Twitter Activity Timeline as a Signature of Urban Neighborhood

Abstract: Modern cities are complex systems, evolving at a fast pace. Thus, many urban planning, political, and economic decisions require a deep and up-to-date understanding of the local context of urban neighborhoods. This study shows that the structure of openly available social media records, such as Twitter, offers a possibility for building a unique dynamic signature of urban neighborhood function, and, therefore, might be used as an efficient and simple decision support tool. Considering New York City as an example, we investigate how Twitter data can be used to decompose the urban landscape into self-defining zones, aligned with the functional properties of individual neighborhoods and their social and economic characteristics. We further explore the potential of these data for detecting events and evaluating their impact over time and space. This approach paves a way to a methodology for immediate quantification of the impact of urban development programs and the estimation of socioeconomic statistics at a finer spatial-temporal scale, thus allowing urban policy-makers to track neighborhood transformations and foresee undesirable changes in order to take early action before official statistics would be available.