Bousfield Lecture Presented by Rafael Pereira

Rafael Pereira delivered the second lecture of the 2024–2025 Bousfield Lecture Series with his talk, Advancing Urban Accessibility for Inclusive Cities, exploring how improving access to essential services like employment, education, and healthcare can foster more just, inclusive, and sustainable cities through advancements in spatial data science and transportation policy. The lecture was hosted by the Department of Geography & Planning on April 2 at University College. Click here to view photos from the event.

Event Abstract

Urban accessibility is the ease with which people can reach activities such as employment, food, health and education services. Ensuring equitable access to opportunities contributes to reducing social and economic disparities and allows individuals to be able to satisfy their basic needs, to participate fully in economic and social life and to flourish. This talk examines the role of urban accessibility in promoting more just, inclusive and sustainable cities. It also provides an overview of recent advancements in spatial data science tools that enhance our capacity to analyze large-scale geospatial data for the examination of transportation networks and mobility futures. Finally, it critically reflects on emerging avenues to advance accessibility research that could contribute to the development of more equitable urban and transportation policies.

About Rafael Pereira

Rafael Pereira is a senior researcher and policy analyst in the Brazilian federal government at the Institute for Applied Economic Research (Ipea), where he leads the Data Science team. His research looks broadly at how urban and transport policies shape the spatial organization of cities, human mobility patterns as well as their impacts on social and health inequalities. Some of his contributions to the fields of urban analytics and planning involve the development of new open-source computational tools and methods to the study of urban systems and transportation networks. These contributions emerge from substantive interests around transportation justice and sustainability issues in urban development. His current work looks at the equity impacts of urban and transport planning on access to opportunities, and at the impacts of the built environment and mobility patterns on environmental emissions. He is particularly interested in how access to opportunities and public services shape socio-economic and health outcomes, with long-term effects on social mobility. Rafael Pereira has a background in sociology and demography and obtained his PhD in Geography from the Transport Studies Unit (TSU) at Oxford University. He has published over 50 peer-reviewed papers, three books and a dozen computational packages in R and Python that are used by several researchers and practitioners in the fields of urban and transport planning.