Germany's big cities are gaining in attractiveness both as a place for living and as a location for companies. Even as Germany's total population is declining, the population of cities increased by nearly 3 percent between 1999 and 2008. The same is true for spatial shifts in the economy: During the past 10 years employment in big cities increased by nearly 4 percent while stagnating in Germany...

I define big data with respect to its size but pay particular attention to the fact that the data I am referring to is urban data, that is, data for cities that are invariably tagged to space and time. I argue that this sort of data are largely being streamed from sensors, and this represents a sea change in the kinds of data that we have about what happens where and when in cities. I describe ...

Smart cities’ is a term that has gained traction in academia, business and government to describe cities that, on the one hand, are increasingly composed of and monitored by pervasive and ubiquitous computing and, on the other, whose economy and governance is being driven by innovation, creativity and entrepreneurship, enacted by smart people. This paper focuses on the former and, drawing on a ...

Cities are living systems where urban infrastructures and their functions are defined and evolved due to population behaviors. Profiling the cities and functional regions has been an important topic in urban design and planning. This paper studies a unique big data set which includes daily movement data of tens of millions of city residents, and develop a visual analytics system, namely UrbanFA...