Cities and Spatial Data in the New Urban World: A Data-Analytic Exploration

The uncritical use of the notion of the ‘urban century’ has led to a neglect of two important issues: (1) the need for an unambiguous definition of a city from a comparative global perspective; (2) the fact that in our mobile and digital age flows of people and data are not restricted to a given urban territory. This chapter seeks to address the emerging research and policy challenges in modern cities, as the result of the presence and use of extensive spatial (mainly urban) data and statistics in the digital society. Particular attention is paid to the way in which the present digital data deluge may influence our thinking about the nature of cities, the mechanisms of sustainable urban development, the spatial resilience of regions and cities, and data-oriented urban planning. Cities tend to become both producers and consumers of large data sets. Various caveats inherent in smart evidence-based planning for cities or urban areas are discussed in this study. It is concluded that the ‘third revolution’ in spatial data science will require different professional skills and new modi operandi in smart urban planning.