The Breheny Prize is awarded annually for the most innovative paper in Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science during the preceding year. It is in recognition of the contribution of Michael Breheny, who was a co-editor of the journal from 1989 until his untimely death in 2003. The paper is chosen by the editors assisted occasionally by members of the editorial board. This year all four editors, Michael Batty, Richard Harris, Linda See and Sarah Williams with Dr. Seraphim Alvenides of Northumbria University made the choice, agreeing that the best paper published in 2016 be awarded to Marco M, Salvini and Sara I. Fabrikant for their paper “Spatialization of user-generated content to uncover the multirelational world city network”, published in volume 43, pages 228–248, doi: 10.1177/0265813515603868.
Dr. Marco Salvini is a Project Manager, leading strategic and interdisciplinary projects in the domain of public management at the City of Aarau, Switzerland. He holds a PhD in Geography from the University of Zurich (UZH). During PhD, he assessed the potential of massively crowd-sourced semi-structured text databases (e.g. Wikipedia) to uncover the global network of world cities. He is the recipient of the UZH Faculty of Science distinction for outstanding PhD research in 2012.
Dr. Sara Irina Fabrikant is a Professor of Geography, leading the Geographic Information Visualization and Analysis (GIVA) group at the GIScience Center of the Geography Department at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. She holds a PhD in Geography from the University of Colorado at Boulder (USA). Her research and teaching interests lie in geographic information visualization and geovisual analytics, GIScience and cognition, graphical user interface design and evaluation, including dynamic cartography.
