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The advent of geographic online social networks such as Foursquare, where users voluntarily signal their current location, opens the door to powerful studies on human movement. In particular the fine granularity of the location data, with…
Understanding the impact that a new business has on the local market ecosystem is a challenging task as it is multifaceted in nature. Past work in this space has examined the collaborative or competitive role of homogeneous venue types…
The Olympic Games are an important sporting event with notable consequences for the general economic landscape of the host city. Traditional economic assessments focus on the aggregated impact of the event on the national income, but fail…
Estimating revenue and business demand of a newly opened venue is paramount as these early stages often involve critical decisions such as first rounds of staffing and resource allocation. Traditionally, this estimation has been performed…
Data generated on location-based social networks provide rich information on the whereabouts of urban dwellers. Specifically, such data reveal who spends time where, when, and on what type of activity (e.g., shopping at a mall, or dining at…
Urban space is highly heterogeneous, with population and human activities concentrating in localized centers. However, the global organization of such intra-urban centers remains poorly understood due to the lack of consistent, comparable…
A good understanding of cities is crucial to implement urban planning policies leading to social and economic sustainability and an efficient use of resources. While urban concentration has been associated with both positive and negative…
Understanding cities is central to addressing major global challenges from climate and health to economic resilience. Although increasingly perceived as fundamental socio-economic units, the detailed fabric of urban economic activities is…
The focused organization theory of social ties proposes that the structure of human social networks can be arranged around extra-network foci, which can include shared physical spaces such as homes, workplaces, restaurants, and so on. Until…
Taking advantage of nearly 4 million transition records for three years in London from a popular location-based social network service, Foursquare, we study how to track the impact and measure the effectiveness of cultural investment in…
There is little knowledge available on the spatial behaviour of urban tourists, and yet tourists generate an enormous quantity of data (Big Data) when they visit cities. These data sources can be used to track their presence through their…
This chapter examines the possibility to analyze and compare human activities in an urban environment based on the detection of mobile phone usage patterns. Thanks to an unprecedented collection of counter data recording the number of…
The amount of data that is being gathered about cities is increasing in size and specificity. However, despite this wealth of information, we still have little understanding of what really drives the processes behind urbanisation. In this…
The current science of cities can provide a useful foundation for future urban policies, provided that these proposals have been validated by correct observations of the diversity of situations in the world. However, international…
Cities are some of the most intricate and advanced creations of humanity. Most objects in cities are perfectly synchronised to coordinate activities such as jobs, education, transportation, entertainment, and waste management. Although each…
We aim to study the temporal patterns of activity in points of interest of cities around the world. In order to do so, we use the data provided by the online location-based social network Foursquare, where users make check-ins that indicate…
Understanding scaling relations of social and environmental attributes of urban systems is necessary for effectively managing cities. Urban scaling theory (UST) has assumed that population density scales positively with city size. We…
The share of the world population living in cities with more than one million people rose from 11% in 1975 to 24% in 2025 (our estimates). Will this trend towards greater concentration in large cities continue or level off? We introduce two…
Great cities connect people; failed cities isolate people. Despite the fundamental importance of physical, face-to-face social-ties in the functioning of cities, these connectivity networks are not explicitly observed in their entirety.…
The problem of identifying the optimal location for a new retail store has been the focus of past research, especially in the field of land economy, due to its importance in the success of a business. Traditional approaches to the problem…