Henrikki Tenkanen defended his doctoral dissertation on 17.11.2017 with the highest possible grade!

Henrikki’s work “Capturing time in space: Dynamic analysis of accessibility and mobility to support spatial planning with open data and tools” focuses on examining how temporality affects to accessibility. Accessibility patterns are studied in the dissertation in different type of areas from urban Helsinki and Tallinn to rural Peruvian Amazonia and South African national parks.

The central aim of the work was to treat the different components of accessibility, people, services and transport network together and dynamically taking into account for example daily variations. With current approaches, temporal variations can be modelled for each component at a time or for all of them together, which shows their effect on accessibility at different times.

Another core theme of the dissertation was to highlight how important it is to consider those travel modes, which are relevant for each study area. For example in Helsinki, besides the car transportation it is also necessary to study accessibility by public transport, cycling and walking because the differences between the travel modes can be considerable.

Exploiting the potential of novel data sources was also an important part of the dissertation. The work combines openly available transportation network data to the sources revealing locations of people such as mobile phone and social media datasets.

As the new approaches to analyze accessibility are important to put into practice in urban planning, our research group has aimed to share the tools and the data, which are developed in research. Hence, the datasets and the tools, which have been created as a result of Henrikki’s work are mostly openly available (see more information from the dissertation).

The dissertation is available online here.

CONGRATULATIONS HENRIKKI!