Spatio-temporal patterns of human mobility from geo-social networks for urban computing: Analysis, models & applications

The availability of rich information about fine-grained user mobility in urban environments from increasingly geographically-aware social networking services and the rapid development of machine learning applications greatly facilitate the investigation of urban issues. In this setting, urban computing emerges intending to tackle a variety of challenges faced by cities nowadays and to offer promising approaches to improving our living environment. Leveraging massive amounts of data from geo-social networks with unprecedented richness, we show how to devise novel algorithmic techniques to reveal underlying urban mobility patterns for better policy-making and more efficient mobile applications in this dissertation. Building upon the foundation of existing research efforts in urban computing field and basic machine learning techniques, in this dissertation, we propose a general framework of urban computing with geo-social network data and develop novel algorithms tailored for three urban computing tasks. We begin by exploring how the transition data recording human movements between urban venues from geo-social networks can be aggregated and utilised to detect spatio-temporal changes of local graphs in urban areas. We further explore how this can be used as a proxy to track and predict socio-economic deprivation changes as government financial effort is put in developing areas by supervised machine learning methods. We then study how to extract latent patterns from collective user-venue interactions with the help of a spatio-temporal aware topic modeling approach for the benefit of urban infrastructure planning. After that, we propose a model to detect the gap between user-side demand and venue-side supply levels for certain types of services in urban environments to suggest further policymaking and investment optimisation. Finally, we address a mobility prediction task, the application aim of which is to recommend new places to explore in the city for mobile users. To this end, we develop a deep learning framework that integrates memory network and topic modeling techniques. Extensive experiments indicate that the proposed architecture can enhance the prediction performance in various recommendation scenarios with high interpretability. All in all, the insights drawn and the techniques developed in this dissertation make a substantial step in addressing issues in cities and open the door to future possibilities in the promising urban computing area

Tourists’ experiences of mega-event cities: Rio’s olympic ‘double bubbles’

Rio 2016 sought to connect Olympic-tourists with the city’s local-Cariocan community and culture. Yet the way mega-events are spatially and regulatorily organized, alongside the behavioural tendencies of Olympic-tourists, constrain such ambitions. Using Rio 2016 as a case-study, we offer in-depth, qualitative insights through the lens of 35 individual Olympic-tourists to examine how and why these factors determine behaviour, and thus experiences across host-environments. We detail how concerns over tourists’ safety result in managers designing risk averse experiences, produced by overlaying hyper-securitized and regulatory enforcements inside existing tourist bubbles, creating what we refer to as a ‘double bubble’ – reducing the likelihood of visitors venturing ‘off-the-beaten-track’. Whilst Olympic-bubbles protect tourists from outside threats, they restrict cultural engagement with the wider city, neighbourhoods and locals – side-lining other sides to Rio. We suggest managers adopt a dual-strategy of ‘local infusion’ in and ‘tourist diffusion’ beyond official zones to achieve intended goals

'The East End is the new West End': London 2012 and resident experiences of the urban changes in a post-Olympic landscape.

Sociological inquiry into the management, hosting and subsequent legacies of the Olympic Games has provided a useful lens through which to examine the staging of sporting mega-events and their impact upon both tangible and intangible outcomes (Gratton and Preuss 2008; Preuss 2010). Whilst broad reviews of legacy provide an overarching insight into the socio-economic impacts of the Olympic Games (Minnaert 2012), it is to issues of urban regeneration, transformation, community engagement, and the (re)creation of space and place that was used as the foci of this study. The aim of this study was to understand how the urban regeneration from the Olympic Games in London influenced the daily lived experience of residents within this post-Olympic space. By exploring resident interactions and experiences with the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park (QEOP) and its surrounding urban and infrastructural developments; a greater understanding of the convergence across local communities and their ‘lived’ experience was developed. By using an integrated methodological approach consisting of: walking ethnography (Pink et al. 2010; Yi’En 2014); an adapted version of Wang and Burris’ (1997) Photovoice methodology using the photo-sharing social media platform Instagram; and follow up semi-structured interviews to discuss the collated digital data, I could comprehensively understand material regeneration and lived experience and evaluate community development in the QEOP. This study revealed how, through modes of gentrification and marginalisation, an authoritative government-corporate elite used urban mega-event policy to (re)shape the social and urban fabric to consolidate the creation of a neoliberal, productive and attractive space. By engaging with middle class bodies whom live within this space, this study was able to highlight the complexities of citizenry and everyday experiences in a post-Olympic landscape: unearthing the varied ascriptions of lived experiences formed by certain citizens and capturing how Olympic urbanism influences these daily negotiations

Progress in Tourism Management: Is urban tourism a paradoxical research domain? Progress since 2011 and prospects for the future

© 2023 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).This paper reviews progress in the field of urban tourism, revisiting and challenging the validity of the paradoxes presented in the paper by Ashworth and Page (2011). To do this, the paper examines the expansion of research endeavours in urban tourism in relation to these paradoxes, including the outputs in dedicated journals on city tourism along with the wider range of outputs generated since 2011 in social science. It also revisits the initial proposition set out regarding an imbalance in attention in urban tourism research (Ashworth 1989, 2003) and how this has been addressed through a broader development of thinking at the intersection of urbanism and tourism. It is a selective review of progress in the field, highlighting the challenges of deriving theory from western modes of analysis that need re-thinking in relation to the global south, notably Africa as well as developments in Asia and the Middle East.Peer reviewe

A SPACE FOR YOUTH, BY YOUTH? REASSEMBLING YOUNG SINGAPOREANS' PARTICIPATORY AND FRIENDSHIP PROCESSES THROUGH THE 2010 YOUTH OLYMPIC GAMES

Master'sMASTER OF SOCIAL SCIENCE

The Permanence of Temporary Urbanism: Normalising Precarity in Austerity London

Temporary urbanism has become an established marker of city making after the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. The book offers a critical exploration of its emergence and establishment as a seductive discourse and as an entangled field of urban practice encompassing architecture, visual and performative arts, urban regeneration and planning. Drawing on seven years of semi-ethnographic research in London, it explores the politics of temporariness at time of austerity from a situated analysis of neighbourhood transformation and wider cultural and economic shifts. Through a sympathetic, longitudinal engagement with projects and practitioners, the book tests the power of aesthetic and cultural interventions and highlights tensions between the promise of practices of dissenting vacant space re-appropriation, and their practical foreclosure. Against the normalisation of ephemerality, it develops a critique of temporary urbanism as a glamorisation of the anticipatory politics of precarity, transforming subjectivities and imaginaries of urban action

Identifying opportunity places for urban regeneration through LBSNs

The use of location based social networks—LBSNs—for diagnosing phenomena in contemporary cities is evolving at a fast pace. However, methodological frameworks for informing urban regeneration at a fine-grain neighborhood scale through LBSNs is still by and large an unchartered territory, which this research seeks to address. This research bridges the knowledge gap by proposing a method to identify urban opportunity spaces for urban regeneration that involves pre-processing, analyzing and interpreting single and overlapped LBSN data. A two-fold perspective—people-based and place-based—is adopted. Data from four LBSNs—Foursquare, Twitter, Google Places and Airbnb—represent the people-based approach as it offers an insight into individual preferences, use and activities. The place-based approach is provided by an illustrative case study. Local unexpected nuances were gathered by the interlinking of data from different LBSNs, and opportunity places for urban regeneration have been recognized, as well as potential itineraries to boost urban liveliness and connectivity at both intra and inter- neighborhood scales. Findings show that overlapping data from various LBSNs enriches the analysis that would previously have relied on a single source.This work was supported by the Council of Education, Research, Culture and Sports – Generalitat Valenciana (Spain). Project: Valencian Community cities analyzed through Location-Based Social Networks and Web Services Data. Ref. no. AICO/2017/018