New research article on "Lakeplace" is published in Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science

Minnesota is famously known as “The Land of 10,000 Lakes.” Lakes are not only essential natural features shaping the state’s landscape and urban form, but also deeply embedded in residents’ daily lives and spatial memories (for example, on the state’s iconic license plates).

In a new article published in Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science, we introduce a novel spatial concept — lakeplace — and a data-driven framework for lakeplace sensing based on large-scale mobile positioning data. This work aims to better understand the spatial interactions between lakes and human activity.

Building on the classical notion of place, the lakeplace concept extends the social and perceptual dimensions of “place” to include natural geographic features like lakes. A lakeplace is defined as a spatial unit composed of the lake itself and its first-order adjacent geographic surroundings — including both on-lake and near-lake areas — making lakes not only natural boundaries, but also units of human-centered analysis.

Using the Twin Cities Metropolitan Area (TCMA) in Minnesota as a case study, we began with 18,964 identified lakes and selected 2,906 lakes larger than one hectare as the basis for analysis. This led to the construction of a lakeplace layer covering 9,723 lakes. Leveraging mobile location data, we then examined the spatiotemporal vitality of these lakeplaces, differentiated patterns of activity between on-lake and near-lake zones, and profiled associated sociodemographic characteristics.

We hope lakeplace, as a new form of spatial representation, can offer a complementary lens for understanding the relationship between natural landscapes and human activity in urban environments — and support applications in water resource management and spatial planning.

Xiong, M., & Zhu, D. (2025). Sensing lakeplace: Interactions between lakes and human activities. Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science, 1-20. https://doi.org/10.1177/23998083251386148 

Read the paper.