The Rio Olympic Games: A Look into City Dynamics through the Lens of Twitter Data

Ana Condeço-Melhorado,Inmaculada Mohino,Borja Moya-Gómez,Juan Carlos García-Palomares

doi:10.3390/su12177003

Ana Condeço-Melhorado, Inmaculada Mohino + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/su12177003

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Abstract

The Olympic Games have a huge impact on the cities where they are held, both during the actual celebration of the event, and before and after it. This study presents a new approach based on spatial analysis, GIS, and data coming from Location-Based Social Networks to model the spatiotemporal dimension of impacts associated with the Rio 2016 Olympic Games. Geolocalized data from Twitter are used to analyze the activity pattern of users from two different viewpoints. The first monitors the activity of Twitter users during the event—The arrival of visitors, where they came from, and the use which residents and tourists made of different areas of the city. The second assesses the spatiotemporal use of the city by Twitter users before the event, compared to the use during and after the event. The results not only reveal which spaces were the most used while the Games were being held but also changes in the urban dynamics after the Games. Both approaches can be used to assess the impacts of mega-events and to improve the management and allocation of urban resources such as transport and public services infrastructure.

Highlights

Mega-events can be defined as events that attract a large number of visitors, have a large mediated reach, come with high costs and have a large impact on the built environment and the host population [1]
The Olympic Games, in particular, constitute an opportunity to transform urban areas that have become obsolete in terms of use, for example, industrial areas, into areas related to the service economy [13,14,15]
There is limited knowledge about the effects of mega-events on the activity levels of the host city and in areas restricted to the event facilities

Summary

Introduction

Mega-events can be defined as events that attract a large number of visitors, have a large mediated reach, come with high costs and have a large impact on the built environment and the host population [1]. A substantial body of literature about mega-events has risen over recent decades, both theoretical [3,4] and empirical, based on case studies [5,6,7,8,9] These studies have mainly focused on the impact of mega-events from different perspectives such as economic, tourism and commercial; infrastructure and physical resources; political; sport and recreation; environmental; and socio-cultural [7,10,11]. The Olympic Games, in particular, constitute an opportunity to transform urban areas that have become obsolete in terms of use, for example, industrial areas, into areas related to the service economy [13,14,15] Despite all these studies, there is limited knowledge about the effects of mega-events ( the Olympic Games) on the activity levels of the host city and in areas restricted to the event facilities.

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