CHAPTER
MAPS OF BABEL: URBAN SENSING THROUGH USER GENERATED CONTENT
AUTHORS Giorgia Lupi, Milan, (Italy), Paolo Patelli, Milan (Italy), Luca Simeone, Rome (Italy) and Salvatore Iaconesi, Rome (Italy)
Abstract
Urban design and planning literature stresses the role of and the need for meaningful urban public spaces for the experience of public life and social interaction. How to determine relationships between specific public places, their physical characteristics and the patterns of social activities they support, in order to promote meaningful innovation in terms of urban design and planning? How can we discover denizens’ perceptions that are affecting their urban experience? From what observations can we deduce what makes denizens satisfied? How do we get to situated everyday patterns, trends, social relations and possibilities? How can we see the relationships between these patterns, and cultural and ethnic groups, within and across cities? Traditional data collection methods such as surveys, interviews, questionnaires and, more recently, data harvesting and analysis (e.g. on the use of mobile devices) have provided interesting insights on the social life of urban spaces. Recent technological development and the emergent participation of internet users in terms of social interaction though, are leading us towards a redefinition of the possibilities of gathering and sharing firsthand information. Today virtually every denizen can produce
and share public information about their everyday experiences and they actually do so, mostly using social networking services and website, such as Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare. Can geo-referenced User Generated Content (UGC), shared over social online platforms, be useful for the creation of meaningful, real time indicators of urban quality, as it is perceived and communicated by the citizens? Is it possible to use real-time text mining and conversational analysis methods on UGC in order to draw a series of maps depicting the very many and co-existing mental images of a city? How does an urban semantic layer - the meanings we attach to places - look like? How are well-being and happiness linked to places and how can we map them in real-time? The paper presents a methodology and an experiment aiming to recognize multiple stories as they emerge, influence each other, unfolding from city users’ mental representations and spatial experiences of city spaces, by conducting an analysis on location-based data sets extracted in real-time from UGC. In particular, how different ethnic groups are distributed spatially and temporally within the city of Milan and what are their sentiments towards the city spaces they name.
Keywords
Urban experience, User Generated Content, environmental knowing, decision-making processes, visual tools
1. Urban Sensing: Background and Aims of Research
Contact
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Giorgia Lupi PhD student, Politecnico di Milano, INDACO - Dipartimento di Industrial Design, Arte, Comunicazione, e Moda (Department of Industrial Design, Art, Communication and Fashion), Via Durando 38/A, 20158 Milan, Italy, +39.3471245480, giorgia.lupi@mail.polimi.it Paolo Patelli PhD Student, Politecnico di Milano, DiAP - Dipartimento di Architettura e Pianificazione (Department of Architecture and Planning), Via Bonardi 3, 20133, Milan, Italy, +39.3398179828, paolo1.patelli@mail.polimi.it Luca Simeone PhD student, MEDEA Malmö University and researcher, FakePress, Via Ghislieri 14, Rome, Italy, me@luca.simeone.name Salvatore Iaconesi Professor, La Sapienza University and technology director, FakePress, Via Ghislieri 14, Rome, Italy, salvatore.iaconesi@artisopensource.net
The progressive instrumentation of the city with technologies embedded into its streets and buildings, and carried by people and vehicles, provides a number of possibilities for creating new ways of inquiring our cities, and for gaining insights on how citizens live, perceive and act in public spaces. Real-time informational landscapes produced by massively distributed technological devices (such as mobile phones acting as ubiquitous sensors or publishing platforms) are transforming our everyday life experiences: our activities (e.g. studying, working, socializing), our places (e.g. home, office, public spaces) and soft infrastructures (i.e. the delivery of specialized services to people) which are increasingly relying on users.
R. Houlstan-Hasaerts, B. Tominc, M. Nikšič, B. Goličnik Marušić (Editors) Urbani izziv - publikacije, Ljubljana, May 2012