The SARS-CoV-2 outbreak motivated the development of a myriad of weekly and daily indicators that track economic activity to estimate and predict the consequences of the pandemic. With some exceptions, these indicators are calculated at the country level and are mainly focused on tracking economic factors, disregarding local urban phenomena. To address this, we present the Urban Dynamic Indicator (UDI), a novel composite indicator designed to measure a city's daily urban dynamic. The UDI is applied to Porto municipality, in Portugal, and it corresponds to a latent factor obtained through a factor analysis over seasonal adjusted daily data regarding traffic intensity, public transportation usage, internet usage in public buses, NO
2
emissions and noise level. The UDI's values show that, by the end of 2020, despite the approach of economic activity to its pre-pandemic values, as suggested by the Portuguese Daily Economic Indicator (DEI), Porto urban dynamic did not recover completely. The UDI enriches the information available for Porto city planners and policymakers to respond to crisis situations and to gauge the application of local policies that contribute to urban sustainable planning. Furthermore, the methodology defined in this work can be followed for the development of daily urban dynamic indicators elsewhere.
Being mobility one of the biggest challenge’s cities face today, the COVID-19 pandemic reinforced this challenge and caused a deep structural change in the mobility of the multilayered dynamic framework of Smart Cities. The need to supply decision support systems to city authorities is higher than ever. Planning and managing mobility in Smart Cities has become more challenging, as the amount of information available and the pressure to enforce sustainable and secure policies increases, stakeholders require faster and more targeted actions. Dashboards are powerful tools that can be used in this context to provide, in an understandable manner, multidimensional information otherwise unavailable in classically static visualizations, as these tools offer a reliable foundation for decision support systems. This chapter goes through the required visualization techniques used to produce meaningful dashboards, to both showcase spatial and temporal trends in the context of mobility in Smart Cities following the COVID-19 pandemic. A general framework for analyzing mobility patterns is suggested by gathering methods and techniques recently developed in the literature.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.