A brother-sister team of Spanish researchers has found that geo-localized
tweets can be a very useful source of information for urban planning and land
use.
Every day, millions of citizens around the world generate massive amounts of
geo-localized content using mobile applications and social networks.
Twitter especially can become a sensor of interactions between people and
their environment and provide guidelines for planning life in the city.
Enrique and Vanessa Frias-Martinez, computer science researchers at
Madrid-based Telefonica Research and University of Maryland in the US,
respectively, pointed out that “thanks to the increased use of smartphones,
social networks like Twitter and Facebook have made it possible to access and
produce information ubiquitously”.
A forgotten issue in urbanism is land use during the night time, with
problems such as noise and dirt, which could be improved with this type of
tool.
“It is an activity carried out by a large number of people who provide
information on where they are at a specific time and what they are doing,” the
duo noted.
“For example, Twitter includes longitude-latitude information in the tweet
if the user so desires. Among possible applications we have seen that this
network could be highly suited to helping in urban planning, especially in
identifying land use,” Enrique said.
Using Twitter, “you can capture information on urban land use more
efficiently and for a much larger number of people than with questionnaires”,
he said.
The new technique automatically determines land uses in urban areas by
grouping together geographical regions with similar patterns of Twitter
activity, the researcher added.
Using aggregate activity of tweets, the siblings studied land use in
Manhattan, Madrid and London. In the first two cases they identified four uses:
residential, business, daytime leisure (mainly parks and tourist areas) and
nightlife areas.
In London, they also established industrial land uses. These results were
validated with open data sources. The findings were published in the journal
Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence.
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