Urban Environmental Assessment Tool

This is a research tool for global urban environmental assessment. The program takes as an input a directory (file folder) of shapefiles with income and population data. Based on these shapefiles, the program will produce estimates for air quality, transportation, urban form, and green space. To replicate this analysis for a city you have in mind, begin by cloning the repo with git clone http://github.com/ryanthomas/urban_epi.git and overwrite the contents of the city_boundary folder with the shapefile for your city. Then follow the instructions below.

Requirements

All the tools used in this analysis are open source, including the data, which are freely available on the internet.

• Unix environment
• GDAL/OGR
• GRASS 7.0 or GRASS 7.2 linked to the commandline call grass

• Extensions are loaded by the program: r.li, v.in.osm

• AWK or GAWK
• NodeJS; osmtogeojson
• python packages

• osmnx
• matplotlib
• descartes
• shapely.geometry
• geopandas
• rtree
• json
• os, sys, glob

• Internet connection (downloads take a long time [>1 hour] on slow internet)

Setup

Importantly, the repo is intended to be cloned into a parent directory and renamed "source". The name of the directory once it is cloned should be "source".

mkdir urban_epi This is to make the parent directory called 'urban_epi'. Feel free to call this something else. In my environment, it is called urban_epi.
git clone http://github.com/ryanthomas/urban-epi.git source to clone and rename the diectory.

The setup script takes one of three arguements:

Command	Description
source/bash/00_setup.sh -dir	To set up the directory structure
source/bash/00_setup.sh -data	To download the data
source/bash/00_setup.sh -build	To set up the grass database
source/bash/00_setup.sh -form	To calculate the urban form statistics
source/bash/00_setup.sh -air	To calculat the air indicators
source/bash/00_setup.sh -trans	To calculat the transportation indicators

It is necessary that these be run one at a time in this order.
// Future developments may allow them to be run together with an -all flag.

Details

source/bash/00_setup.sh -dir

This will prompt you to enter the absolute path to your parent directory (chosen above). Use the following steps to get the absolute path to your parent directory. You will need to do this outside the script's dialogue (i.e. before typing the above script). You can also exit once you start without breaking anything.

• Enter the directory from a bash terminal. If you haven't moved, do nothing - you're already there.
  
• Type echo $PWD in your bash terminal, and
  
• Copy the output.

source/bash/00_setup.sh -data

This takes exceedingly long, since there are several global rasters involed. This is the main reason for splitting the process into multiple parts. Future iterations of this project may involve targeted downloading of only necessary files.

source/bash/00_setup.sh -build

Reads in data to PERMANENT mapset.

source/bash/00_setup.sh -air

Calculates statistics for air quality.

source/bash/00_setup.sh -form

Calculates statistics for urban form.

source/bash/00_setup.sh -trans

Calculates statistics for transportation.

source/bash/00_setup.sh -green

Coming soon...