Abstract
Technological advances have enabled new sources of geoinformation, such as geosocial media, and have supported the propagation of the concept of smart cities. This paper argues that a city cannot be smart without citizens in the loop, and that a geosocial sensor might be one component to achieve that. First, we need to better understand which facets of urban life could be detected by a geosocial sensor, and how to calibrate it. This requires replicable studies that foster longitudinal and comparative research. Consequently, this paper examines the relationship between geosocial media content and socio-demographic census data for a global city, London, at two administrative levels. It aims for a transparent study design to encourage replication, using Term Frequency—Inverse Document Frequency of keywords, rule-based and word-embedding sentiment analysis, and local cluster analysis. The findings of limited links between geosocial media content and socio-demographic characteristics support earlier critiques on the utility of geosocial media for smart city planning purposes. The paper concludes that passive listening to publicly available geosocial media, in contrast to pro-active engagement with citizens, seems of limited use to understand and improve urban quality of life.
Highlights
Collective urban imaginaries continue to be an important dimension of urban life, and geosocial media reflect and shape our perception of urban space and urban places [3]
This paper aims to address, but cannot hope to solve on its own, the important question when results are similar enough so that we can claim a successful replication, allowing us to conclude something about the generalizability or transferability of studies, and the volatility of geosocial media
This paper focuses on two questions that are guided by the desire to utilize geosocial media for urban policymaking: 1
Summary
Rejecting new technological developments and their use in society and by citizens is no solution either, because so many of our daily activities are happening entirely online or are guided by location-based services. This leads to closer interaction between the physical world and the digital dimension, which a geosocial sensor might help to capture [2]. A geosocial sensor captures information from social media and social networks that is linkable to a physical place, e.g., through coordinate metadata or mentions of place names Such a geosocial sensor might reveal layers of urban fabric and spatial practices that are inaccessible by other means. Collective urban imaginaries continue to be an important dimension of urban life, and geosocial media reflect and shape our perception of urban space and urban places [3]
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