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.

No abstract

No abstract

Geo-tagged Twitter has been proven to be a useful proxy for urban mobility, this way helping to understand the structure of the city and the shape of its local neighborhoods. In the present work we approach this problem from another angle by leveraging additional information on Twitter customers mentioning each other, which might partially reveal their social relations. We propose a novel way of constructing a spatial social network based on such data, analyze its structure and evaluate its utility for delineating urban neighborhoods. This delineation happens to have substantial similarity to the earlier one based on the user mobility network. It leads to an assumption that the social connectivity between the users is strongly related with the similarity in their mobility patterns. We justify this hypothesis enabling extrapolation of the available user mobility patterns as a proxy for social connectivity and building a network of hidden ties based on the mobility pattern similarity. Finally, we evaluate the socioeconomic characteristics of the partitions for all three networks of all mentioning, reciprocal mentioning and the hidden ties.