Not just numbers: Understanding cities through their words

In the past we have written how one can use social media or newspapers to study the world around us. Keeping with this theme of using text we (Xinyu Fu, Catherine Brinkley, Thomas Sanchez, Chaosu Li and myself) have a new editorial entitled "Not just numbers: Understanding cities through their words" which accompanies a special issue in Environment and Planning B entitled "Leveraging Natural Language Processing for Urban Analytics" 

The editorial discusses how researchers can use natural language processing  (NLP) methods to get a sense of a diverse range of issues impacting cities. To quote from the editorial, these range: 

 "from  analyzing housing development from council planning applications (Lin et al., 2025), revealing visitor perceptions of famous attractions or passengers’ perceptions on transit service quality from social media (Luo et al., 2025; Ma et al., 2025), defining the meaning of urban imageability based on online review (Zhu et al., 2025), understanding the spatial implications of the digital economy (Occhini et al., 2025), and extracting policies from official government reports (Wang et al., 2025)."

These papers, along with the data they used, and findings are summarized in the table below, and as such demonstrate how one can move beyond purely quantitative data and methods to study cities. If this sounds of interest, please feel free to read our editorial along with the papers in the special issue. 

Full reference: 

Fu, X., Brinkley, C., Sanchez, T.W., Li, C. and Crooks, A.T. (2026), Not Just Numbers: Understanding Cities through their Words, Environment and Planning B, 53(1): 3-10. (pdf)