Ate Poorthuis
Biographic Data
| ID | 352057 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ate Poorthuis |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ate |
| FAMILY NAME | Poorthuis |
| SIGNATURE | POORTHUIS A |
| AFFILIATIONS | KU Leuven |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3808-7493 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 40 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 285 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 40 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2013 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Probing the Potential of an Open Computational Tool in Urban Polycentricity Research
This article responds to calls for theoretically informed, domain-specific tools in urban and regional studies by examining how computational tools might support research on polycentric urban regions (PURs). PURs are clusters of nearby, distinct yet functionally interconnected cities and have become a key lens for analyzing emerging regional geographies. Yet PUR research remains hampered by fragmented analytical approaches and a lack of shared me…
Mapping flows, shaping spaces
Knowing where, how and for what purposes people frequently cross borders has significant policy implications. However, limited data availability often hinders effective decision-making. The lack of granular, reliable and comparable data frequently leads to an underestimation of the true scale of cross-border movements within the EU. Additionally, the assessment of the socioeconomic potential of border regions does not consider the hypothetical el…
Connecting Senses
Smell is a crucial yet understudied sensory dimension in urban environments, bridging tangible elements (e.g., exhaust, flowers) with intangible impacts on emotions, social interactions, and well‐being. While geographical and urban research increasingly acknowledges multisensory experiences, much of geospatial analysis still emphasized the visual dimension. This research advances spatial thinking by examining cross‐modal associations between smel…
From fragmentation to framework
This article starts from the premise that purposefully working toward shared urban definitions can foster constructive dialogue across geographical and disciplinary boundaries. Yet, the process of standardisation is inherently power-laden and requires difficult work to navigate tensions between simplicity and diversity. Drawing on a qualitative interview study, we explore how an urban standardisation effort can be organised in practice: what the …
Where the Discipline Is Made
From local hacks to global standards
Reimagining functional cross-border regions in Europe through the mobilities of people
Cross-border interactions of people contribute to the (re)production of functional cross-border regions, yet they remain underexplored. We have addressed this by proposing a conceptual framework stemming from the mobility approach and mobile big data. Using geolocated social media data as a proof-of-concept, we empirically examined people’s mobilities across all the internal border regions in Europe. We distinguished between cross-border regions …
The Geography of the Labour Force Composition in the Netherlands
In 1961, Robert Tamsma started a new section in TESG titled ‘The Netherlands in Maps’. It ran for more than 50 years, spotlighting both cartography and the geography of the Netherlands for the journal’s readers. In this first Geographica contribution, I draw inspiration from one of Tamsma’s many visualizations: a ternary plot highlighting the heterogeneity of the labour force in Groningen. I present a modern reinterpretation that maps the labour‐…
Cocooning Throughout Our Daily Lives
Recent work suggests that segregation may persist beyond residential neighbourhoods into other aspects of our daily lives, as broadly captured by our ‘activity spaces’. We contribute to this ongoing research by extending the concept of cocooning — a person's exposure to segregation across their daily life — to activity spaces. We conduct two parallel, multi‐scalar empirical investigations of ethnic activity space segregation in Rotterdam, the Net…
Mapping the Invisible
Smells can shape people’s perceptions of urban spaces, influencing how individuals relate themselves to the environment both physically and emotionally. Although the urban environment has long been conceived as a multisensory experience, research has mainly focused on the visual dimension, leaving smell largely understudied. This article aims to construct a flexible and efficient bottom-up framework for capturing and classifying perceived urban s…
Examining the impact of daily urban activity on spatial segregation
Urban segregation poses significant implications, one of which may be limited exposure between population groups, potentially amplifying disparities among urban populations. Traditionally, segregation has been studied mainly through a residential lens or in places like work or education. Including all environments where individuals spend their time during daily activities helps to paint a more realistic picture of the urban experience. This study…
Neighbors and visitors
A spatially-explicit sensitivity analysis of urban definitions
Delineating Neighborhoods
Although neighborhoods are a widely used analytical concept in urban geography, they are often proxied using grids or statistical sectors in empirical research. The rationales underlying these proxies are often separated from the theoretical considerations of what makes a neighborhood a neighborhood, casting shadows over their relevance and applicability. In this article, we identify two specific challenges separating empirical operationalization…
A nationwide dataset of de-identified activity spaces derived from geotagged social media data
In this article, we present a historical dataset of activity spaces, originally based on publicly posted and geotagged social media sent within the United States from 2012 to 2019. The dataset, which contains approximately 2 million users and 1.2 billion data points, is de-identified and spatially aggregated to enable ethical and broad sharing across the research community. By publishing the dataset, we hope to help researchers to quickly access …
Flexurba
This paper describes flexurba , a software library written in R, with the first open reconstruction of the Degree of Urbanisation algorithm to classify cities, towns, and rural areas. The R package offers enhanced flexibility and facilitates constructing alternative versions of the Degree of Urbanisation classification by customising parameters such as the minimum population size required for a city, and more ‘hidden’ implementation details inclu…
Quantifying the effects of Singapore’s street configurations on people’s activity spaces
Although it is generally accepted that street configurations may influence people’s intra-urban travel, capturing the exact nature of that influence remains challenging. We frame this challenge as one of operationalization and measurement and attempt to quantify and analyze the impact of street configurations more precisely. We draw on geographic data science tools to suggest that street configurations may be captured using catchment area polygon…
Spaces of Encounter
Urban experiences are shaped by daily activities that often extend beyond residential areas, leading to opportunities for encounters with people different from us in various contexts. Such encounters can subsequently influence attitudes towards those groups, which is critical in the diverse environments of modern cities. This study explores how neighbourhoods with varying types of amenities facilitate intergroup mixing among individuals of differ…
"Platform Urbanism and "Splintering Amenitization
This article engages with the spatialities of platform urbanism by foregrounding where digital platforms are located in cities. Drawing on a geocoded data set of visible, material traces of platformization collected across neighborhoods in Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal, we consider the influences that characteristics of urban built environments-including existing amenities, urban morphology, and area-level socioeconomic factors-have on platfor…
Categorizing urban space based on visitor density and diversity
Analyses of urban spaces have often stressed the importance of both the density and diversity of the people they attract. However, the diversity of people is a challenging concept to operationalize within the context of urban spaces, which is why many evaluations of urban space have relied primarily on density-based measures. We argue that a focus on only one of the two aspects misses important aspects of the variety of urban spaces in our cities…
Moving the 15-minute city beyond the urban core
Pandemic polycentricity? Mobility and migration patterns across New York over the course of the Covid-19 pandemic
The expectation of a mass movement out of cities due to the rise of remote work associated with the Covid-19 pandemic, is counter to longstanding theories of the benefits of agglomeration economies. It suggests centrifugal shifts of economic activity which could boost neighbourhood economies at the expense of the downtown core. Using mobile phone data from SafeGraph, we track migration and daily mobility patterns throughout the New York metropoli…
Monitoring streets through tweets
The new availability of big data sources provides an opportunity to revisit our ability to predict neighborhood change. This article explores how data on urban activity patterns, specifically, geotagged tweets, improve the understanding of one type of neighborhood change—gentrification—by identifying dynamic connections between neighborhoods and across scales. We first develop a typology of neighborhood change and risk of gentrification from 1990…
Entangled footprints
Rethinking ‘kampung’ or ‘village’ in the (re)making of Singapore and Singaporeans
‘Village’ as a metaphor, propelled by mobilizing nostalgia for the ‘rural’ as counter to urban fragmentation, has been used across nations to engender a sense of place and community in urban spaces. In Singapore, the narrative of kampung (Malay for village), rooted in restorative nostalgia, has been used repeatedly to foster living in harmony. However, it remains unclear in what ways ‘kampung’ and related social policies resonate with current cit…
Social media and the city
Beyond the geotag
This article presents an overview and initial results of a geoweb analysis designed to provide the foundation for a continued discussion of the potential impacts of ‘big data’ for the practice of critical human geography. While Haklay's (2012) observation that social media content is generated by a small number of ‘outliers’ is correct, we explore alternative methods and conceptual frameworks that might allow for one to overcome the limitations o…
Pacifying Babel’s Tower
It is sometimes claimed that the degree of polycentricity of an urban region influences that region’s competitiveness. However, because of widespread use and policy relevance, the underlying concept of polycentricity has become a ‘stretched concept’ in urban studies. As a result, academic debate on the topic leads to situations reminiscent of Babel’s Tower. This meta-study of the scientific literature in urban studies traces the conceptual stretc…
Mapping the data shadows of Hurricane Sandy
The New Political Economy of Geographical Intelligence
A troubling new political economy of geographical intelligence has emerged in the United States over the last two decades. The contours of this new political economy are difficult to identify due to official policies keeping much relevant information secret. The U.S. intelligence community increasingly relies on private corporations, working as contractors, to undertake intelligence work, including geographical intelligence (formally known as GEO…
Christaller and “big data”
This article utilizes central place theory (CPT) to navigate the “deluge” brought about by big data. While originating in the 1930s, CPT is a theoretical monument of 1960s spatial science. CPT aims to understand settlement geographies based on consumption behavior and is often presented as a singular, outdated, and rationalist theory. After critically reviewing the history of CPT, we assess the microfoundations of Christaller’s CPT – the threshol…
Moving the 15-minute city beyond the urban core
The Nature of Neighborhoods
Neighborhoods have long held a central place in the analysis and planning of urban spaces. Despite this centrality, the exact definition of a neighborhood, as well as how and where to draw its boundaries, has remained unclear. Although these questions have generated significant academic debate, they have arguably little effect on people’s everyday lives or decision-making processes. Atlanta, Georgia, represents a different case, however, because …
Containment and Connectivity in Dutch Urban Systems
This paper discusses key methodological issues with nodalising interaction data of urban networks to produce a state‐of‐the‐art settlement geography of the Netherlands. We operationalise the three‐systems model that analyses functional settlement geographies through the interaction between the daily urban system, the central place system and the export base system. We utilise theoretically‐informed selections of spatial interactions derived from …
Attentional Social Media
In this article we use big data methods to analyze the attention paid to the fashion industry on social media. The article argues that for the fashion industry, like many industries, the core product is a form of knowledge that is dependent on gaining and holding people’s attention. To understand this attentional economy, social media offers a unique window because it is increasingly a central space within which fashion knowledge is created and s…
Changing neighborhoods, shifting connections
New sources of ‘big data’ are regularly described as revolutionizing the study of urban life. Of particular interest is analyzing gentrification, which has proven a challenging endeavor with conventional methods. Big data may offer a new approach to the persistent problem of defining and measuring gentrification, while also allowing us to rethink broader questions about theory and methodology in urban geography. Using geotagged Twitter data, we d…
Being Smarter about Space
Smart technology—in its many facets—is often critiqued within geography in ways that parallel the critiques of quantitative geography in the 1960s and GIScience in the 1990s. In this way, both the development of “smart” technology itself and its criticisms are the latest chapter in a long-standing disciplinary debate around quantification and technology. We reevaluate this history and argue that quantitative methodology and its theoretical critiq…
The Geography of the Labour Force Composition in the Netherlands
In 1961, Robert Tamsma started a new section in TESG titled ‘The Netherlands in Maps’. It ran for more than 50 years, spotlighting both cartography and the geography of the Netherlands for the journal’s readers. In this first Geographica contribution, I draw inspiration from one of Tamsma’s many visualizations: a ternary plot highlighting the heterogeneity of the labour force in Groningen. I present a modern reinterpretation that maps the labour‐…
Examining the impact of daily urban activity on spatial segregation
Urban segregation poses significant implications, one of which may be limited exposure between population groups, potentially amplifying disparities among urban populations. Traditionally, segregation has been studied mainly through a residential lens or in places like work or education. Including all environments where individuals spend their time during daily activities helps to paint a more realistic picture of the urban experience. This study…
Urban governance and electricity losses
The inadequate supply of electricity in Pakistan disrupts everyday life and hampers industry and business; in this it is an emblematic indicator of the poor quality of urban governance pervasive in much of the Global South. We focus on the governance of Karachi’s electricity distribution system, and its spatial unevenness across this sprawling metropolis of 15 million residents which encompasses huge informal settlements alongside upscale housing…
Big Data for Better Urban Life? – An Exploratory Study of Critical Urban Issues in Two Caribbean Cities
Beyond the geotag
This article presents an overview and initial results of a geoweb analysis designed to provide the foundation for a continued discussion of the potential impacts of ‘big data’ for the practice of critical human geography. While Haklay's (2012) observation that social media content is generated by a small number of ‘outliers’ is correct, we explore alternative methods and conceptual frameworks that might allow for one to overcome the limitations o…
Mapping the data shadows of Hurricane Sandy
The New Political Economy of Geographical Intelligence
A troubling new political economy of geographical intelligence has emerged in the United States over the last two decades. The contours of this new political economy are difficult to identify due to official policies keeping much relevant information secret. The U.S. intelligence community increasingly relies on private corporations, working as contractors, to undertake intelligence work, including geographical intelligence (formally known as GEO…
Big Data for Better Urban Life? – An Exploratory Study of Critical Urban Issues in Two Caribbean Cities
Social media and the city
Pacifying Babel’s Tower
It is sometimes claimed that the degree of polycentricity of an urban region influences that region’s competitiveness. However, because of widespread use and policy relevance, the underlying concept of polycentricity has become a ‘stretched concept’ in urban studies. As a result, academic debate on the topic leads to situations reminiscent of Babel’s Tower. This meta-study of the scientific literature in urban studies traces the conceptual stretc…
Making Big Data Small
While exciting, Big Data (particularly geotagged social media data) has proven difficult for many urbanists and social science researchers to use. As a partial solution, we propose a strategy that enables the fast extracting of only relevant data from large sets of geosocial data. While contrary to many Big Data approaches—in which analysis is done on the entire dataset—much productive social science work can use smaller datasets—around the same …
Christaller and “big data”
This article utilizes central place theory (CPT) to navigate the “deluge” brought about by big data. While originating in the 1930s, CPT is a theoretical monument of 1960s spatial science. CPT aims to understand settlement geographies based on consumption behavior and is often presented as a singular, outdated, and rationalist theory. After critically reviewing the history of CPT, we assess the microfoundations of Christaller’s CPT – the threshol…
A roundtable discussion
The field of urban analytics and city science has seen significant growth and development in the past 20 years. The rise of data science, both in industry and academia, has put new pressures on urban research, but has also allowed for new analytical possibilities. Because of the rapid growth and change in the field, terminology in urban analytics can be vague and unclear. This paper, an abridged synthesis of a panel discussion among scholars in U…
The Nature of Neighborhoods
Neighborhoods have long held a central place in the analysis and planning of urban spaces. Despite this centrality, the exact definition of a neighborhood, as well as how and where to draw its boundaries, has remained unclear. Although these questions have generated significant academic debate, they have arguably little effect on people’s everyday lives or decision-making processes. Atlanta, Georgia, represents a different case, however, because …
Being Smarter about Space
Smart technology—in its many facets—is often critiqued within geography in ways that parallel the critiques of quantitative geography in the 1960s and GIScience in the 1990s. In this way, both the development of “smart” technology itself and its criticisms are the latest chapter in a long-standing disciplinary debate around quantification and technology. We reevaluate this history and argue that quantitative methodology and its theoretical critiq…
Attentional Social Media
In this article we use big data methods to analyze the attention paid to the fashion industry on social media. The article argues that for the fashion industry, like many industries, the core product is a form of knowledge that is dependent on gaining and holding people’s attention. To understand this attentional economy, social media offers a unique window because it is increasingly a central space within which fashion knowledge is created and s…
Entangled footprints
Rethinking ‘kampung’ or ‘village’ in the (re)making of Singapore and Singaporeans
‘Village’ as a metaphor, propelled by mobilizing nostalgia for the ‘rural’ as counter to urban fragmentation, has been used across nations to engender a sense of place and community in urban spaces. In Singapore, the narrative of kampung (Malay for village), rooted in restorative nostalgia, has been used repeatedly to foster living in harmony. However, it remains unclear in what ways ‘kampung’ and related social policies resonate with current cit…
Urban governance and electricity losses
The inadequate supply of electricity in Pakistan disrupts everyday life and hampers industry and business; in this it is an emblematic indicator of the poor quality of urban governance pervasive in much of the Global South. We focus on the governance of Karachi’s electricity distribution system, and its spatial unevenness across this sprawling metropolis of 15 million residents which encompasses huge informal settlements alongside upscale housing…
Changing neighborhoods, shifting connections
New sources of ‘big data’ are regularly described as revolutionizing the study of urban life. Of particular interest is analyzing gentrification, which has proven a challenging endeavor with conventional methods. Big data may offer a new approach to the persistent problem of defining and measuring gentrification, while also allowing us to rethink broader questions about theory and methodology in urban geography. Using geotagged Twitter data, we d…
Containment and Connectivity in Dutch Urban Systems
This paper discusses key methodological issues with nodalising interaction data of urban networks to produce a state‐of‐the‐art settlement geography of the Netherlands. We operationalise the three‐systems model that analyses functional settlement geographies through the interaction between the daily urban system, the central place system and the export base system. We utilise theoretically‐informed selections of spatial interactions derived from …
Pandemic polycentricity? Mobility and migration patterns across New York over the course of the Covid-19 pandemic
The expectation of a mass movement out of cities due to the rise of remote work associated with the Covid-19 pandemic, is counter to longstanding theories of the benefits of agglomeration economies. It suggests centrifugal shifts of economic activity which could boost neighbourhood economies at the expense of the downtown core. Using mobile phone data from SafeGraph, we track migration and daily mobility patterns throughout the New York metropoli…
Monitoring streets through tweets
The new availability of big data sources provides an opportunity to revisit our ability to predict neighborhood change. This article explores how data on urban activity patterns, specifically, geotagged tweets, improve the understanding of one type of neighborhood change—gentrification—by identifying dynamic connections between neighborhoods and across scales. We first develop a typology of neighborhood change and risk of gentrification from 1990…
Categorizing urban space based on visitor density and diversity
Analyses of urban spaces have often stressed the importance of both the density and diversity of the people they attract. However, the diversity of people is a challenging concept to operationalize within the context of urban spaces, which is why many evaluations of urban space have relied primarily on density-based measures. We argue that a focus on only one of the two aspects misses important aspects of the variety of urban spaces in our cities…
Moving the 15-minute city beyond the urban core
A spatially-explicit sensitivity analysis of urban definitions
Delineating Neighborhoods
Although neighborhoods are a widely used analytical concept in urban geography, they are often proxied using grids or statistical sectors in empirical research. The rationales underlying these proxies are often separated from the theoretical considerations of what makes a neighborhood a neighborhood, casting shadows over their relevance and applicability. In this article, we identify two specific challenges separating empirical operationalization…
A nationwide dataset of de-identified activity spaces derived from geotagged social media data
In this article, we present a historical dataset of activity spaces, originally based on publicly posted and geotagged social media sent within the United States from 2012 to 2019. The dataset, which contains approximately 2 million users and 1.2 billion data points, is de-identified and spatially aggregated to enable ethical and broad sharing across the research community. By publishing the dataset, we hope to help researchers to quickly access …
Flexurba
This paper describes flexurba , a software library written in R, with the first open reconstruction of the Degree of Urbanisation algorithm to classify cities, towns, and rural areas. The R package offers enhanced flexibility and facilitates constructing alternative versions of the Degree of Urbanisation classification by customising parameters such as the minimum population size required for a city, and more ‘hidden’ implementation details inclu…
Geography (25 works) · Computer Science (22 works) · Sociology (21 works) · Human Mobility and Location-Based Analysis (18 works) · Urban Transport and Accessibility (14 works) · Economics (13 works) · Economic geography (12 works) · Engineering (12 works) · Regional science (12 works) · Data science (10 works)