Isolation is a main factor of stress that threatens urban resilience. Research on urban isolation has been focusing on the residence places without enough examination of the movements of urban dwellers. Treating urban neighborhoods as nodes and urban dwellers as links, this project seeks to understand urban mobility from a network perspective.

As such, the project aims to quantify, understand, and explore the resilience of geosocial networks by utilizing a unique, publicly available Twitter data across the 50 largest population centers in the United States. The objectives of the project include:

  1. Integrating large-scale urban informatics to examine urban mobility and the emerged geosocial networks
  2. Systematically simulating different types of perturbation to urban geosocial networks
  3. Quantifying the impact of the perturbations on urban neighborhoods.

The granularity and scale of this project will enable unprecedented quantitative examination of urban geosocial networks and provide a new network analysis approach to examine urban resilience.

Project Principal Investigators