New City Landscape – Geneva

Geneva is the Swiss city with the most important international connections. In Geneva a lot of international organisations have a headquarter such as UNO, WHO, UNHCR, ILO, WIPO and the Red Cross. But there are also other institution of international significance based, such a the CERN or the World Wide Web Library.

This results in a very dense network of international connections and puts a rather small city on the world map. Geneva only has a population of some 190’000 people. This makes it the second largest city in Switzerland after Zuerich and before Basel and Bern.

Geneva New City Landscape
Image by urbanTick for NCL / Geneva 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 Geneva.

Geneva is just like Basel another Swiss city located right at the border. Here it is the crossing between Switzerland and France. The map with a 30km radius then covers large areas of France too. It reaches right down to the French town of Annecy in the south.

The international flair in Geneva together with the beautiful scenery around the Lake of Geneva (Lac Leman) and the proximity to the mountains with great ski resorts also attracts high profile celebrities, who either live there or have a second home. For example Yoko Ono, Shania Twain or Phil Collins all live around the Lake Geneva. Also interesting there is a very special group of celebrities living in the area Michael Schumacher, Jacques Villeneuve, Jean Alesi, Alain Prost, David Coulthard and Fernando Alonso I wonder if they all go together for a spin around Lake Geneva once a week.

Geneva New City Landscape

Image by urbanTick using the GMap Image Cutter / Geneva 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.

The very peak of the Geneva NCL is just above the Jet d’Eau the major Geneva landmark. It is located in the port out on a jetty shooting 500 litre of water per second 140 meter into the sky. It has been the symbol for the past 130 years.

In the main hill most of the international organisations are included. There are a number of tweets from UNO, WHO and so on just to the North East of the Jet d’Eau. The second peak next to the central one is around the international airport and the PalExpo in the area of Vernier. An then there is a sort of activity ridge along the north shore of the Lake Geneva, the locations most of the international celebrities live.

Geneva timeRose
IImage 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 Geneva local time. Geneva is a night time city with more activity between midnight and four than through out the work day. The graphs show the platform of preference used to send the tweet and the language set respectively.

Interestingly the data for Geneva shows a completely different time activity pattern than any of the urban areas looked at before. So far the activity over 24 hours always more or less fitted with the normal day activity pattern and showed the characteristic activity low between the early morning hours 3am – 4am. However Geneva has its activity peaks between 1am and 3am and overall the general activity high is between midnight and 6am.

Regarding the language English and Japanese are leading the table before French. Maybe this could explain the out of hour activity. Users are tweeting with and to different parts of the world during odd times, because of the different local times.