This paper focuses on the adoption of big data visual representation and semantic interpretation to study complex urban patterns in places largely impervious to traditional mapping technologies and documentary analytical tools. Particularly we will focus on stadiums built by China in the Global South as part of a larger strategy of building diplomacy. Between 1959 and 2022, China facilitated approximately 2,000 construction projects in developing countries, and among them more than 150 are large scale sports facilities. While these building have been mainly analyzed in architectural and typological terms, their relations with the urban environments in which they are situated and their effect on the local communities and the environment still have remained unexplored and hard to decipher. In this paper, we will show how through big data, particularly Location Based Social Network Data, visualization and interpretation, supported by systems of Artificial Intelligence, we can offer new possibilities to understand such large-scale architectures’ ability to attract people, affect movement patterns throughout the urban space and generate economic and social impact on the existing city.