Structure of 311 service requests as a signature of urban location

PLoS One. 2017 Oct 17;12(10):e0186314. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0186314. eCollection 2017.

Abstract

While urban systems demonstrate high spatial heterogeneity, many urban planning, economic and political decisions heavily rely on a deep understanding of local neighborhood contexts. We show that the structure of 311 Service Requests enables one possible way of building a unique signature of the local urban context, thus being able to serve as a low-cost decision support tool for urban stakeholders. Considering examples of New York City, Boston and Chicago, we demonstrate how 311 Service Requests recorded and categorized by type in each neighborhood can be utilized to generate a meaningful classification of locations across the city, based on distinctive socioeconomic profiles. Moreover, the 311-based classification of urban neighborhoods can present sufficient information to model various socioeconomic features. Finally, we show that these characteristics are capable of predicting future trends in comparative local real estate prices. We demonstrate 311 Service Requests data can be used to monitor and predict socioeconomic performance of urban neighborhoods, allowing urban stakeholders to quantify the impacts of their interventions.

MeSH terms

  • Boston
  • Censuses
  • Chicago
  • City Planning
  • Ecology*
  • Forecasting
  • Housing
  • Humans
  • Machine Learning
  • New York City
  • Residence Characteristics
  • Socioeconomic Factors*
  • Spatial Analysis
  • Urban Population*

Grants and funding

PK, CK and SS acknowledge partial support from the NYU University Challenge Research Fund. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.