Characterizing urban lifestyle signatures using motif properties in network of places

The lifestyles of urban dwellers could reveal important insights regarding the dynamics and complexity of cities. The availability of human movement data captured from cell phones enables characterization of distinct and recurrent human daily visitation patterns. Despite growing research on analysis of lifestyle patterns in cities, little is known about the characteristics of people’s lifestyle patterns at urban scale. This limitation is primarily due to challenges in restriction of human movement data to protect the privacy of users. To address this gap, this study constructed networks of places to model cities based on location-based human visitation data. We examined the motifs in the networks of places to map and characterize lifestyle patterns at urban scale. The results show that (1) people’s lifestyles in cities can be well depicted and quantified based on distribution and attributes of motifs in networks of places; (2) motifs show stability in quantity and distance as well as periodicity on weekends and weekdays indicating the stability of lifestyle patterns in cities; (3) networks of places and lifestyle patterns show similarities across different metropolitan areas implying the universality of lifestyle signatures across cities; (4) lifestyles represented by attributed motifs are spatially heterogeneous suggesting variations of lifestyle patterns within different population groups based on where they live in a city. The findings provide deeper insights into urban lifestyle signatures and significant implications for data-informed urban planning and management.