Affordable smartphones featuring geolocation capabilities and social media applications generate a data stream associating people’s interactions across space and time. The ability to mine this data for information provides us with a new way to think about urban planning and management. In their short book, published as part of the “SpringerBriefs in Applied Sciences and Technology” series, the authors present how social media interactions, like Twitter comments, Pickles reviews, and Foursquare check-ins, can help researchers and urban planners to analyze the urban space. The coverage includes existing work that has been done in the field and the authors’ own experiments.

The work begins with a discussion of urban issues that can be tackled through social media mining: from the characterization of geographic areas and their relationships, to the political attitudes expressed through the acceptance and feeling toward local policies and urban interventions. Then the authors present a taxonomy of a large number of case studies on geo-referenced data visualization. These are neatly summarized in a table, which, unfortunately, is printed in a small font that makes it virtually unreadable. Two further chapters cover a framework and process for dealing with geo-referenced social media data, as well as a description of field experiments that the authors have performed. In these experiments, conducted in large cities, the authors use social media data to examine how people move across the city over the day. The book concludes with a critical assessment of the field’s potential.

There are numerous potentially captivating figures and tables illustrating the presented concepts and case studies. These would have been the book’s main assets had they been printed in a large color format. In their small grayscale rendering, they mainly serve to give the reader an idea of what is (fortunately) available in the book’s online supplement. The text is complemented by a large list of case studies available online, a list of references, and an index. This book serves as a handy overview of this interesting emerging field.