Mobility and the Liveable Southeast Asian Cities

PI: Dr Harvey Neo (LKYCIC, SUTD)
Team: Dr Jose Rafael Martinez Garcia (LKYCIC, SUTD)

With rapidly increasing populations, Southeast Asian cities face a range of challenges moving people and goods within and without the cities. The project focuses on how public space characteristics and urban spatial structure influence human mobility patterns. It investigates how often and from how far away people are attracted to specific locations in different ASEAN cities. The project revolves around the Visit Potential Model (VPM) which includes metrics of accessibility, attractors and built-up environment features which describes the occupancy of a public space. Some of our methodological approaches in different cities:

Jakarta

Our data collection was based on a community-based survey. The goal of this survey was to gather as many different perspectives as possible within the selected studied sites in the city. With this approach in mind, in each of the targeted communities we brought together community members, representatives from community/grassroot organizations and local governments, including academic researchers, to collect and interpret and provide inputs to community (and local government).

Phnom Penh

The study in Phnom Penh classified the city into districts and subdistricts. Characteristics of those selected districts and subdistricts were based on the Cambodian Socio-Economic Survey 2017, and this data was used as the main criteria for selection. These selections respond to the recent development and expansion of Phnom Penh, and this expansion will be increasingly important for follow-up studies or similar studies in the future, as Phnom Penh is likely to continue its rapid expansion in the near future.