The Digital Life of Parisian Parks: Multifunctionality and Urban Context Uncovered by Mobile Application Traffic
Andr\'e Felipe Zanella, Linus W. Dietz, Sanja \v{S}\'cepanovi\'c, Ke Zhou, Zbigniew Smoreda, Daniele Quercia

TL;DR
This study uses refined mobile traffic data to uncover the multifunctionality and diverse usage patterns of Parisian parks, revealing how urban context influences park activities and visitor motivations.
Contribution
It introduces a novel method to isolate park-specific mobile traffic and applies it to analyze park functions and visitor behaviors in Paris.
Findings
Distinct mobile traffic signatures for different park types
Identification of three park usage clusters: lunchbreak, cultural, recreational
Suburban parks reflect local demographics and preferences
Abstract
Urban parks support public health, but landscape architecture typically examines them through form and function. Prior equitable access research focused on park form, while functional studies relied on small-scale surveys, movement data, or broad usage metrics, missing specific activities and visit motivations. This gap limits our grasp of parks' functional diversity. We address this with a novel method refining mobile base station coverage via antenna azimuths to isolate park-specific traffic from surroundings. Using Paris as a case study, we process 492 million hourly per-app mobile records (35% market share) from 45 urban parks. We test the central-city hypothesis (multifunctional parks in dense, high-rent zones due to land constraints) and socio-spatial hypothesis (parks reflecting neighborhood routines and preferences). Results reveal parks' unique mobile traffic signatures,…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsUrban Green Space and Health · Urban Transport and Accessibility · Human Mobility and Location-Based Analysis
