Typical approaches to defining regions, districts or neighborhoods within a city often focus on place instances of a similar type that are grouped together. For example, most cities have at least one bar district defined as such by the clustering of bars within a few city blocks. In reality, it is not the presence of spatial locations labeled as bars that contribute to a bar region, but rather the popularity of the bars themselves. Following the principle that places, and by extension, place-type regions exist via the people that have given space meaning, we explore user-contributed content as a way of extracting this meaning. Kernel density estimation models of place-based social check-ins are compared to spatially tagged social posts with the goal of identifying thematic regions within the city of Los Angeles, CA. Dynamic human activity patterns, represented as temporal signatures, are included in this analysis to demonstrate how regions change over time.
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