Sensing the Urban Using location-based social network data in urban analysis Working

Location-based services (LBS) are generating vast bodies of data relating to the whereabouts of their users. This is due to the ease with which modern mobile phones can communicate their precise location via the global positioning system (GPS). Online social networks have begun using LBS to aid social encounter and place discovery in cities. A spatial analysis of the aggregate activity generated by such networks can show us how social activity in a city is distributed, revealing fine-grained spatial patterns evident in the social life of cities. The nature of this new data is discussed in relation to existing urban data sets. Large-scale data from one such network is analysed across three cities in order to produce an inter-urban analysis. Comparative measures of polycentricity and fragmentation are used to discuss the spatial structure of the three cities in question. Finally, the impact of LBS technologies are discussed in the context of urban analysis.

[1]  R. Bachi.  Standard distance measures and related methods for spatial analysis , 1963 .

[2]  T. Bell.  Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions , 2003 .

[3]  Michael Batty.  The Pulse of the City , 2010 .

[4]  E. Meijers.  Measuring Polycentricity and its Promises , 2008 .

[5]  Michael Batty,et al.  Environment and Planning B , 1982 .

[6]  S. O’sullivan,et al.  Walking Distances to and from Light-Rail Transit Stations , 1996 .

[7]  N. Green.  Functional Polycentricity: A Formal Definition in Terms of Social Network Analysis , 2007 .

[8]  Mimi Sheller,et al.  Mobile Publics: Beyond the Network Perspective , 2004 .

[9]  Hans-Peter Kriegel,et al.  A Density-Based Algorithm for Discovering Clusters in Large Spatial Databases with Noise , 1996, KDD.

[10]  Noam Shoval.  Sensing Human Society , 2007 .

[11]  Carlo Ratti,et al.  Mobile Landscapes: Using Location Data from Cell Phones for Urban Analysis , 2006 .

[12]  J. B. Parr,et al.  The Polycentric Urban Region: A Closer Inspection , 2004 .

[13]  M. Castells,et al.  The Informational City. Information Technology, Economic Restructuring, and the Urban-Regional Process , 1995 .

[14]  Stephen Graham,et al.  Cities in the Real-Time Age: The Paradigm Challenge of Telecommunications to the Conception and Planning of Urban Space , 1997 .

[15]  Vassilis Kostakos,et al.  Instrumenting the City: Developing Methods for Observing and Understanding the Digital Cityscape , 2006, UbiComp.

[16]  Michael Batty,et al.  The computable city , 1997 .

[17]  Carlo Ratti,et al.  Eigenplaces: Analysing Cities Using the Space–Time Structure of the Mobile Phone Network , 2009 .

[18]  Carlo Ratti,et al.  City out of chaos: Social patterns and organization in urban systems , 2006 .

[19]  Carlo Ratti,et al.  Mobile Landscapes: Graz in Real Time , 2007, Location Based Services and TeleCartography.

[20]  B. Warf.  Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities, and the Urban Condition , 2003 .

[21]  Alex Singleton,et al.  Web mapping 2.0: The neogeography of the GeoWeb , 2008 .

[22]  Michael Batty,et al.  Commuting in a polycentric city , 2010 .