REPRESENTING THE SOCIAL CHARACTER OF PLACES: ONTOLOGY MODELS OF THE URBAN ENVIRONMENT

The thesis aimed at rendering machine understandable the social dimension of urban places to provide a new generation of urban analytics based on peoples’ socio- spatial behaviour. The main outcome has been a formal framework, encoded in the form of Ontology Design Patterns, to represent the interaction between the architectural aspects of the city, its form, and the behaviour of city dwellers. Ontology models are based on place theories discussed by social and cultural geographers - such as Henri Lefevbre, Edward Soja and Doreen Massey - and experimented in a knowledge discovery pipeline by exploring geographic crowdsourced data coming from the TripAdvisor platform

Turin's Foodscapes: Exploring Places of Food Consumption Through the Prism of Social Practice Theory

This contribution wishes to propose an addition to the existing toolbox of techniques employed to approach and render explicit the place semantics embedded in geosocial data. Inspired by the notion of relational place introduced by human geographers, we focused on people's experience of the city derived from the aggregation of the points of view of different social groups. We analysed socio-spatial behaviour under the frame of social practice theories, defining social practices as collective social actions performed by groups of people that display a similar behaviour. Applying spatial pattern analysis and clustering on data extracted from TripAdvisor platform, we classified social groups of users depending on our prior knowledge and their spatial behaviours

Urban Artefacts and Their Social Roles: Towards an Ontology of Social Practices

Cities can be seen as systems of urban artefacts interacting with human activities. Since cities in this sense need to be organized and coordinated, convergences and divergences between the "planned" and the "lived" city have always been of paramount interest in urban planning. The increasing amount of geo big data and the growing impact of Internet of Things (IoT) in contemporary smart city is pushing toward a re-conceptualization of urban systems taking into consideration the complexity of human behaviors. This work contributes to this view by proposing an ontological analysis of urban artefacts and their roles, focusing in particular on the difference between social roles and functional roles through the prism of social practices

Inequalities in experiencing urban functions. An exploration of human digital (geo-)footprints

Studies on mobility inequalities have so far mostly relied on Survey data or Censuses. While such studies have demonstrated that inequalities strongly influence everyday mobility choices, these data sources lack granular information on people’s movements on a daily basis. By capitalising on high spatio-temporal resolution data provided by Spectus.ai, this study aims at investigating how the deprivation level of the area where people live influences the kinds of urban environment they are more likely to use for their everyday activities. To do this, raw GPS trajectories collected in 2019 in Great Britain (GB) are transformed into semantic trajectories where short-time changes and the functional nature of urban contexts are acknowledged as two key dimensions to understand human spatial behaviours. Hourly sequences of stops are extracted from GPS trajectories and enriched with contextual information based on a new area-based classification detecting urban functions. The data exploration shows that some human patterns are widely common across all levels of deprivation, such as the tendency to be mostly exposed to the urban context near the home location. At the same time, we show that differences exist, especially between those who live in the most deprived areas and those who live in the least deprived areas of GB. It appears that people living in the most deprived areas tend to have a less regular working pattern and be more exposed to urban-based functions and well-served areas, while those living in the least deprived areas have a more regular working patterns and are mostly exposed to the countryside and low-density areas. Our approach and results provide new insights on the temporal and contextual dimensions of mobility inequalities, informing on who is exposed to issues characterising certain urban environments. </jats:p