This week, we are delighted to welcome Dr. Renate Thiede from the University of Pretoria to the Mobility Lab for a short research stay. The statistician from SpatialLab@UP delivered an engaging lunch talk today entitled “An Unsupervised Clustering Algorithm for Identifying Neighbourhoods Within Spatial Road Networks.”

Her presentation offered numerous points of connection with our own research at the Mobility Lab. Renate’s algorithmic approach to delineating neighbourhoods based on the structure of road networks aligns closely with our research on network analysis, accessibility, and connectivity metrics.

The exchange with Dr Thiede was highly inspiring and opened up new perspectives for deepening our collaboration. We identified overlapping interests not only within the Mobility Lab but also across other research activities within the department and faculty. We very much hope that Renate’s next visit will be a longer one. Currently, our proposal under the Africa-UniNet programme—driven primarily by Luuk van der Meer and Renate—is under review. If approved, it would allow us to significantly expand our collaboration with colleagues at the University of Pretoria and jointly work on sustainable solutions for mobility and urban development.

We thank Dr Thiede for her visit and look forward to the next steps in this promising partnership!