Dear Colleagues,

The global population is being increasingly concentrated in urban areas at an unprecedented scale and speed. Cities will be facing the daunting task of accommodating the urban dynamics with smarter management strategies. Uncovering the multi-dimensional interplay between computation and the social aspects of urban activities has both theoretical and practical implications for urban planning and public health. There are growing efforts aiming for the development of analytical methods to deal with high-dimensional, heterogeneous, and unstructured location-based social network data drawn from urban locales. Spatial social network analysis has been employed by researchers from various disciplines to reveal physical and social configurations, considering social processes in either geographical or network space. More methodological advances are needed to help researchers and policy makers track urbanization processes more closely, and also forecast the impacts of policies more accurately. Urban informatics research will advance a broad spectrum of real-world applications by enabling an extensive community of domain users to tackle the urban data challenge. This direction will also prepare the next generation of the workforce for smart city action.

This Special Issue emphasize the development of research frameworks, theories, methods, and good case studies of tackling key research challenges related to the advance of urban informatics and spatial social network analysis. Sample topics include:

• Data sharing and dissemination in urban informatics research;
• Digital divide and sampling issue in urban informatics research;
• Multi-scale spatiotemporal analysis and modeling of social dynamics;
• Privacy issues in spatial social network data and possible solutions;
• Spatial agent-based models of human–environment interactions;
• Spatiotemporal analysis of human activities in physical and virtual spaces;
• Spatiotemporal data models for studying intra-urban social network;
• Spatiotemporal social network analysis;
• The importance of spatial data from marginalized communities;
• Visualization of spatial social network;
• Visualization of the food environment;
• Using space–time models to help decide allocation of public health resources.

Dr. Xinyue Ye
Dr. Pamela Valera
Dr. Ling Wu
Dr. Joachim D. Sackey
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• complexity system
• computational urban science
• digital health
• food environment
• health of marginalized communities
• human dynamics
• network science
• telehealth