The spoken postcodes

The current Oxford English Dictionary defines a neighbourhood as '[a] district or portion of a town, city, or country, esp. considered in reference to the character or circumstances of its inhabitants'. However, a large part of quantitative urban analysis relies on administrative boundaries, such as postcodes, as an approximation of true neighbourhoods. This regional graphic explores the possibility of redefining internal boundaries of a city through the combination of new sources of data, statistics and computation. Using the language of a sample of georeferenced tweets in the Dutch city of Amsterdam, in combination with a regionalization algorithm that groups similar continuous areas, the official postcodes are redrawn into those based on their spoken characteristics. The result is a very different urban landscape that is likely to encapsulate better substantive differences between parts of the city.