Urban Calculator plays a crucial role in the education of students pursuing Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in the field of urban design and planning. Urban design studios may choose this tool when they lack the time or resources for extensive GIS training. Despite these limitations, they aim to provide students with the fundamental principles of evidence-based urban design. Currently, Urban Calculator is actively employed in urban design studios at BTH University in Karlskrona, Chalmers University in Gothenburg, and Breda University in the Netherlands.

While a solid knowledge of GIS is essential for urban practitioners to handle raw data from open sources and create street network models for centrality analysis, the ability to interpret spatial analysis is equally, if not more, crucial in urban design projects. It enables professionals to define project goals based on the surrounding urban context and project site location. Additionally, it empowers them to evaluate how their design choices can be reinforced by centrality analysis.

In urban design and planning education, it’s common that studios do not have the time and resources to delve into the intricacies of GIS and map data editing. However, it’s still crucial to help students see urban space as a network and use different ways of network centrality analysis. The basics of Space Syntax analysis can be used to better understand the urban space from a systematic perspective. The city is a system of relations between parts and whole and it is the flow between the parts that has the key importance for socio-economic processes in cities. 

Urban Calculator simplifies the process of conducting spatial analysis, enabling students to concentrate on the interpretation of centrality analysis and its significance in their design interventions. Further, it prevents students from getting overwhelmed by the technical details of handling rather complex street datasets. Through a series of quick exercises, students can experiment and become familiar with the analysis method and investigate how locations (in terms of centrality) creates conditions for pedestrian flows, different uses, attractions and social interaction in cities.