The Evolution of Natural Cities from the Perspective of Location-Based Social Media

Abstract

This article examines the former location-based social medium Brightkite, over its three-year life span, based on the concept of natural cities. The term natural cities refers to spatially clustered geographic events, such as the agglomerated patches aggregated from individual social media users’ locations. We applied the head/tail division rule to derive natural cities, based on the fact that there are far more low-density areas than high-density areas on the Earth's surface. More specifically, we generated a triangulated irregular network, made up of individual unique user locations, and then categorized small triangles (smaller than an average) as natural cities for the United States (mainland) on a monthly basis. The concept of natural cities provides a powerful means to develop new insights into the evolution of real cities, because there are virtually no data available to track the history of cities across their entire life spans and at very fine spatial and temporal scales. Therefore, natural cities can act as a good proxy of real cities, in the sense of understanding underlying interactions, at a global level, rather than of predicting cities, at an individual level. Apart from the data produced and the contributed methods, we established new insights into the structure and dynamics of natural cities; for example, the idea that natural cities evolve in nonlinear manners at both spatial and temporal dimensions.