Mikel Barrena Herrán

His research career has been marked by a constant exploration of the interactions between urban space and everyday life, through the analysis of new spatiotemporal data sources.

He began his activity at Tecnalia Research & Innovation, where he participated in the MOSSFILT project, developing a GIS tool to optimize the location of urban natural filters aimed at improving air quality.

Since 2021, he has collaborated with the CAVIAR EHU group on projects addressing urban regeneration from a data-driven perspective. In RISAV, he designed a multi-criteria GIS tool to prioritize rehabilitation interventions based on housing-related health risks. In the RISAU project, he developed a method to assess health risks in urban environments, integrating indicators of vitality, active mobility, and environmental quality as strategic axes of healthy urban design. This line of work is being incorporated as a new specific dimension of the urban environment in the Urban Vulnerability Inventory of the Basque Government.

Building on that experience, his research has evolved towards the use of geolocated big data as an instrument to understand contemporary urban dynamics. This line was consolidated with DINUR, where he proposed a methodology to visualize human interaction with the built environment in three key areas: social interaction spaces, urban landmarks, and people flows. More recently, in the LoTu project, he has explored the relationship between residents’ everyday dynamics and tourist activity, developing a system that combines physical parameters of the city with georeferenced social data to identify conflicts in the use of urban space.