Exploiting digital footprints to describe tourism

Fabien Girardin and Josep BlatUniversitat Pompeu Fabra

New urban actorsMobile phones, speed cameras, pollution sensors, digital cameras, wireless networks, CCTV systems, bike sharing systems, etc…

These new urban actors get embedded in the fabric of our lives and give us the ability to show previously invisible urban processes

Sentient cities

• Enhancement of our perception• Reveal the city as we experience it• Instantaneous information• Empowerment of the citizen

Example: Reveal Paris through its bike sharing system

Example: Bicing activity

Example: Mobile phone network activity

Opportunities local authorities• Planning was about predict and

accommodate and it becomes more observe and improve

• Evidence-based urbanism: hard scientific data to go beyond assumptions and costly surveys

• Remote-control urbanism: actions and policies changes from real-time data of urban dynamics

• Post-occupancy evaluation: understand the impacts of an intervention

Example: Tourism

Nowadays tourists leave digital footprints behind them that reveal their presence

Presence of tourists

Traces left by tourists (Tuscany)

Traces left by tourists (Rome)

Spatio-temporal visualization

Semantics (“Ruins” in Rome)

Tourists activities (sightseeing vs. on the move)

Current limitations

• Provide a glimpse to reality. Sense what is cheap to sense, plus lack of data interoperability

• Reveal phenomena. But does not explain them. Need to study the practice that create these digital footprints

• Need to prove that these data bring at least the same amount of knowledge than their “manual” data (e.g. surveys).

• Need of skills and knowledge to analyze and grasp the significance of these data

NYC Waterfalls

Barcelona

• Themes: Urban Tourism, mobile technologies as sensors, mobility data mining.

• Actors who showed interest:Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Grupo de Tecnologías Interactivas)Barcelona Media (Laboratorio de Visualización Virtual and Laboratori de Cultura)Massachusetts Institute of Technology (SENSEable City Lab)Bit Carrier (Bluetooth scanning)Intelligent Coast (Master Program with UPC)Barcelona EcologiaBarcelona City CouncilTelefonica R&D(?)