Abstract
Urban public spaces facilitate social interactions between people, reflecting the shifting functionality of spaces. There is no commonly-held consensus on the quantification methods for the dynamic interplay between spatial geometry, urban movement, and face-to-face encounters. Using anonymized social media check-in records from Shanghai, China, this study proposes pipelines for quantifying physical face-to-face encounter potential patterns through public space networks between local and non-local residents sensed by social media over time from space to space, in which social difference, cognitive cost, and time remoteness are integrated as the physical co-presence intensity index. This illustrates the spatiotemporally different ways in which the built environment binds various groups of space users configurationally via urban streets. The variation in face-to-face interaction patterns captures the fine-resolution patterns of urban flows and a new definition of street hierarchy, illustrating how urban public space systems deliver physical meeting opportunities and shape the spatial rhythms of human behavior from the public to the private. The shifting encounter potentials through streets are recognized as reflections of urban centrality structures with social interactions that are spatiotemporally varying, projected in the configurations of urban forms and functions. The results indicate that the occurrence probability of face-to-face encounters is more geometrically scaled than predicted based on the co-location probability of two people using metric distance alone. By adding temporal and social dimensions to urban morphology studies, and the field of space syntax research in particular, we suggest a new approach of analyzing the temporal urban centrality structures of the physical interaction potentials based on trajectory data, which is sensitive to the transformation of the spatial grid. It sheds light on how to adopt urban design as a social instrument to facilitate the dynamically changing social interaction potential in the new data environment, thereby enhancing spatial functionality and the social well-being.
Highlights
A city is a complex system for the interactions between humans
Using anonymized social media check-in records from Shanghai, China, this study proposes pipelines for quantifying physical face-to-face encounter potential patterns through public space networks between local and non-local residents sensed by social media over time from space to space, in which social difference, cognitive cost, and time remoteness are integrated as the physical co-presence intensity index
By adding temporal and social dimensions to urban morphology studies, and the field of space syntax research in particular, we suggest a new approach of analyzing the temporal urban centrality structures of the physical interaction potentials based on trajectory data, which is sensitive to the transformation of the spatial grid
Summary
A city is a complex system for the interactions between humans. modern communication technologies have extended human interactions from the physical to the non-physical, the built environment still functions as the primary arena in which people encounter one another, socialize, and build confidence. By interlinking the concepts of co-presence in space syntax and related concepts in sociology, Marcus [3] promoted a concept called “spatial capital,” which reflects the geometric distance that people should overcome to be co-present for unfolding the role of the architectural in shaping social capital in space These efforts contributed to the knowledge translation between urban design and sociology, but failed to explicitly quantify the temporally shifting face-to-face presence patterns within the geometric context of urban space, thereby constraining the implication of urban design for dynamic social well-being in space. Spatial co-presence potential can be understood through the index of exposure or its mirror-isolation, which describes the inter-group interaction potential and within-group interaction potential in people’s daily activity spaces [24] Another recent attempt was using joint accessibility, which is the intersection of spacetime prisms, to estimate the physical interaction potential by taking into account mobility patterns [25]. These efforts, even though they were conducted on different scales with various approaches, suggested that physical co-presence patterns are a key focus for uncovering the multi-scalar implications of urban design, planning, and other spatial developments, even though our social connections are not currently geographically limited [26]
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