Abstract
The high population density in cities confers many advantages, including improved social interaction and information exchange. However, it is often argued that urban living comes at the expense of reducing happiness. The goal of this research is to shed light on the relationship between urban communication and urban happiness. We analyze geo-located social media posts (tweets) within a major urban center (Milan) to produce a detailed spatial map of urban sentiments. We combine this data with high-resolution mobile communication intensity data among different urban areas. Our results reveal that happy (respectively unhappy) areas preferentially communicate with other areas of their type. This observation constitutes evidence of homophilous communities at the scale of an entire city (Milan), and has implications on interventions that aim to improve urban well-being.
Highlights
For the first time in history, the majority of humans lives in cities
5 Discussion We have taken a first step towards understanding the interplay between communication and happiness in urban areas at a high resolution
We found evidence of assortative mixing in communication between different urban areas based on their happiness level
Summary
For the first time in history, the majority of humans lives in cities. A complete theory concerned with the growth and dynamics of cities is still a work-in-progress [ ]. Our phenomenological understanding of cities is growing significantly thanks to progress in our ability to sense the dynamics of human behavior [ ], and the urban environment and infrastructure [ , ]. Cities exhibit consistent sub-linear and super-linear scaling of many of these indicators [ ]. These characteristics of cities are attributed to many factors [ , ]. Characteristics of human social interaction, such as the role of weak ties [ ], structural holes [ ] and the diversity in interaction [ ] are often seen as important facilitators of success in cities. It has been suggested that cities are special because the increased urban population density leads to super-linear scaling in social tie density, facilitating super-linear scaling of information spreading [ ]
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