What People Tweet May Improve Urban Planning

It turns out that analyzing what people tweet on Twitter may just help with urban planning. Scientists have suggested that using geolocalized tweets could potentially be used for urban planning and land use by identifying the nightlife areas of certain locations.

Each day, millions of citizens around the world generate massive amounts of geolocalized content using mobile applications and social networks. This is especially true for Twitter, which could potentially become a sensor of interactions between people and their environment, and may provide guidelines for planning life in a city.

"Geolocalized tweets can be a very useful source of information for planning, since 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," said Enrique Frias-Martinez in a news release. "Thanks to the increased use of smartphones, social networks like Twitter and Facebook have made it possible to access and produce information ubiquitously."

So how can these networks help? Using Twitter, you can capture information on urban land use more efficiently and for a much larger number of people than with questionnaires. By aggregating the activity of tweets, the researchers can identify uses; in this case, they studied the major cities of Manhattan, Madrid and London. In all, they identified four uses: residential, business, daytime leisure and nightlife areas.

"One of the most interesting contributions of the study is the identification of nightlife areas, since this type of land use is not often specified in urban planning, despite the problems of noise, security and need for cleaning that this creates," said Frias-Martinez. "Therefore, this information is very relevant."

The findings are published in the journal Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence.

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