CEM develops platform that brings unprecedented indicators for the São Paulo Metropolitan Region

ReSolution was developed in association with Brazilian partners and with a London research center, and includes data on segregation and accessibility.

Janaína Simões

The ReSolution project has made it possible to dynamically verify, via maps and interactive graphs, absolute and relative numbers of how different population groups are distributed in the São Paulo Metropolitan Area (RMSP). It is an innovation produced by researchers from the Center for Metropolitan Studies (CEM), one of the Research, Innovation and Dissemination Centers of the São Paulo Research Foundation (Cepid-Fapesp) in partnership with international researchers. The platform has just been launched, along with the institution's new website, and can be consulted at http://200.144.244.157:8000/resolution/.

The ReSolution portal features 97 absolute and relative variables. An example is the concentration of the white, Asian, brown and black populations in the RMSP, using the color-ethnicity indicator. In the central region of São Paulo, for example, it is noted that black and brown are predominantly located in the neighborhoods of São Joaquim, Baixada do Glicério, Praça da Sé, Parque D. Pedro, São Bento and Luz, while the white population is concentrated in the so-called 'expanded center', such as Consolação, Pacaembu, Higienópolis and Jardim Paulista. The platform provides simultaneous visualization with corresponding maps and graphs, as well as allowing for the dynamic selection of locations on the maps and graphs. It also allows specific consultations by clicking on the region of interest or point on the graph for more details.

 

 

“With ReSolution, we were able, for the first time, to create a user-friendly system that provides indicators on demography, race and immigration, religion, education, income and work on a single platform, as well as adding new indicators, on accessibility and segregation, allowing us to compare social patterns with segregation and access”, highlights Eduardo Marques, Deputy Coordinator of CEM, Coordinator of the ReSolution project and Professor in the Department of Political Science at the Faculty of Philosophy, Literature and Human Sciences at the University of São Paulo (DCP/FFLCH – USP). Additionally, the project involved the development of studies on segregation and accessibility, as well as an agent-based model that computationally simulates dynamics of residential location of different population groups and their responses to segregation patterns and differentials of accessibility to work. All research activities were carried out comparatively for London and São Paulo.

The indicators are based on the 2010 Census conducted by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE). The 2007 Origin and Destination Survey carried out by the São Paulo Metro was used by the team of Mariana Giannotti, CEM Transfer Coordinator and Professor at USP's Polytechnic School, to provide travel times and calculations for the accessibility indexes. The team of Researcher Flávia Feitosa, a Professor at the Federal University of ABC (UFABC), developed the segregation indexes, applied to the conditions of the RMSP. Both theme groups, accessibility and segregation, received support from the team of Professor Joana Barros from the geography department of Birkbeck, University of London. The agent-based model was developed in partnership with the Institute for Space Research (INPE). The project was also developed in partnership with the Researchers Mike Batty, Duncan Smith, Chen Zhong and Yao Shen of the Center for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) at University College London.

Accessibility and segregation: The great innovations

With ReSolution (Resilient Systems for Land Use Transportation), it is possible to clearly identify and quantify accessibility in urban space – a concept that captures access to job opportunities based on where you live and the transport options available. “The ReSolution portal shows on the accessibility maps how many job opportunities you can reach from your place of origin (home), taking travel time into account”, explains Mariana Giannotti.

A person who lives in the vicinity of the São Paulo Museum of Art (Masp), on Avenida Paulista, for example, has more than 1.3 million jobs within reach, within a radius of distance that can be covered in 30 minutes using public transport. For the same time and distance parameters, a resident of the Inácio Monteiro housing project in Cidade Tiradentes, a neighborhood in the East Zone of the city, has potential access to 100 times fewer jobs – just over 13,000 jobs within reach. It is clear that access to these posts is not restricted to the issue of physical access, also involving educational and occupational factors, among others, “but the measure helps to put a magnifying glass to observe how much transport can hinder access for some populations in comparison to others, sometimes adding another barrier that reinforces inequalities”, adds Mariana. This is, in fact, a central dimension of social inequalities in cities like São Paulo.

The ReSolution portal also shows and quantifies the process of spatial segregation in an unprecedented way. “To understand the different aspects of segregation, we worked on the so-called cartography of the invisible, ‘transforming’ concepts into equations using population data”, explains Joana Barros. “As there are several ways to understand segregation, we have several measures. For each concept, we have a way of measuring it ”, she adds.

The platform includes indicators of residential and occupational segregation. “Residential segregation is commonly measured, but it also makes sense to measure segregation of workplaces, given the time we spend at, or going to and from, them. As we were looking at the issue of transportation, it was interesting to have a narrative that brought these two things together”, he says.

ReSolution shows how the groups are distributed in the city, considering places of residence and work, through indicators such as dissimilarity and the H index (used in Information Theory). These indicators look at localities and compare the population composition of the area with that of the entire metropolis. Very segregated localities do not have similar compositions to the whole. "If we have, for example, three groups, and they are all over the city, they are spread evenly, we have an integrated situation", he explains.

For example, by looking at the segregation map “residential isolation from the group of higher occupations”, it is possible to observe and quantify the concentration of this population group in areas closer to the center of São Paulo. “The wealthier classes are more concentrated and isolated, spatially, but that does not mean that these groups suffer from segregation, which becomes a problem when the place where the group is located limits their access to things that will benefit their quality of life”, he points out.

Another indicator is the Exposure Index, which shows the likelihood of different groups sharing the same space. It can be seen that the highest rates are also registered in the center and expanded center of the capital, where there are a greater number of commercial establishments and jobs and where people from different social classes live together.

International Partnership

The idea for ReSolution was born out of postdoctoral research by Eduardo Marques in England in 2004, funded by Fapesp. During this period, he became acquainted with the work of the Center for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA), an interdisciplinary research center at University College London (UCL) focused on the development of computational methods, modelling and visualization applied to cities. They developed DataShine, a system that produces online maps at the smallest scale of the English census, and can very quickly generate large volumes of data from across England. “I approached them to negotiate a transfer of technology, as Brazilian webmaps were very slow, outdated and not user-friendly, but instead they proposed joint research project”, says Marques.

In this collaboration funded by Fapesp and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC-UK), researchers were able to compare indicators on socio-spatial segregation and accessibility in São Paulo and London. On the English side, the coordination was with Michael Batty, a researcher at CASA-UCL, and Joana Barros, from Birkbeck, University of London. “Accessibility is much better in London and segregation patterns are very different”, he says. In the capital of England, segregation patterns are more complex, associated with micro-segregation, a segregation process characterized by the existence of small territories of specific groups, which may be class, ethnic or religious, and which are located both within and outside the metropolis. São Paulo, by contrast, is more macro-segregated.

Benefits of dissemination and training

“One of CEM's missions is to disseminate the knowledge we produce within the academy to wider society. Developing applications focused on social themes in an interdisciplinary way, by bringing engineers and information technology professionals together with social scientists, is no easy task, but we have found a way to do that”, emphasizes the Director of CEM, Marta Arretche, political scientist and Professor at DCP/FFLCH-USP.

Marques also highlights the benefits for training within CEM itself. “The project also allowed us to innovate in our technical area, improving our databases, making it possible to integrate information and communication technology researchers into our projects, making it possible for Professor Mariana Giannotti to come to our team and update us in terms of knowledge transfer", he concludes.

 


Midia Press
Janaína Simões
E-mail: imprensa.cem@usp.br
Phone: 55 (11) 3091-2097 / 55 (11) 99903-6604