City of the People, for the People: Sensing Urban Dynamics via Social Media Interactions

Understanding the spatio-temporal dynamics of cities is important for many applications including urban planning, zoning, and real-estate construction. So far, much of this understanding came from traditional surveys conducted by persons or by leveraging mobile data in the form of Call Detailed Records. However, the high financial and human cost associated with these methods make the data availability very limited. In this paper, we investigate the use of large scale and publicly available user contributed content, in the form of social media posts to understand the urban dynamics of cities. We build activity time series for different cities, and different neighborhoods within the same city to identify the different dynamic patterns taking place. Next, we conduct a cluster analysis on the time series to understand the spatial distribution of patterns in the city.