Scaling of city attractiveness for foreign visitors through big data of human economical and social media activity

Scientific studies investigating laws and regularities of human behavior are nowadays increasingly relying on the wealth of widely available digital information produced by human social activity. In this paper we leverage big data created by three different aspects of human activity (i.e., bank card transactions, geotagged photographs and tweets) in Spain for quantifying city attractiveness for the foreign visitors. An important finding of this papers is a strong superlinear scaling of city attractiveness with its population size. The observed scaling exponent stays nearly the same for different ways of defining cities and for different data sources, emphasizing the robustness of our finding. Temporal variation of the scaling exponent is also considered in order to reveal seasonal patterns in the attractivenessComment: 8 pages, 3 figures, 1 tabl

Новый цифровой источник статистической информации о населении

The article presents the authors’ views on using «Big Data» to gain new information on population and to study various social and economic phenomena and processes on its basis. As the foreign  experience clearly demonstrates, with the development of  information industry and the ubiquitous mobile communications  penetration, one of the most promising sources of «Big Data» in  terms of population coverage (using population as an object of  statistical observation) and efficiency in obtaining information on it,  is data from mobile operators. The paper also notes Russian  experience in this field, especially since 2014, when Russia managed to implement the «Geoanalysis» project on using data from mobile  operators in managerial activities of the Moscow Government. The  authors outline the history and development of the new digital data  source for population statistics, which is based on technical data of cellular networks. The paper covers baselines to Russian innovation methodological developments and algorithms for converting radio frequency events from base stations of mobile operators into  statistical indicators of number, density and dynamics of population  movements with full coverage of study area and high level of space- time specification. This article pays particular attention to issues  concerning protection of subscribers’ personal data, legality of collecting and processing the information received from mobile operators in accordance with the legislation of the Russian  Federation. The authors thoroughly examined directions for applying  statistical indicators, based on data from mobile operators, in the  field of economy, trade, culture, transport modeling, urban planning and management.В статье дается изложение авторского понимания вопросов использования больших данных в целях получения новых знаний о населении и исследовании на их основе различных  социально-экономических явлений и процессов. Указывается, что с развитием информационной индустрии и повсеместным проникновением мобильной связи,  как показывает зарубежный опыт, одним из наиболее перспективных источников больших  данных с точки зрения полноты охвата населения как объекта статистического наблюдения  и оперативности получения информации о нем являются данные сотовых операторов.  Авторы подробно рассматривают отечественный опыт в этой области. В частности, еще в  2014 г. в России удалось реализовать проект «Геоаналитика» по практическому применению данных операторов в управленческой деятельности органов исполнительной власти  Правительства Москвы. Авторами освещается история возникновения и развития нового  цифрового источника статистической информации о населении, в основе которого лежат  технические данные сотовых сетей. Излагаются основы инновационных российских методологических разработок и алгоритмов преобразования радиочастотных событий  базовых станций операторов сотовой связи в статистические показатели численности,  плотности и динамики перемещений населения с полным охватом исследуемой территории и высоким уровнем пространственно-временной детализации. Особое внимание в статье  уделяется вопросам защиты персональных данных абонентов, легальности процессов сбора  и обработки информации, получаемой от операторов сотовой связи, в соответствии с  требованиями законодательства Российской Федерации. Детально рассматриваются  направления практического применения статистических показателей, сформированных на основе данных сотовых операторов, в области экономики, торговли, культуры,  транспортного моделирования, сферах городского планирования и управления.

Mining Urban Performance: Scale-Independent Classification of Cities Based on Individual Economic Transactions

Intensive development of urban systems creates a number of challenges for urban planners and policy makers in order to maintain sustainable growth. Running efficient urban policies requires meaningful urban metrics, which could quantify important urban characteristics including various aspects of an actual human behavior. Since a city size is known to have a major, yet often nonlinear, impact on the human activity, it also becomes important to develop scale-free metrics that capture qualitative city properties, beyond the effects of scale. Recent availability of extensive datasets created by human activity involving digital technologies creates new opportunities in this area. In this paper we propose a novel approach of city scoring and classification based on quantitative scale-free metrics related to economic activity of city residents, as well as domestic and foreign visitors. It is demonstrated on the example of Spain, but the proposed methodology is of a general character. We employ a new source of large-scale ubiquitous data, which consists of anonymized countrywide records of bank card transactions collected by one of the largest Spanish banks. Different aspects of the classification reveal important properties of Spanish cities, which significantly complement the pattern that might be discovered with the official socioeconomic statistics.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figures, to be published in the proceedings of ASE BigDataScience 2014 conferenc

Estimating Attendance From Cellular Network Data

We present a methodology to estimate the number of attendees to events happening in the city from cellular network data. In this work we used anonymized Call Detail Records (CDRs) comprising data on where and when users access the cellular network. Our approach is based on two key ideas: (1) we identify the network cells associated to the event location. (2) We verify the attendance of each user, as a measure of whether (s)he generates CDRs during the event, but not during other times. We evaluate our approach to estimate the number of attendees to a number of events ranging from football matches in stadiums to concerts and festivals in open squares. Comparing our results with the best groundtruth data available, our estimates provide a median error of less than 15% of the actual number of attendees

The geography of taste: analyzing cell-phone mobility and social events

This paper deals with the analysis of crowd mobility during special events. We analyze nearly 1 million cell-phone traces and associate their destinations with social events. We show that the origins of people attending an event are strongly correlated to the type of event, with implications in city management, since the knowledge of additive flows can be a critical information on which to take decisions about events management and congestion mitigation

Instagram, Flickr, or Twitter : Assessing the usability of social media data for visitor monitoring in protected areas

Social media data is increasingly used as a proxy for human activity in diferent environments, including protected areas, where collecting visitor information is often laborious and expensive, but important for management and marketing. Here, we compared data from Instagram, Twitter and Flickr, and assessed systematically how park popularity and temporal visitor counts derived from social media data perform against high-precision visitor statistics in 56 national parks in Finland and South Africa in 2014. We show that social media activity is highly associated with park popularity, and social media based monthly visitation patterns match relatively well with the ofcial visitor counts. However, there were considerable diferences between platforms as Instagram clearly outperformed Twitter and Flickr. Furthermore, we show that social media data tend to perform better in more visited parks, and should always be used with caution. Based on stakeholder discussions we identifed potential reasons why social media data and visitor statistics might not match: the geography and profle of the park, the visitor profle, and sudden events. Overall the results are encouraging in broader terms: Over 60% of the national parks globally have Twitter or Instagram activity, which could potentially inform global nature conservation.Peer reviewe

Starting to get bored: An outdoor eye tracking study of tourists exploring a city

Predicting the moment when a visual explorer of a place loses interest and starts to get bored is of considerable importance to the design of touristic information services. This paper investigates factors affecting the duration of the visual exploration of a city panorama. We report on an empirical outdoor eye tracking study in the real world with tourists following a free exploration paradigm without a time limit. As main result, the number of areas of interest revisited during a short period was found to be a good predictor for the total exploration duration

Cell Towers as Urban Sensors: Understanding the Strengths and Limitations of Mobile Phone Location Data

Understanding urban dynamics and human mobility patterns not only benefits a wide range of real-world applications (e.g., business site selection, public transit planning), but also helps address many urgent issues caused by the rapid urbanization processes (e.g., population explosion, congestion, pollution). In the past few years, given the pervasive usage of mobile devices, call detail records collected by mobile network operators has been widely used in urban dynamics and human mobility studies. However, the derived knowledge might be strongly biased due to the uneven distribution of people’s phone communication activities in space and time. This dissertation research applies different analytical methods to better understand human activity and urban environment, as well as their interactions, mainly based on a new type of data source: actively tracked mobile phone location data. In particular, this dissertation research achieves three main research objectives. First, this research develops visualization and analysis approaches to uncover hidden urban dynamics patterns from actively tracked mobile phone location data. Second, this research designs quantitative methods to evaluate the representativeness issue of call detail record data. Third, this research develops an appropriate approach to evaluate the performance of different types of tracking data in urban dynamics research. The major contributions of this dissertation research include: 1) uncovering the dynamics of stay/move activities and distance decay effects, and the changing human mobility patterns based on several mobility indicators derived from actively tracked mobile phone location data; 2) taking the first step to evaluate the representativeness and effectiveness of call detail record and revealing its bias in human mobility research; and 3) extracting and comparing urban-level population movement patterns derived from three different types of tracking data as well as their pros and cons in urban population movement analysis

El parque central metropolitano, pieza singular del sistema de espacios libres: hacia una definición crítica

En las grandes metrópolis de hoy, entre las diferencias que las distinguen de las ciudades menores, podemos encontrar un sistema de espacios libres habitualmente complejo. En algunas, forma parte de este sistema un espacio de características especiales y de rango preferente, por sus cualidades y dimensión, que se puede denominar Parque Central Metropolitano. La investigación se aproxima a la definición de éste desde dos visiones complementarias: el origen del concepto a través de la historia de la cultura y la de los casos de estudio, y el ocio colectivo como función a la que el parque central da servicio y que es clave para el análisis crítico de su programa. Así, nos disponemos a conocer y discutir las condiciones y cualidades urbanísticas de estos parques, con el empuje de aportar una modesta contribución a la discusión sobre la constitución de la metrópoli contemporánea. Se quiere reivindicar expresamente la urbanidad de los parques centrales, más allá de los beneficios medioambientales que puedan representar.ENG: Today in great metropolis we can usually find a complex open space system, as one of the major differences between them and ordinary cities. Sometimes, this open space system comprises one patch with special features and leading role because of its qualities and dimension that could be named Metropolitan Central Park. There are two basic components of our research. The first involves researching the origin of this kind of parks from the history of culture and from each case study history. The second component studies collective leisure as a function that central park performs and is a key part of the critical analysis of the park program. Ultimately, our research tries to discuss these large parks’ conditions, with the aim of contributing to our understanding of the composition of the contemporary metropolis. We try to establish that the central park has an urban value over and above its environmental goodness.Peer Reviewe

El parque central metropolitano : pieza singular del sistema de espacios libres. Hacia una definición crítica

En las grandes metrópolis de hoy, entre las diferencias que las distinguen de las ciudades menores, podemos encontrar un sistema de espacios libres habitualmente complejo. En algunas, forma parte de este sistema un espacio de características especiales y de rango preferente, por sus cualidades y dimensión, que se puede denominar Parque Central Metropolitano. La investigación se aproxima a la definición de éste desde dos visiones complementarias: el origen del concepto a través de la historia de la cultura y la de los casos de estudio, y el ocio colectivo como función a la que el parque central da servicio y que es clave para el análisis crítico de su programa. Así, nos disponemos a conocer y discutir las condiciones y cualidades urbanísticas de estos parques, con el empuje de aportar una modesta contribución a la discusión sobre la constitución de la metrópoli contemporánea. Se quiere reivindicar expresamente la urbanidad de los parques centrales, más allá de los beneficios medioambientales que puedan representar. // Today in great metropolis we can usually find a complex open space system, as one of the major differences between them and ordinary cities. Sometimes, this open space system comprises one patch with special features and leading role because of its qualities and dimension that could be named Metropolitan Central Park. There are two basic components of our research. The first involves researching the origin of this kind of parks from the history of culture and from each case study history. The second component studies collective leisure as a function that central park performs and is a key part of the critical analysis of the park program. Ultimately, our research tries to discuss these large parks’ conditions, with the aim of contributing to our understanding of the composition of the contemporary metropolis. We try to establish that the central park has an urban value over and above its environmental goodness.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version