user’s viewpoints dynamically. The 5DWM WebGIS system was used to store, visualize, manage and analyze the different collaboratively collected location-based data (e,g, digitized spatial data layers, GPS data, image, video and text) on the physical and non-physical characteristics of the observed trail systems in the environment. In this context, some spatio-temporal and semantic analysis have been done on the collaboratively collected data by using the functionalities of 5DWM and the different categories trail systems have been classified based on the existing spatial patterns and driving forces in the trail formation process.