Unveiling urban dynamicsAn exploration of tools and methods using crowd-sourced data for the study of urban space

Abstract

The following work presents several trans-disciplinary resources for understanding cities beyond just their physical form and spatial processes. The conceptualization of cities from a top-down, modern and post- modern approach to the form-function duality lacks multiple dimensions, which need to be studied in order to gain a proper understanding of how contemporary urban societies perform nowadays. Instead, this work considers settlements as a set of an infinite number of individual perceptions and experiences, which construct overlapping layers of hidden and intangible information that shape cities as complex systems. Social relations that are moving progressively to the virtual realm are becoming major factors in decision- making and location choices by citizens. This definition of a city’s hidden image is developed through the study of data retrieved from online servers. To do so, this work focuses on spatial and temporal activity patterns, values of certain places and their quantitative weight within the urban fabric, the distribution and nature of places, the observation of people’s perception of certain places through the representation of activities captured by pictures posted online, or several other theoretical and methodological approaches under the umbrella of crowd-sourced data in the city. Therefore, this thesis aims to be an initial study that provides a multidisciplinary discourse to support further studies on why and how to approach research on cities, acknowledging their multiple and contemporary dimensions, and testing innovative methods and perspectives to exploit these resources. The work presented in this thesis encompasses a variety of papers under the umbrella of crowd-sourced data to study cities and developed under four major topics: Theory, Computational Methods, Observational Methods, and Education. Texts developed under the topic of Socio-spatial Theory set the theoretical background upon which the other contributions are based. As mentioned above, this thesis rests on the dualism between the spatial configuration of cities and the human layers that overlap them. More specifically, Introduction and Conclusions establish a theoretical setting while “Optional and necessary activities: Operationalising Jan Gehl’s analysis of urban space with Foursquare data” focuses on human actions understood as what people do in cities. This last paper conceptualizes a theoretical approach according to which traditional research on activities, i.e. Jan Gehl’s methods, are operationalized to (1) apply them not only to public space but to cities as a whole, (2) allow replication, and (3) test further spatial computations.