This work stream assesses how socio-spatial outcomes of home-based self-employment and businesses (HBBs) vary across space thereby testing the significance of the neighbourhood and city scales.

• In what type of places do home-based self-employed workers reside?
• Does home-based self-employment link disadvantaged neighbourhoods back to the city?
• Does home-based self-employment connect socio-economically different places?

A key data source we use is social media data. Here we explore how textual and linked-geographic data can be extracted from virtual social networks to study HBBs and how this analysis can be augmented through data linkage. The location of HBBs who make active use of these web-based social networks will be visualised using Geographic Information Systems (GIS), and census data for the UK and regional data for other countries will be linked to these data to analyse associations between social media use with local/regional socio-economic patterns.

UK Home-based business map