Uploaded on 2015-04-25 by gianmariaquarta

[1]: https://edxuploads.s3.amazonaws.com/14299560066893851.jpg This is taken close to where I live in Shanghai, China. As you can see very clearly, networks related to different users intersect here on multiple levels: bike lane, scooter lane, taxi and bus, cars (urban network) and cars (metropolitan network), elevated pedestrian paths leading to a shopping area and allowing people to easily cross the street without interfering with traffic underneath. What you cannot see is that all motorbikes are by law electric, and therefore need to be charged at home or in specific spots across the city. Another element which is part of the picture but not visible to us are the mobile applications in each user's mobile phone. In China, more and more services such as booking a taxi, paying bills, transfering money, paying at the restaurant, charging your phone etc. can be done through Alipay, a simple and intuitive app (provided you can read Chinese). This means that the link between a certain monetary transaction and the physical position of the user is more and more broken in relation to the urban space. Tracking anonymously where a certain amount of transactions are made related to the service which has been bought and trying to recognize patterns of action could give interesting knowledge about the way people's shopping habits are changing, and be used (for instance) to avoid future over-specialization of urban areas.