Spatial Social Networks

How do you find clusters of incidents/individuals that are not only geographically close to each other, but also have dense local social connections?

Designed for social scientists, geographers, and planners to visualize spatial social networks in R. The tutorial comes with a R package that embed advanced functions and sample datasets.

While a new metro station enhances transit connetivity in the metro network, its construction plans to demolish a historic neighborhood in Guangzhou China. How can we quantify the social cost of the station in terms of loss in social connections and memories?

Airport as a regional transportation hub tends to overshadow the surrounding neighborhoods. When a new PRT infrastructure is proposed for ‘Airport City’, how can planners propose and evaluate design scenarios that will benefit the nearby residents?

What are the demographic characteristics of people who are locals vs. jetsetters? How may these people different in local social support, ability to leverage social networks for disaster evacuation, and frequency to travel or migrate between cities?

How has COVID-19 pandemic impacted international scientific collaboration? Which disciplines or which countries suffer more? Do developing countries leverage COVID-19 to grow their research influence in the scientific networks?

We know cities scale with populaton in a systematic fashion, but how much of (and what kinds of) the city outcomes (e.g., GDP, innovation) can be explained by population and how much can be explained by inter-city connectivity?

How have research knowledge of spatial network insights and methods been applied to study cities and planning? What are some of the challenges and opportunities, especially in collaborative planning?