Modelling urban vibrancy with mobile phone and OpenStreetMap data

PLoS One. 2021 Jun 2;16(6):e0252015. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0252015. eCollection 2021.

Abstract

The concept of urban vibrancy has become increasingly important in the study of cities. A vibrant urban environment is an area of a city with high levels of human activity and interactions. Traditionally, studying our cities and what makes them vibrant has been very difficult, due to challenges in data collection on urban environments and people's location and interactions. Here, we rely on novel sources of data to investigate how different features of our cities may relate to urban vibrancy. In particular, we explore whether there are any differences in which urban features make an environment vibrant for different age groups. We perform this quantitative analysis by extracting urban features from OpenStreetMap and the Italian census, and using them in spatial models to describe urban vibrancy. Our analysis shows a strong relationship between urban features and urban vibrancy, and particularly highlights the importance of third places, which are urban places offering opportunities for social interactions. Our findings provide evidence that a combination of mobile phone data with crowdsourced urban features can be used to better understand urban vibrancy.

MeSH terms

  • Cell Phone / statistics & numerical data*
  • City Planning / methods*
  • Geographic Information Systems / statistics & numerical data*
  • Humans
  • Models, Theoretical*
  • Urban Renewal / methods*

Grants and funding

The author(s) received no specific funding for this work.