AI UK 2022
Tuesday 22 Mar 2022 - Wednesday 23 Mar 2022
Time: 09:30 - 17:00
Bio
Rachel Franklin is Group Leader for Liveability in the Urban Analytics Programme at Turing and Professor of Geographical Analysis in the Centre for Urban and Regional Development Studies (CURDS) at Newcastle University. At Newcastle, she is also Head of Newcastle Data, the University’s centre for research excellence in data. In addition, she is part of the team leading the interdisciplinary EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Geospatial Systems. Prior to joining Newcastle and Turing, she was the Associate Director of Brown University's initiative in Spatial Structures in the Social Sciences (S4), in the U.S. She is trained as a quantitative human geographer and her research focus is in spatial demography and the interplay between spatial analytics and demographic change, in particular quantifying patterns, sources and impacts of spatial inequality.
Research interests
Rachel’s research interests are in the sources and impacts of demographic change as it occurs at multiple spatial scales, and in novel forms of data and analysis to identify, characterise, and address these changes. She works at the regional and local scales to understand how societal and technological innovations (e.g., smart city technologies) can be implemented equitably and justly; how best to characterise or measure the populations and features of places; how location and scale are related to spatial inequalities and demographic change; and how migration, especially internal, affects demographic composition. She is especially interested in how we use data and statistics to understand what sorts of people are located where, how this changes over time, and what this means for our understanding of spatial inequality.
Current research addresses how smart city technologies, particularly sensors, contribute to and reinforce socio-economic and spatial inequalities; how “left behind” places can be identified using new methods and data; and how new and emerging forms of “smart” data can feed into impactful social science research. Rachel’s “Spatial Inequality and the Smart City” project, funded by the Turing Institute, aims to identify who is affected by ‘sensor deserts’, ascertain coverage for vulnerable populations, and improve understanding of connections between urban mobility and sensor density and location. This work contributes to a growing body of research that highlights the potential risk of smart cities amplifying rather than reducing inequality and quality of life, providing a blueprint to assist cities in better adoption of smart city technologies.
Other recent projects have addressed regional inequality, population loss, and shrinkage at the local and regional scales. This research has focused in particular on identifying patterns in and trends; the demographic sources of population loss; spatial metrics for urban shrinkage; and the impacts of loss on inequality. These projects have been funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health in the United States and, more recently, the ESRC.
