Sensing Urban Land Use with Twitter Activity

Individuals generate vast amounts of geolocalized content through the use of mobile social media applications. In this context, Twitter has become an important sensor of the interactions between individuals and their environment. Building on this idea, the authors propose the use of geolocated tweets as a complementary source of information for urban planning applications, focusing on the characterization of land use. The authors’ proposed technique automatically determines land uses in urban areas by clustering geographical regions with similar tweeting activity patterns. Three case studies are presented and validated for Manhattan, London and Madrid using Twitter activity and land use information provided by the city planning departments. Results indicate that geolocated tweets can be used as a powerful data source for urban planning applications.