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Benny Chin 陳威全

a Geographer, Cartographer, & GIScientist

Daily life pattern of a city: Delineating activity space and time using social media data

Chin, W. C. B.  (2021)

Paper

Chin, W. C. B. (2021). Daily life pattern of a city: Delineating activity space and time using social media data, SSRN. Working paper: 3961269.

Abstract

People live in cities. However, different groups of people are active at varying times at distinct places in their daily lives, forming different activity spaces and times within a city. Previous studies focused on the distribution of the activity or the partition of regions based on similarity or strength of the interaction, but not the collective activity spaces and times of the people who live within the area. Using only the geotagged/timestamped social media as a proxy, this study intended to delineate activity spaces and times of eight selected cities, including Tokyo, Osaka, Hongkong, Singapore, Bangkok, Jakarta, Manila, and Penang. Activity space is defined as a geographic extent where people undertake their daily life. This study generated two co-occurrence networks (spatial and temporal) for each city and delineated the activity spaces and times using a network community detection method. In summary, the results showed a clear pattern for both activity spaces and times in the eight cities. The activity spaces results showed spatially continuous communities with clear borders, indicated the boundaries of human movements, which may be affected by political or natural separation. The activity time results existed a cyclic pattern on a daily and weekly basis, indicating the habits of people in each city, and which pattern is slightly different between cities. In conclusion, this study demonstrated a framework for delineating activity spaces and provided a novel perspective for representing the space and time patterns of daily life in a city.

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