Measuring Urban Social Diversity Using Interconnected Geo-Social Networks

ABSTRACT

Large metropolitan cities bring together diverse individuals, creating opportunities for cultural and intellectual exchanges, which can ultimately lead to social and economic enrichment. In this work, we present a novel network perspective on the interconnected nature of people and places, allowing us to capture the social diversity of urban locations through the social network and mobility patterns of their visitors. We use a dataset of approximately 37K users and 42K venues in London to build a network of Foursquare places and the parallel Twitter social network of visitors through check-ins. We define four metrics of the social diversity of places which relate to their social brokerage role, their entropy, the homogeneity of their visitors and the amount of serendipitous encounters they are able to induce. This allows us to distinguish between places that bring together strangers versus those which tend to bring together friends, as well as places that attract diverse individuals as opposed to those which attract regulars. We correlate these properties with wellbeing indicators for London neighbourhoods and discover signals of gentrification in deprived areas with high entropy and brokerage, where an influx of more affluent and diverse visitors points to an overall improvement of their rank according to the UK Index of Multiple Deprivation for the area over the five-year census period. Our analysis sheds light on the relationship between the prosperity of people and places, distinguishing between different categories and urban geographies of consequence to the development of urban policy and the next generation of socially-aware location-based applications.

References

1. Lars Backstrom, Eric Sun, and Cameron Marlow. Find Me if You Can: Improving Geographical Prediction with Social and Spatial Proximity. In Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on World Wide Web (WWW'10), pages 61--70, 2010.
2. Michael Batty. The New Science of Cities. MIT Press, 2013.
3. Michael Batty and Yichun Xie. From Cells to Cities. Environment and Planning B, 21:s31--s31, 1994.
4. Stefano Boccaletti, G Bianconi, R Criado, Charo I Del Genio, J Gómez-Gardenes, M Romance, I Sendina-Nadal, Z Wang, and M Zanin. The Structure and Dynamics of Multilayer Networks. Physics Reports, 544(1):1--122, 2014.
5. Stephen P. Borgatti. Structural Holes: Unpacking Burt's Redundancy Measures. Connections, 20:35--38, 1997.
6. Chloë Brown, Neal Lathia, Cecilia Mascolo, Anastasios Noulas, and Vincent Blondel. Group Colocation Behavior in Technological Social Networks. PLoS ONE, 9(8), August 2014.
7. Chloë Brown, Vincenzo Nicosia, Salvatore Scellato, Anastasios Noulas, and Cecilia Mascolo. Social and Place-focused Communities in Location-based Online Social Networks. The European Physical Journal B, 86(6):1--10, June 2013.
8. Sergey V Buldyrev, Roni Parshani, Gerald Paul, H Eugene Stanley, and Shlomo Havlin. Catastrophic Cascade of Failures in Interdependent Networks. Nature, 464(7291):1025--1028, 2010.
9. Ronald S Burt. Structural Holes. Harvard University Press, 1995.
10. Ronald S Burt. The Network Structure of Social Capital. Research in Organizational Behavior, 22:345--423, 2000.
11. Ronald S Burt. Structural Holes and Good Ideas. American Journal of Sociology, 110(2):349--399, 2004.
12. Eunjoon Cho, Seth A Myers, and Jure Leskovec. Friendship and Mobility: User Movement in Location-based Social Networks. In Proceedings of the 17th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD'11), pages 1082--1090. ACM, 2011.
13. David Crandall, Dan Cosley, Daniel Huttenlocher, Jon Kleinberg, and Siddharth Suri. Feedback Effects between Similarity and Social Influence in Online Communities. In Proceedings of the 14th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD'08), pages 160--168. ACM, 2008.
14. Justin Cranshaw, Eran Toch, Jason Hong, Aniket Kittur, and Norman Sadeh. Bridging the Gap between Physical Location and Online Social Networks. In Proceedings of the 12th ACM International Conference on Ubiquitous computing (UbiComp'10), pages 119--128. ACM, 2010.
15. Manlio De Domenico, Albert Solé-Ribalta, Sergio Gómez, and Alex Arenas. Navigability of Interconnected Networks Under Random Failures. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(23):8351--8356, 2014.
16. Maeve Duggan, Nicole B. Ellison, Cliff Lampe, Amanda Lenhart, and Mary Madden. Social Media Update 2014. Pew Research Center, 2015.
17. Nathan Eagle, Michael Macy, and Rob Claxton. Network Diversity and Economic Development. Science, 328(5981):1029--1031, 2010.
18. Richard L. Florida. The Rise of the Creative Class: Revisited. Basic Books, 2012.
19. Riccardo Gallotti and Marc Barthelemy. The Multilayer Temporal Network of Public Transport in Great Britain. Scientific data, 2, 2015.
20. Desislava Hristova, Pietro Panzarasa, and Cecilia Mascolo. Multilayer Brokerage in Geo-Social Networks. In Proceedings of the 9th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM'15), 2015.
21. Jane Jacobs. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Vintage International. Random House, 1961.
22. M. Kivel\"a, A. Arenas, M. Barthelemy, J. P. Gleeson, Y. Moreno, and M. Porter. Multilayer Networks. Journal of Complex Networks, 2(3):203--271, 2014.
23. Haewoon Kwak, Changhyun Lee, Hosung Park, and Sue Moon. What is Twitter, a Social Network or a News Media? In Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on World Wide Web (WWW'10), pages 591--600, 2010.
24. Neal Lathia, Daniele Quercia, and Jon Crowcroft. The Hidden Image of the City: Sensing Community Well-Being from Urban Mobility. In Pervasive Computing, number 7319 in Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 91--98. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, June 2012.
25. Loretta Lees. Gentrification and Social Mixing: Towards an Inclusive Urban Renaissance? Urban Studies, 45(12):2449--2470, 2008.
26. Alejandro Llorente, Manuel Garcia-Herranz, Manuel Cebrian, and Esteban Moro. Social Media Fingerprints of Unemployment. PLoS ONE, 10, 05 2015.
27. Tiancheng Lou and Jie Tang. Mining Structural Hole Spanners through Information Diffusion in Social Networks. In Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on World Wide Web (WWW'13), pages 825--836, 2013.
28. Sally Macintyre, Laura Macdonald, and Anne Ellaway. Do Poorer People have Poorer Access to Local Resources and Facilities? The distribution of local resources by area deprivation in Glasgow, Scotland. Social Science & Medicine, 67(6):900--914, September 2008.
29. M. McPherson, L. Smith-Lovin, and J. M. Cook. Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks. Annual Review of Sociology, 27:215--444, 2001.
30. Anastasios Noulas, Salvatore Scellato, Renaud Lambiotte, Massimiliano Pontil, and Cecilia Mascolo. A Tale of Many Cities: Universal Patterns in Human Urban Mobility. PLoS ONE, 7(5):e37027, May 2012.
31. Anastasios Noulas, Blake Shaw, Renaud Lambiotte, and Cecilia Mascolo. Topological Properties and Temporal Dynamics of Place Networks in Urban Environments. In Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on World Wide Web (WWW'15), pages 431--441, 2015.
32. Jukka-Pekka Onnela, Samuel Arbesman, Marta C González, Albert-László Barabási, and Nicholas A Christakis. Geographic Constraints on Social Network Groups. PLoS ONE, 6(4):e16939, 2011.
33. Jamie Pearce, Tony Blakely, Karen Witten, and Phil Bartie. Neighborhood Deprivation and Access to Fast-Food Retailing: A National Study. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 32(5):375--382, May 2007.
34. Robert D. Putnam. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. Simon & Schuster, New York, 2000.
35. Daniele Quercia, Jonathan Ellis, Licia Capra, and Jon Crowcroft. Tracking Gross Community Happiness from Tweets. In Proceedings of the ACM 2012 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW'12), pages 965--968. ACM, 2012.
36. Daniele Quercia and Diego Saez. Mining Urban Deprivation from Foursquare: Implicit Crowdsourcing of City Land Use. IEEE Pervasive Computing, 13(2):30--36, April 2014.
37. Salvatore Scellato, Anastasios Noulas, and Cecilia Mascolo. Exploiting Place Features in Link Prediction on Location-based Social Networks. In Proceedings of the 17th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD'11), pages 1046--1054, 2011.
38. Chris Smith, Daniele Quercia, and Licia Capra. Finger on the Pulse: Identifying Deprivation Using Transit Flow Analysis. In Proceedings of the 2013 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW'13), CSCW '13, pages 683--692, 2013.
39. Dominic Stead. Relationships between Land Use, Socioeconomic Factors, and Travel Patterns in Britain. Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design, 28(4):499--528, August 2001.
40. LB Hackney Policy Team. A Profile of Hackney, its People and Place. Hackney Council, 2014.
41. Jameson L. Toole, Carlos Herrera-Yaqüe, Christian M. Schneider, and Marta C. González. Coupling Human Mobility and Social Ties. Journal of The Royal Society Interface, 12(105):20141128, April 2015.
42. Carmen Vaca Ruiz, Daniele Quercia, Luca Maria Aiello, and Piero Fraternali. Taking Brazil's Pulse: Tracking Growing Urban Economies from Online Attention. In Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on World Wide Web (WWW'14), pages 451--456, 2014.
43. Laura Vaughan, David L Chatford Clark, Ozlem Sahbaz, and Mordechai Haklay. Space and Exclusion: Does Urban Morphology Play a Part in Social Deprivation? Area, 37(4):402--412, 2005.
44. Alessandro Venerandi, Giovanni Quattrone, Licia Capra, Daniele Quercia, and Diego Saez-Trumper. Measuring Urban Deprivation from User Generated Content. In Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW'15), pages 254--264, 2015.
45. Ke Zhang and Konstantinos Pelechrinis. Understanding Spatial Homophily: The Case of Peer Influence and Social Selection. In Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on World Wide Web (WWW'14), pages 271--282, 2014.

Index Terms

• Human-centered computing

  • Collaborative and social computing

    • Collaborative and social computing design and evaluation methods

      • Social network analysis

    • Collaborative and social computing theory, concepts and paradigms

      • Social media

  • Ubiquitous and mobile computing

    • Ubiquitous and mobile computing theory, concepts and paradigms

      • Mobile computing

• Social and professional topics

  • Professional topics

    • Computing and business

      • Socio-technical systems

  • User characteristics

    • Geographic characteristics