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Familiar strangers—individuals related through regular and repeated visual encounter occurring without verbal interaction—may reduce the risk of crime at places by increasing guardianship and internal motivation for norm compliance. This study examines the association between familiar stranger presence and incidents of theft and disorder at train stations using transit smart card and crime data for 22 stations across a six-month period. Familiar strangers are operationally defined as individual transit cards that are co-present within a 30-min temporal window on more than two occasions across a one-month period at a given train station. We apply logistic regression to estimate the likelihood of disorder and theft crimes within a 400-m radius of train stations controlling for station environmental features, co-located facilities and neighbourhood socio-demographic characteristics. Our results show that the impact of familiar strangers on crime (disorder and theft) at train stations is moderated by the neighbourhood socio-demographic context. This may suggest that macro-level norms of informal social control are important for determining crime at micro-places such as transit stations. The findings also indicate that urban design and transport policies require greater flexibility to enable intra-network variability in station design and formal security to enhance ridership.

Understanding and enhancing community resilience is a global priority as societies encounter a rising number of extreme weather events. Given that these events are typically both sudden and unexpected, community resilience is typically examined after the disaster so there can be no before and after comparisons. As such, the extent to which existing community capacities buffer the effects of a traumatic event remains largely unexamined and untested in the literature. Drawing on a longitudinal study of 148 Brisbane suburbs, we examine the key community processes associated with community resilience to the crime before and after the 2011 Brisbane floods. We introduce a novel disaster severity index to simultaneously capture the direct and indirect impacts of the flood and embed this measure within our modeling framework. Results from the models provide important insights for predisaster preparedness and postdisaster rebuilding and recovery.

The last few decades have seen the intensity of internal migration decline in Australia and other advanced economies including the United States. Recent evidence suggests that changes in the composition of the population alone do not account for this persistent downward trend. This has led migration scholars to suspect that more profound behavioural changes driven by social, economic, and technological transformations are at play and that shifts in migration behaviour are likely to be reflected in changes in reasons for migration. We use data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey to shed new light on the factors driving the decline in internal migration in Australia between 2002 and 2018. This is done by examining annual trends in self-reported reasons for intrastate and interstate migration and applying a series of pooled logistic regressions. Results reveal a decline across all reasons for migration, and not only employment-related migration contrary to explanations proposed in the extant literature. The decline in employment-related migration does not appear to be the result of a rise in alternative forms of mobility such as teleworking or substitution with inter-industry or occupation mobility. Furthermore, we also find that the negative effect of duration of residence has increased for family-related migration. Collectively, these findings suggest that behavioural change, particularly increased place attachment, may have contributed to the decline in internal migration.

Having begun as a short-term rental platform in major cities, Airbnb has now extended to many remote and regional areas of Australia. One effect of this spread has been disruption to the conventional rental industry, which stimulates micro-entrepreneurship in local communities directly through short-term accommodation and indirectly through related industries. Given Australia’s core–periphery settlement structure, resulting from the country’s historical development, disruption through entrepreneurship has relatively more potential in remote and regional areas. This article uses the Porter diamond model to explain how Airbnb-led micro-entrepreneurship interacts with territorially embedded socioeconomic characteristics across regional and remote Australia. Drawing on Airbnb data for Australia between 2014 and 2018 at the scale of regional labour markets, we use a quantile regression model to explain the association between Airbnb-led micro-entrepreneurship and four distinct structural dimensions between metropolitan and non-metropolitan regions. The analysis provides evidence that non-metropolitan regions have certain stronger competitive advantages for attracting Airbnb-led micro-entrepreneurship compared with metropolitan regions, particularly across regional cities and in areas associated with mining, agriculture, and tourism. We conclude that policymakers should weigh concerns relating to peer-to-peer accommodation in major metropolitan regions against the purported benefits to peripheral regions.

Globally, the COVID-19 pandemic has induced a mental health crisis. Social media data offer a unique opportunity to track the mental health signals of a given population and quantify their negativity towards COVID-19. To date, however, we know little about how negative sentiments differ across countries and how these relate to the shifting policy landscape experienced through the pandemic. Using 2.1 billion individual-level geotagged tweets posted between 1 February 2020 and 31 March 2021, we track, monitor and map the shifts in negativity across 217 countries and unpack its relationship with COVID-19 policies. Findings reveal that there are important geographic, demographic, and socioeconomic disparities of negativity across continents, different levels of a nation's income, population density, and the level of COVID-19 infection. Countries with more stringent policies were associated with lower levels of negativity, a relationship that weakened in later phases of the pandemic. This study provides the first global and multilingual evaluation of the public's real-time mental health signals to COVID-19 at a large spatial and temporal scale. We offer an empirical framework to monitor mental health signals globally, helping international authorizations, including the United Nations and World Health Organization, to design smart country-specific mental health initiatives in response to the ongoing pandemic and future public emergencies.

Whilst some land uses are highly criminogenic, others remain largely free of crime. This patterning is a reflection of the types and timing of daily activities that take place in a given land use and the opportunities that this presents for crime. While the criminology literature has developed a rigorous understanding of geographic component of crime, relatively less emphasis has been placed on the temporal dimension. Here, we address this through applying a technique to examine micro-temporal variations in crime at places. This technique adopts a factor approach to model hourly counts of crime across seven land use types (commercial, residential, parkland, agricultural, medical/hospital, industrial and education) to unveil the number and distribution of crime signals across a 24-hour period along with how these signals mix across each land use type. Results reveal clear and distinct differences between crime type and land use, highlighting the diurnal nature of crime patterns and speak to the literature on risky places and risky times. The utility of our approach lies in its capacity to delineate common temporal rhythms and how these rhythms are shared across different land use types.

The land use mosaic that characterises our urban environments is complex and subject to regular and on-going change and transition. Land use change takes place as cities seek to meet ever evolving population, economic, social, and environmental objectives. However, our empirical capacity to map, measure and monitor the geographical shifts in land use at a fine spatial granularity and how these aggregate across the urban environment remain very limited. In this paper, we draw on parcel level land use data for a large metropolitan region in Australia for a 19-year period and employ sequence analysis to delineate the location and timing of shifts in land use. Results reveal both similarities between jurisdictional regions alongside the unique land use transitions that go some way to highlight context specific mechanisms. This study demonstrates the utility of our empirical approach in its capacity to inform regional development strategies through revealing the type, timing and location of land use change in relation to land use policy and planning goals.

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Neighbourhood places like shops, cafes and parks support a variety of social interactions ranging from the ephemeral to the intimate. Repeated interactions at neighbourhood places over time lay the foundation for the development of social cohesion and collective efficacy. In this study, we examine the proposition that changes in the presence or arrangement of neighbourhood places can destabilise social cohesion and collective efficacy, which has implications for crime. Using spatially integrated crime, social survey and parcel-level land-use classification data, we estimate mixed effects panel models predicting changes in theft and nuisance crimes across 147 Australian neighbourhoods. The findings are consistent with neighbourhood social control and crime opportunity theories. Neighbourhood development – indicated by fewer vacant properties and fewer industrial and agricultural sites – is associated with higher collective efficacy and less crime over time. Conversely, introducing more restaurants, transit stations and cinemas is associated with higher theft and nuisance over time regardless of neighbourhood collective efficacy. We argue that the addition of socially conducive places can leave neighbourhoods vulnerable to crime until new patterns of sociability emerge and collective efficacy develops.

This paper examines the role of local weather conditions in explaining variations in assault, in sub-tropical Brisbane, Australia. It details the extent to which local variations in weather are important in shaping the necessary preconditions for assault to take place. Results suggest that higher daily temperatures are associated with an increased propensity for assault at the neighborhood level after controlling for seasonal effects. Assaults occur significantly less frequently in summer than in spring and there is a greater propensity for assaults to occur on weekends compared to weekdays. Neighborhood disadvantage, ethnic diversity, and the presence of risky facilities such bars, schools, or shops increased the propensity for assault above and beyond the effect of temperature. Findings are important in their capacity to isolate the effect of the prevailing local weather conditions whilst controlling for seasonal variations, land use, and the socio-economic and demographic context within which assaults took place.

Understanding and monitoring socio-spatial patterns of population walking mobility can inform urban planning and geographically targeted health promotion strategies aimed at increasing population levels of physical activity. In this study we use aggregated, anonymous mobile phone mobility data to examine the association between neighbourhood physical and social characteristics and residents' weekly walking behaviour across 313 neighbourhoods in a large metropolitan region of Queensland, Australia. We find that residents in neighbourhoods that are highly fragmented by streets with speed limits above 50 kmph, residents in neighbourhoods with high retail density and those living is economically disadvantaged neighbourhoods walk fewer kilometres and minutes on average per week than their counterparts. These findings can inform urban planning policy on the minimum specifications required in newly developing neighbourhoods and provide targets for retro-fitting features into existing neighbourhoods.

This paper investigates the utility of information and communication technologies data for the measurement of visitation dynamics in third places across a large metropolitan university campus. A suite of seven metrics encompassing intensity, popularity, capacity, tempo, dwell, churn, and periodicity are employed to describe the visitation dynamics of each third place. Findings suggest that despite overt functional similarities, significant variability exists in the visitation dynamics of third places. Increasing pervasiveness of Wi-Fi networks in public spaces will improve the utility of social sensing data in recording the spatial and temporal dynamics of visitation.

Smartcard-based public transit systems have been widely adopted across many cities around the world. These systems generate large volumes of transaction records from individual passenger trips and contain the requisite information that enable the mapping, measurement and monitoring of fare equity. In this paper, we propose and apply new measures to evaluate fare equity using smartcard data to map changes in fare equities following a fare policy reform across a major metropolitan region in Australia. Smartcard data is used to first reconstruct individual travel trajectories on which we compute our measures to explore two dimensions of equity: (1) ‘horizontal’ (for all passengers) versus ‘vertical’ (different types of passengers); and, (2) ‘global’ (across the entire transit network) versus ‘local’ (for a specific travel zone). Results reveal that in the first dimension the fare policy reform led to more equitable fares with the effect of diminishing spatial variations under the old policy for all types of transit passengers (adults, children, seniors and concession card holders); however, the impact of this fare policy reform reflected in the second dimension is subject to the number of zones travelled, residential location of passengers, the number of journeys made within the week and the applicable incentives. Finally, we draw on our empirical approach to report on a prototype dashboard through which public transit agencies have the capacity to map, measure and monitor how ridership translates to fare equities. More generally, we highlight the capacity of smartcard data, when embedded within our empirical framework, to better inform smarter policy around fare reforms in order to achieve greater equity across service populations.

Successive waves of international migration have rendered the residential patterns of cities a variegated patchwork of ethnical communities and spaces. Various theories attempt to account for this diversity, with particular regard to the motivations and drivers that explain the settlement pathways of individuals and households vis-a-vis co-ethnic residents in their city. This study provides a refined understanding of how the settlement pathways of international migrants are shaped by their residential mobility after arrival in the destination city. Applying a ‘segmented assimilation’ model, we assert that the residential mobility of international migrants is accompanied by the formation of both ethnic concentration and deconcentration simultaneously, the extent of which is determined by migrant-specific characteristics and neighbourhood features. To illustrate this, we examine the residential mobility of Mainland China (MC)-born migrants in Australia since settlement. We analyse primary survey collected by WeChat, a mobile application, to track residential mobility over the course of individuals’ settlement in Australia, the principal motives behind each move, and the determinants of successive residential moves. The findings indicate that residential moves correspond to three phases — the first tied to certain migrant-specific characteristics and in particular English proficiency, the second tied to education/career and residential environment, and the third driven by ‘optimisation’, which reflects a desire to co-locate with friends and family, or to be closer to work and transport options. Segmented assimilation, as reflected by residential mobility, is stratified within migrant concentrations and distinguished by space, and this non-linear process is associated with a combination of personal preference, migrants’ socioeconomic characteristics, and residential features.

Living in close proximity to recent, violent crime may undermine sense of safety in the home territory by increasing perceived crime risk. Yet it is also possible that practicing active guardianship by responding to local problems will moderate this association by reducing perceived vulnerability to crime. In this study we examine the association between residents’ proximity to recent violence, perceived safety and the moderating effect of active guardianship. Controlling for individual characteristics and features of the individual’s home territory, we estimate mixed effects regression models to investigate the effect of proximity to violence and active guardianship on feelings of safety. We also examine the moderating effect of active guardianship. The findings indicate that individuals living in closer proximity to recent violence feel less safe and those who report taking action when they observe local problems feel safer than those who do not engage in guardianship action. Despite the direct association between active guardianship and feeling safer, active guardianship did not moderate the association between proximity to violence and feelings of safety. While this study cannot ascertain temporal ordering, the findings suggest people who feel safer are more likely to engage in active guardianship, rather than active guardianship leading to reduced vulnerability. On a promising note, the direct association between active guardianship and feeling safer suggests that empowering residents via grass-roots crime prevention strategies has the potential to benefit communities by both addressing crime and improving perceived safety.

Hagerstrand proposed that individuals’ daily mobility is constrained to a particular time–space path by capability, coupling, and authority requirements. This tethering of routine activities to par...

Funding Information: The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by Australian Research Council (LP160100031). Publisher Copyright: © The Author(s) 2022. Parking is often overlooked by urban researchers even though parking consumes large proportions of a city’s physical footprint and imposes a significant impediment to more sustainable travel. Underpinning this lack of attention is suitable data and methods capable of capturing the complex dynamics of parking. Here we redress this gap by drawing on an emergent source of parking data and deploying empirical techniques to unpack this complexity. Data from 3542 on-street parking sensors observed over a 9-year period are used to delineate the first typology of parking routines before using a fixed-effects logistic regression model to explain how nearby land-use types and land-use mix shapes tempo and timing of parking utilisation. The benefit of our approach lies in its capacity to discriminate broad types of temporal rhythms associated with parking dynamics at particular places, how these change over time and how these rhythms are associated with different types and mixes of nearby land use. This knowledge is important to inform policies seeking to optimise the use of on-street parking and invoke more sustainable patterns of mobility.