User-Generated Content and Its Applications in Urban Studies

Abstract

AbstractThe emergence of Web 2.0 and mobile Internet produces massive user-generated content (UGC), including geo-tagged photos, social network posts, street view images, and crowdsourced GPS trajectories. UGC creates unprecedented opportunities to sense what was previously hidden in the physical surfaces of cities and to portray the interactions of infrastructures, geo-information, and people; therefore, it is not only a new lens for urban space but also leads to innovative applications. In this chapter, we will introduce several typical types of UGC, such as geo-tagged photos, social media data, crowdsourcing GPS trajectories, and videos. We showcase ways in which user-generated big data can be harvested and analyzed to generate invisible and impressionistic landscapes of urban dynamics and to stimulate innovative applications. We discuss typical UGC-driven applications to demonstrate the potential of UGC in revealing how urban spaces are perceived by the public, establishing links between tangible artifacts and physical-cyber-social spaces. This fosters alternative approaches to urban informatics that better capture the intricate nature of urban space and its dynamics.