Objectives

The primary objective of this workshop is to explore how digital traces, including social media interactions, mobile location data, and geospatial data, can provide insights into urban inequalities and segregation. 

By analysing how these traces reflect patterns of social interaction, mobility, and access to services, we aim to uncover how urban residents experience different levels of access and opportunity across various urban areas.

The workshop, thus, invites original contributions that explore the use of web-based data, social media, and mobile location traces to study inequalities in urban environments. 

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Urban mobility and spatial access inequalities: Using mobility data from mobile devices, location-based services, and other digital traces to examine how patterns of movement shape unequal access to employment, services, and social interaction. This includes identifying spatial barriers, exclusionary mobility patterns, and constraints that affect residents’ opportunities across urban areas.

• Spatial distributions of urban resources and services: Applying geospatial analysis to digital traces and administrative data to map inequalities in access to housing, transportation, healthcare, education, and public infrastructure. Contributions may focus on how these spatial disparities differentially affect demographic and socio-economic groups within cities.

• Online social interaction and socio-spatial segregation: Studying how social media activity and online networks reflect, reproduce, or amplify socio-economic and spatial segregation. This includes analysing network structures, information flows, and patterns of online interaction in relation to urban neighbourhoods, as well as digital segregation beyond strictly physical space.

• Digital divides and unequal access to urban opportunities: Examining inequalities in access to digital technologies, mobile internet, and online platforms, and how these digital divides intersect with urban inequalities. Topics may include how limited digital access constrains residents’ ability to access services, participate in civic life, or benefit from urban opportunities.

• Computational approaches to measuring urban inequality: Developing and applying computational methods to analyse large-scale web, mobility, and geospatial data for the measurement of inequality and segregation. This includes methodological contributions on data integration, algorithmic indicators of exclusion, and reproducible tools for studying urban disparities.

• Personalized and trace-based assessment of urban service quality: Analysing digital traces, potentially in combination with administrative records, survey data, or domain-specific datasets, to evaluate access to and perceived quality of urban services while accounting for heterogeneous needs, preferences, and mobility constraints across population groups. Contributions may explore how personalized or recommendation-based approaches provide user-centric measures of accessibility and uncover inequalities hidden by aggregate or one-size-fits-all indicators.