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Cities of the 21st century are places where various actors interact, where physical systems, that are sometime geographically distant, are strictly dependent, where relational mechanisms become crucial, and where the boundaries between individual and collective, local and global, real and digital become more and more blurred. In this context, social media can be used as a digital lens to analyze the space and the territory of cities. In fact, they offer a great opportunity to individualize and understand the connections that might exist between different spheres. In this article, we use Twitter to analyze the language mix of the city and to detect language communities within the city neighborhoods. We then compare these “digital” communities, discovered through Twitter, with the “real” communities identified by the traditional census data. Milan, a city which is increasingly becoming an international melting pot, is chosen as a case study for this work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In economic literature, the quality of life (QoL) in a city is usually assessed through the standard revealed-preference approach, which defines a QoL index as the monetary value of urban amenities. This paper proposes an innovative methodology to measure urban QoL when equity concerns arise. The standard approach is extended by introducing preferences for even accessibility to amenities throughout the city into the QoL assessment. The QoL index is then reformulated to account for the unequal availability of amenities across neighbourhoods. The more unbalanced the distribution of amenities across neighbourhoods, the lower the assessment based on the new index. This methodology is applied to derive a QoL index for the city of Milan. The results show that the unequal distribution of amenities across neighbourhoods significantly affects the assessment of QoL for that city. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]