Urban Analysis for the XXI Century: Using Pervasive Infrastructures for Modeling Urban Dynamics

The recent adoption of ubiquitous computing technologies has enabled the capture of large amounts of spatio-temporal data about human motion. The digital footprints computed from these datasets provide complementary information for the study of social and human dynamics, with applications in urban planning and transportation. In this context, cell phones and cell phone networks, due to its pervasiveness, can be considered sensors of human behavior and as such, can be used as proxies to study urban environments. In this paper we describe three applications that present the potential of using cell phone networks infrastructures for modeling urban dynamics: (1) the identification of dense areas; (2) the identification and classification of land uses and (3) the identification of routes within an urban landscape. Our approach provides a complementary source of information for traditional urban analysis techniques without the limitations that these techniques have.