Naoto Itani (p), Kazunari Tanaka

Camille Souffron

In recent years, the number of companies which adopted remote work is increasing after the outbreak of Covid-19 in Japan. People working in their house may say that it is very important to create good environmental conditions. However, the number of people who say complaint about noise problem is increasing. we consider that there are some contents which structural countermeasures can’t solve. Thus, we focused on the psychological aspects for non-structural countermeasures.
The purpose of this study is to analyze the relationship between impression evaluate and cognitive distance based on auditory information. This is because we guessed it is important to describe psychological impacts.
As a method, we conducted two questionnaire surveys and an experimental investigation. We did the first questionnaire survey, which has three types of voices (conversation of adults, playing children, screaming children). We could obtain four types of principal components. Next, we did a second questionnaire survey, which had six types of sounds in the city (conversation of adults, playing children in the nursery school, bird sound, rain sound, noise of moving train, construction noise). We could obtain four types of principal components. This part of them is different from the first questionnaire. Finally, we conducted an experimental investigation. For this experiment, we created an experimental environment and experimented on 18 people. In the experiment, we instructed to dot the points where the examiner felt the location of the sound source after listening to six types of sounds in the city. This is because we tried to obtain different of cognitive distance on the type of sounds.
In conclusion, we could obtain the relationship between four types of principal components and cognitive distance based on the auditory information. The conclusion suggests the possibility that cognitive distance and impression are connected.

Jingxue Xie (p)

Naoto Itani

In the 2021 "Urban Redevelopment Guidelines," the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Bureau of Urban Development emphasized the importance of visualizing urban spaces and enhancing pedestrian accessibility, particularly around major transit stations, while also advocating for increased urban greenery. This emphasis aligns with academic advancements in urban green space visualization, highlighting the growing interest in streetscape studies through street view imagery.

This research focuses on the pedestrian accessibility within 15-minute walking radii of Tokyo's Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) cores, specifically around rail transit stations with high daily pedestrian traffic. It employs a multidimensional pedestrian spatial indicator system and a spatial multi-scale evaluation approach, prioritizing the pedestrian perspective.

Our methodology involves defining the study area, identifying specific populations, and pinpointing points of interest (POIs). We utilized Python scripts to extract Google Street View data, applying the PSPnet modeling algorithm and the Cityscapes Dataset to identify various streetscape elements such as roads, pedestrians, vehicles, plants, and walls. These elements were then analyzed using ArcGIS.

The study introduces a comprehensive assessment system encompassing four primary dimensions: safety, comfort, activity, and mobility, each further divided into two or three sub-dimensions. The results are visualized to provide a detailed analysis.

We present an in-depth examination of the pedestrian environment around Tokyo's TOD core rail stations, assessing their characteristics, strengths, and weaknesses. The findings lead to well-founded recommendations for future development priorities in the neighborhood environments, contributing significantly to urban planning and pedestrian-centric urban design.

Ugo Gragnolati (p), Luigi Moretti, Francesca Rossi

Jingxue Xie

This paper builds an exogenous probability for a location to attract large-scale inland transport networks such as railways. Our probability measure reflects the complex non-linearities between the underlying cost morphology, topological centrality, and network structure. Such a measure can prove useful to detect local deviations of a railway network from an exogenous scenario (i.e., a hypothetical network with cities having equal political influence to gain direct access to the railway network). After laying out the construction and features of the probability measure by mean of toy examples, the paper presents either simulations and a real data application to the case of the construction of early railways to show how our measure can be employed as an instrumental variable to deal with the endogeneity of actual railway paths and, hence, complement the well-known and classical least cost paths (LCPs) approach.

Camille Souffron (p), Judith Kleman

Ugo Maurizio Gragnolati

For years, the experimental method of Randomised Controlled Trials (RCTs) has been presented as a gold standard in public policy evaluation and causal assessment of interventions in development economics, particularly at local and regional levels.
Although presented as "a-theoretical" and "agnostic", this counterfactual method nevertheless often relies on the paradigm of bounded rationality, particularly with regard to the interpretation of agents' economic choices as "biased" and "inefficient". This article attempts to shed light on how apparently irrational choices (such as preference for "temptation goods", inter-personal transfers, spending on social relations to build informal social insurance, or taking min-max approach for farmers during the weakest harvests to ensure an incompressible production floor instead of seeking to maximize the marginal productivity of their land - the context making them legitimately and rationally risk-averse) may in fact represent rational decisions taken in a context of multidimensional and often endogenous constraints in low-income countries. These constraints include not only financial and informational limitations, but also social, cultural and psychological factors that are often not taken into account by interventions that advocate normative rationality and claim to be able to dispense with priors on the intervention context. A small-scale micro-theoretical model comparing normative and contextual rationality will be proposed to reconsider the notion of effectiveness in a development context.
This behavioral focus leads this category of RCTs to participate in the dynamic of orienting public development interventions and policies towards a micro, market-oriented, private-good-oriented scale, and thus to potentially overshadow the importance of macroeconomic dynamics and structural investments necessary for sustainable and inclusive development. This can lead to an underestimation of the need for generalizable macroeconomic and macroinstitutional interventions and development governance policies. This historical evolution in the economic analyses carried out and the economic policies they inspire, particularly in developing countries, will be examined. In particular, the case of microcredit, a theme much favoured by RCTs, will be used to illustrate this evolution, and the consequences in terms of the treatment of poverty by public policies.
Thus, this article calls for a reevaluation of how we conceptualize rationality and related interventions in development economics as well as the related micro-macro articulation, advocating for a more inclusive and context-sensitive approach including local knowledge systems, subjectivities and agency, and offering new pathways for a more epistemologically robust empirical research such as "actor-oriented" approach, mixed methods designs, iterative learning and community-based participatory research.