Unveiling social vibrancy in urban spaces with app usage
Date:
Presented at the Conference on Complex Systems 2024 — the flagship annual meeting of the Complex Systems Society, hosted jointly by the University of Exeter and Northeastern University London.
Authors
- Thomas Collins (University of Exeter)
- Diogo Pacheco (University of Exeter)
- Riccardo Di Clemente (Northeastern University London; The Alan Turing Institute)
- Federico Botta (University of Exeter; The Alan Turing Institute)
Read the preprint (arXiv:2412.14943)
Abstract
Urban vibrancy reflects the energetic pulse of a city — and in today’s digital age, mobile app usage offers an unprecedented signature of how people engage with urban spaces. Using high-resolution app-usage data across eighteen French cities from the NetMob23 dataset, this talk explores how socially relevant urban features derived from OpenStreetMap interact with patterns of online behaviour. I present a methodology for identifying and classifying multidimensional app-usage time series based on similarity, capturing variation across cities and between weekdays and weekends, and discuss what this means for understanding urban vibrancy and designing more responsive and inclusive cities.