Abstract
The concept of urban vibrancy has become increasingly important in the study of cities. A vibrant urban environment is an area of a city with high levels of human activity and interactions. Traditionally, studying our cities and what makes them vibrant has been very difficult, due to challenges in data collection on urban environments and people’s location and interactions. Here, we rely on novel sources of data to investigate how different features of our cities may relate to urban vibrancy. In particular, we explore whether there are any differences in which urban features make an environment vibrant for different age groups. We perform this quantitative analysis by extracting urban features from OpenStreetMap and the Italian census, and using them in spatial models to describe urban vibrancy. Our analysis shows a strong relationship between urban features and urban vibrancy, and particularly highlights the importance of third places, which are urban places offering opportunities for social interactions. Our findings provide evidence that a combination of mobile phone data with crowdsourced urban features can be used to better understand urban vibrancy.
Highlights
Recent years have witnessed an increased urbanisation of the environment in which people live, with more than half of the world’s population living in urban areas [1]
We investigate whether features derived from OpenStreetMap and the census are related to the presence of people in different parts of the city
We start our investigation by performing a correlation analysis between the mobile phone data and the urban features described in the Data and Data preparationsections above
Summary
Recent years have witnessed an increased urbanisation of the environment in which people live, with more than half of the world’s population living in urban areas [1]. The large diversity of cultures and people living in metropolitan areas poses challenges in terms of economic inequality and criminality [4, 5]. The recent surge in large data sets derived from our interactions with large technological systems, such as the Internet, offers novel opportunities in this area, which has become known as urban analytics or urban computing [6]. High resolution data on urban environments is widely available at a large scale thanks to open collaborative projects, such as OpenStreetMap [9]
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