Homa Rahmat

UNSW Sydney | UNSW · Faculty of Built Environment

Behavior mapping is the systematic observation of people using their environments. The Smart Social Spaces research project, recently completed in Sydney, Australia, is used as a vehicle to illustrate the usefulness of this method for understanding the relationships between people and public spaces in cities. Behavior mapping was the central method...

Urban planning has long pursued the improvement of health and wellbeing through the rapidly evolving scholarship and practice of health-supportive environments, underpinned by the seminal World Health Organization’s Healthy Cities Framework. Although a much more recent development, technology has been informing urban planning, as well as advancing...

Ecosystem services provide essential services for cities and are key factors in achieving many of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Such services are best delivered through green infrastructure, which works in resourceful, multifunctional, synergistic, and environmentally sensitive ways to deliver ecosystem services and provide alternative...

This article discusses the design process and pilot program of a suite of IoT-integrated street furniture aimed to improve use and amenity of municipality assets in public open spaces in Sydney, Australia. Networked sensors were embedded in the furniture and linked to a web-based dashboard application enabling a digital twin of the asset to monitor...

This chapter explores the potential of smart cities initiatives as a driver of partnership formation. It presents lessons learnt from the collaboration between the Faculty of Built Environment at the University of New South Wales Sydney, Street Furniture Australia, and Georges River Council, New South Wales, as partners in a Commonwealth funded sma...

Through data-driven analysis, this article maps the use of various social media platforms in a local government municipality, Georges River Council (GRC), in New South Wales, Australia from 2016 to 2019. We examine underlying dynamics of citizen engagement in Council’s projects and activities through their Facebook page, their Twitter account and I...

This chapter explores the potential of smart cities initiatives as a driver of partnership formation. It presents lessons learnt from the collaboration between the Faculty of Built Environment at the University of New South Wales Sydney, Street Furniture Australia, and Georges River Council, New South Wales, as partners in a Commonwealth funded sma...

This paper explores the potential for smart cities initiatives to drive partnership formation. It presents lessons learnt from the collaboration between the Faculty of Built Environment at the University of New South Wales Sydney, Street Furniture Australia, and Georges River Council, New South Wales, as partners in a Commonwealth-funded smart citi...

Universities are facing many challenges with growing student numbers and a need to modify the traditional lecture and tutorial–based face-to-face pedagogical style both for students who work full-time while studying and for international students who may have language difficulties. To address these challenges, a flipped classroom pedagogical model...

Drawing on the ideas of participatory urbanism, this chapter argues for the potential of social media data to enable more interactive and responsive planning and collaboration between citizens, experts, and public officials. Focusing on a data-driven approach to collaborative planning, the chapter highlights the advantage of multiplicity and divers...