NCL Basel – Clusters
Basel, the city at the ‘Rheinknie’, marks the northern gateway to Switzerland. The ‘Dreiländereck’ (three country corner) is an important fix point in the port of Basel, where the borderlines of France, Germany and Switzerland touch. The resulting ‘trinational’ region with Basel as the largest hub has established its own culture and functions across borders both culturally and economically.
Basel is the largest city in this area with Mulhouse and St. Louis being the French and the German main city respectively. Basel offers a lot of work places for about 100’000 cross border commuters. A connecting feature throughout the region is the river Rhine. It marks the North-Eastern border of Switzerland coming from the ‘Bodensee’. In Basel this important landscape bends North, leaving Switzerland and continues to mark the boarder between France and Germany.
Right at this bend is where the Basel hub is located and obviously the river has historically been a very important source of identity and still continues to be. A lot of activity is happening along the waterline and this is then also reflected in the twitter map. The New City Landscape to some extend reflects the river and it can be read how it trails from the East side into the city and sharply turns North exiting between the French-German ‘gate’ at the Northern end of the NCL map.
Map by urbanTick for NCL / Basel New City Landscape map generated from location based tweets collected over the period of one week. The area covered is within a 30 km radius of Basel.
With a population of 166’173 residence it is in the international context a very small centre. Economically it is however rather important as a banking hub and is the home to very large international pharmaceutical companies such as Novartis and Roche. Nevertheless, the countryside around the city is completely missing from the NCL map. There are very little activity on twitter. The distinction between city and countryside in Switzerland is no loger very dramatic, since most of the rural landscape is urbanised to a high degree. The covered area of the NCL map must be the home to about 800’000 the twitter activity clusters on the city of Basel.
Image by Wladyslaw taken from Wikimedia / “Panorama Basel vom Martinsturm des Basler Münsters aus” (Panoramic view from one of the towers of the Basel Münster, with the Rhine bend and the Messeturm in the focus.
The highest point is the ‘Münsterstock’ probably the very most central location of the city, a hill overlooking the river Rhine right at the bend with the Basle Münster, a very attractive Church. From this central location the twitter activity trails out along the main infrastructure axis, Rhine, public transport along tram no 10, no 11 and no 6 as well as along the Motorway A2 and A3.
Basel New City Landscape
Image by urbanTick using the GMap Image Cutter / Basel New City Landscape -Use the Google Maps style zoom function in the top right corner to zoom into the map and explore it in detail. Explore areas you know close up and find new locations you have never heard of. Click HERE for a full screen view. The maps were created using our CASA Tweet-O-Meter, in association with DigitalUrban and coded by Steven Gray, this New City Landscape represents location based twitter activity.
In terms of time of day twitter is active, Basel has strong morning and evening peaks. Also lunch is a time for tweetig as most people leave the work place for a lunch brake. The evening peak is very consistent between eight and ten, but then drops of rather quickly and stays very ow until it picks up the next morning around seven, the start of the next working day.
The language top three is Germa, English and French. Where English dominated the top ten in Zuerich, has Basel, with its proximity to Germany a very different position. However rank two reflects the importance of the international ties.
Image by urbanTick for NCL / The rose shows the twitter activity over the tweet activity per hour of the day, starting at 00:00 at the top. Here we are showing Basel local time. Hence the characteristic dip between three and five o’clock in the morning. Basel is a morning and afternoon city with more activity around start and end of the work day. The graphs show the platform of preference used to send the tweet and the language set respectively.
