Pleasant Urban Experiences: Place-Making Theories Using Geo-Coded Social Media Data

People:  Jianxiang Huang (HKU), Yiyang Yang (HKU), Mengdi Guo (HKU)

               Lishuai Li (CityU), Qingpeng Zhang (CityU), Weiran Yao (CityU), Yiming Sun (CityU)

Creating enjoyable urban places is of growing importance for urban planners and design practitioners. Cities and towns are reclaiming spaces leftover from the automobile era, transforming highways, parking lots, and street intersections into places that are pleasant for people. Such transformation were guided by classic theories of place-making that are often limited to specific social, cultural, or geographical context. Pioneered by scholars and practitioners from the Anglo-American context half a century ago, these theories were largely developed during the era of ‘small data’. Most dwelled on a small number of case studies (Jacobs, 1961), personal observations (Gehl, 1987; Whyte, 1980), surveys (Lynch, 1984) or anecdotal evidences(Montgomery, 2013). Although taught in a growing number of urban design / planning / architecture programmes world-wide, the validities of such theories remained contested. For instance, the theory of New Urbanism (CNU, 1996), a popular yet controversial alternative to conventional urban development, was accused of inadequate sampling of projects, premature judgements, or ideological bias (Ellis, 2002). Booming cities in Asia, often dominated by mega blocks and vast vehicular infrastructure, were often perceived as a rebuttal against the European-scale townscape (Cullen, 1961). Questions rise as whether there are principles of place-making that can be scientifically proven, whether then are universally true across social context? If yes, what attributes of the physical urban form are related to pleasant occupant experiences? The rise of social media and user-generated contents provided new opportunities to study the relationship between people and the built environment. Massive user data, mood, together with their geo-spatial coordinates can be easily accessed.

We hypothesize that classic theories on place-making can be re-examined in the digital age using geo-coded social media data (behavior and mood) as well as GIS information. The objectives of this study lies three-fold: 1) to quantify the impact of urban form on occupant mood & behaviours; 2) to examine classic theories on urban design & place-making; 3) to formulate new theories of place-making in the digital age.