“Should I walk, cycle, or drive today, or stay home and work remotely so I can get to the daycare and grocery store on time?”
I study sustainable mobility and land use in cities. I focus on spatial accessibility, which connects questions about everyday travel modes and choices to global challenges such as environmental and social sustainability, land-use change, and urbanization. Accessibility is an important tool in urban and transport planning, which was the focus of my doctoral thesis. I received my doctorate from the University of Helsinki in 2023, with a thesis on measuring sustainable accessibility. I am also interested in understanding how urban spaces can balance human needs with nature.
My disciplinary background is in geography and geographic information systems, which means that I make use of computational methods and spatial big data sources including mobile phone data, satellite images, street view images, and even virtual reality. If you have ever taken a city bike trip in the Helsinki region, your journey might be represented as one point among millions in my data.
I am currently working as a postdoctoral researcher in the Digital Geography Lab research group at the Department of Geography at the University of Helsinki. I am the deputy leader of the GREENTRAVEL project (2023-2027) funded by the European Research Council (ERC), which studies greenery exposure during everyday travel in five European cities. Our goal is to understand the health and well-being effects of greenery exposure, develop novel ways to capture urban greenery from a human perspective, model mobility flows and related exposure, and examine spatial and socioeconomic inequalities in access to greenery.