By leveraging social-related data such as mobility patterns and merging them with existing population data, we can better understand the dynamics of human interaction within cities and larger regions. This type of social data analysis is fundamental to the best decision making for planning and infrastructure investments and can help assure the viability and longevity of new developments to the benefit of the communities they serve.

For example, researchers analyzed mobility data from Twitter to observe patterns of traffic and movement in the city of Riyadh in order to support planning decisions for a proposed metro system there. Some tools from that project can be seen here.