Crime, inequality and public health: a survey of emerging trends in urban data science

Massimiliano Luca; Gian Maria Campedelli; Simone Centellegher; Michele Tizzoni; Bruno Lepri

doi:10.3389/fdata.2023.1124526

Crime, inequality and public health: a survey of emerging trends in urban data science

Front Big Data. 2023 May 25:6:1124526. doi: 10.3389/fdata.2023.1124526. eCollection 2023.

Authors

Massimiliano Luca^{1

2}, Gian Maria Campedelli³, Simone Centellegher¹, Michele Tizzoni³, Bruno Lepri¹

Affiliations

¹ Mobile and Social Computing Lab, Bruno Kessler Foundation, Trento, Italy.
² Faculty of Computer Science, Free University of Bolzano, Bolzano, Italy.
³ Department of Sociology and Social Research, University of Trento, Trento, Italy.

Abstract

Urban agglomerations are constantly and rapidly evolving ecosystems, with globalization and increasing urbanization posing new challenges in sustainable urban development well summarized in the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The advent of the digital age generated by modern alternative data sources provides new tools to tackle these challenges with spatio-temporal scales that were previously unavailable with census statistics. In this review, we present how new digital data sources are employed to provide data-driven insights to study and track (i) urban crime and public safety; (ii) socioeconomic inequalities and segregation; and (iii) public health, with a particular focus on the city scale.

Keywords: cities; crime; digital data; public health; segregation and inequalities.

Publication types

Review

Grants and funding

BL and SC are supported by the PNRR ICSC National Research Centre for High Performance Computing, Big Data and Quantum Computing (CN00000013), under the NRRP MUR program funded by the NextGenerationEU.