10.6092/1970-9870/2500Massa, PierangeloCampagna, MicheleSocial Media Geographic Information: Recent Findings and Opportunities for Smart Spatial PlanningTema. Journal of Land Use, Mobility and Environment2014Social Media Geographic Information SMGI; Urban Regional Planning; Volunteered Geographic Information VGI; Computational Social Science2014-05-142014-05-142014-05-152014-06-03engArticle3-171-2500<p>TeMA is an open access, online publication, with licence:</p><table width="100%"><tbody><tr><td width="82"><p><img title="cc-by-80x15_80" src="http://www.rmojs.unina.it/public/site/images/ojs/cc-by-80x15_80.png" alt="cc-by-80x15_80" width="80" height="15" /></p></td><td><em><a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/" target="_blank">CCPL Creative Commons Attribution</a></em></td></tr></tbody></table><p>The author retains the copyright of his work whilst granting anyone the possibility “to reproduce, distribute, publicly communicate, publicly exhibit, display, perform and recite the work”, provided that the author and the title of the journal are cited correctly. When submitting the text for publication the author is furthermore required to declare that the contents and the structure of the work are original and that it does not by any means compromise the rights of third parties nor the obligations connected to the safeguard of the moral and economic rights of other authors or other right holders, both for texts, images, photographs, tables, as well as for other parts which compose the contribution. The author furthermore declares that he/she is conscious of the sanctions prescribed by the penal code and by the Italian Criminal and Special Laws for false documents and the use false documents, and that therefore TeMA is not liable to responsibilities of any nature, civil, administrative or penal, and that the author agrees to indemnify and hold TeMA harmless from all requests and claims by third parties.</p><br /><br />This paper deals with the opportunities of Social Media Geographic Information (SMGI) as valuable support for analysis, design and decision-making in urban and regional planning. In the light of the recent advances in digital geographic information, such as Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI) and Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) which are fostering innovation in urban and regional planning, the authors focus on the potentialities of Social Media as source of knowledge for the planning practices. The authors argue SMGI may play an important role to inform 'smart city' strategies extending authoritative and sensor data infrastructure with experiential and pluralist citizens knowledge. To support this thesis, an innovative methodology for the advance of Social Media Geographic Information (SMGI) Analytics is proposed. To this end, the authors present an original user-friendly tool able to extract information from popular Social Media such as Twitter.com and Youtube.com and to apply Spatial-Temporal Textual (STTx) analysis . Some examples are provided at the regional and at the local scale in order to demonstrate the potential of SMGI analytics in regional and urban planning. The results show how SMGI analytics can support design, analysis and decision making in planning, and add the value of pluralism to inform smart city initiatives. The paper ends with some brief conclusions on the opportunities of SMGI analytics for possibly affecting decision-making dynamics and urban and regional planning processes, through citizens’ dialogue and integration of experiential and professional knowledge.Tema. Journal of Land Use, Mobility and Environment, 2014: INPUT 2014 - Smart City: planning for energy, transportation and sustainability of the urban system