Meta Berghauser Pont on Pedestrian movement modeling for sustainable urban development

On September 19 for the 2022 Fall Urbanism Lecture series, co-hosted by the City Design & Development Program (CDD), SMArchS Urbanism Program, and Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism at MIT, Meta Berghauser Pont shared her work on Pedestrian movement modeling for sustainable urban development.

Meta Berghauser Pont is an associate professor in Urban Design at Chalmers University of Technology. In 2010, she published Spacematrix about space, Density, and Urban Form, together with Per Haupt, sheds light on built density from various perspectives. Her work is based on urban morphology with a focus on quantitative spatial analysis to understand better how the urban environment affects urban life.

Meta shared the body of research examining pedestrian movement modeling and the tools developed for spatial analysis developed with the group SMoG. She presented part of the extensive work using large-scale data to predict pedestrian flows on the street based on its density type flows. The presentation highlighted the models formulated using hour-by-hour counts from three European cities: Amsterdam, London, and Stockholm.

By Sylvia Jimenez, Norman B. (1938) and Muriel Leventhal Fellow, Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism.