  Urban agglomerations are constantly and rapidly evolving ecosystems, with
globalization and increasing urbanization posing new challenges in sustainable
urban development well summarized in the United Nations' Sustainable
Development Goals (SDGs). The advent of the digital age generated by modern
alternative data sources provides new tools to tackle these challenges with
spatio-temporal scales that were previously unavailable with census statistics.
In this review, we present how new digital data sources are employed to provide
data-driven insights to study and track (i) urban crime and public safety; (ii)
socioeconomic inequalities and segregation; and (iii) public health, with a
particular focus on the city scale.
