Understanding sentiments and activities in green spaces using a social data–driven approach

doi:10.1016/B978-0-12-816639-0.00006-5

Smart Cities: Issues and Challenges

Mapping Political, Social and Economic Risks and Threats

2019, Pages 77-107

https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-816639-0.00006-5 Get rights and content

Abstract

Green spaces are believed to enhance the well-being of residents in urban areas. Although there is research exploring the emotional benefits of green spaces, most early works are based on user surveys and case studies, which are typically small in scale, intrusive, time intensive, and costly. In contrast to earlier works, we utilize a nonintrusive methodology to understand green space effects at large scale and, in greater detail, via digital traces left by Twitter users. Using this methodology, we perform an empirical study on the effects of green spaces on user sentiments, emotions, and activities in Melbourne, Australia, and our main findings are (1) tweets in green spaces contain more positive and less negative emotions compared with those in urban areas; (2) emotions in tweets vary seasonally; (3) there are interesting changes in sentiments based on the hour, day, and month that a tweet was posted; (4) negative sentiments are typically associated with large transport infrastructures such as train interchanges, major road junctions, and railway tracks; and (5) each green space is often associated with a specific type of activity and/or event, which can be a useful information for online recommender systems. The novelty of our study is the combination of psychological theory alongside data collection and analysis techniques on a large-scale Twitter data set, which builds on traditional methods in urban research and provides important implications for urban planning authorities.

References (0)

Cited by (18)

Planning small for winning big: Small urban green space distribution patterns in an expanding city
2022, Urban Forestry and Urban Greening
Citation Excerpt :
There is limited knowledge regarding how the proximity of lands covered with vegetation can enhance student performance (Browning and Rigolon, 2019). However, educational facilities are usually paired with green spaces as they are considered to mitigate the insecurity sentiment (Lim et al., 2019). Nevertheless, SPUGS near educational facilities, especially schools, have also been subjected to the overall trend of shrinkage, as since 2004 the municipality began a programme of increasing the kindergarten capacity by constructing new buildings in the vicinity of existing primary schools or courtyards, which has led to the partial destruction of schoolyards and their green areas (Iojă et al., 2014).
While major urban areas are expanding, becoming more crowded, vegetated lands areshrinking. Built-up densification limits the planning of large urban green spaces,depriving urban dwellers of the benefits provided by such structures. In this context,small public urban green spaces (SPUGS) become of high value for urban landscapes,and their distribution throughout the city should aim to compensate the lack of largergreen areas. The driving forces of SPUGS distribution may be linked to the urbanfunctions they are usually paired with.The current study aimed to determine which are the urban functions that benefit ofhigher amounts of SPUGS in their proximities and to map the distribution and densityof SPUGS within Bucharest, helping us expose the green deprived communities.Results revealed that multi-dwelling residential areas are the ones with higher share ofSPUGS within walking distance. Nevertheless, analysis on SPUGS deprivation withinthe city showed that communist planned residential neighbourhoods are greener thanthe ones developed in the past three decades. Healthcare and commercial functionswithin the city recorded smaller shares of SPUGS in their proximity, highlighting thatvulnerable groups (such as ill people) are exposed to less vegetation, and that publicplanning documents are not encouraging developers to allocate more land for greenfeature development.These results are relevant for projecting the quality of outdoor environmentsthroughout Romania’s capital and for assessing potential future managementchallenges. The outcomes of this research provide local policy makers and plannerswith the vulnerable areas in which immediate action for expanding the greeninfrastructures should take place. At the same time, the methodological approachdescribed in the study proved to be efficient in assessing the distribution of SPUGSthroughout the city and the determinants of this distribution. It can be easily replicatedin other cities by scholars and planners.
The interaction between human demand and urban greenspace supply for promoting positive emotions with sentiment analysis from twitter
2022, Urban Forestry and Urban Greening
Citation Excerpt :
Therefore, greenspace design needs not only to follow city planning guidelines but also, more importantly, to transform the understanding of the various values of citizens assigned to greenspaces (Ives et al., 2017). The real-time messages posted by visitors to UGS are about their opinions and specific sentiments (Ceron et al., 2014; Lim et al., 2019). Several studies have used SMD to analyze human health and the usage of greenspaces and to evaluate emotions in greenspaces.
Urban greenspace (UGS) plays an essential role in providing benefits to human well-being in cities. Understanding how to promote positive emotions is vital for planning and designing a UGS supply that satisfies human demand. However, little is known about the impact on human emotions of the interaction of cross-cultural demands and different greenspace supplies. This study explored different human emotions about UGS from a cross-linguistics perspective using social media data (SMD). Sentiment analysis was conducted with geolocated Twitter data from 26 UGSs in Berlin to acquire sentiment value and tweet number of tweets. The sentiments of English and German tweets in four types of UGSs were compared, and the correlations with 11 physical and activity landscape characteristics were identified. The results demonstrate that (1) sentiment value and tweet number of tweets were distinctive in the 26 greenspaces, showing different emotions responding to the different types of UGS; (2) the cross-linguistic demands were different in the comparison of English and German tweets, with the highest sentiment values in gardens and parks, respectively; and (3) the sentiment of the all, English and German tweets was respectively correlated with open space, interesting plants and swimming infrastructure. The activity landscape made the highest contributions to positive emotions even with cross-cultural differences. The results of the study suggest that human emotions can indicate whether the UGS supply meets the human demand and that specific landscape characteristics can enhance positive emotions to maintain human demand in cross-cultural background, especially considering the increasing attention to immigrants and natives. Thus, human emotions identify the interaction between UGS supply and human demand based on SMD to improve UGS outcomes for urban sustainability and public well-being.
Attitudes towards urban green during the COVID-19 pandemic via Twitter
2022, Cities
Citation Excerpt :
Thanks to this analysis it was possible to determine the sentiment polarity of tweets collected, classifying them as: positive, negative or neutral. Although focusing on one language allows us to abstract away the nuances associated with sentiment analysis, it was not possible to perform the sentiment analysis using text analysis tools and dictionaries tested in other studies based on Twitter data as they are developed for the English language (Lim et al., 2019; Plunz et al., 2019). Our sentiment analysis provided fragmented results, also because Twitter has a maximum limit of characters that can be used for each tweet, thus reducing the articulation of the sentence, encouraging abbreviations and the use of emoticons.
COVID-19 has had economic, social and environmental impacts worldwide. Governments have adopted containment measures to limit the spread of the virus. Urban green spaces (UGSs) were included among the non-essential activities and were consequently closed during the lockdown periods in some countries. This study analysed tweets posted by users to understand the citizens' perception and sentiment in relation to the closure of UGS in Italy. Results revealed that people felt a strong deprivation feeling in relation to the restrictions imposed on UGS access, which limited the number of spaces for supporting mental and physical wellbeing of citizens. Users from urban areas were more affected by the lockdowns and more willing to share thoughts on social media, demonstrating a strong emotionality. Furthermore, findings show that users seemed concerned about their children's health, expressing awareness about the benefits of being in contact with nature. UGS is able to provide services to citizens, and close-to-home parks are fundamental for the community, in particular during a health emergency. The implementation of urban design, which includes green areas to support health and environment challenges, should be addressed by policy-makers to create opportunities for a green and resilient recovery of cities, and prepare for future emergencies.
Serverless Edge Providers for AI Applications
2024, Springer Proceedings in Complexity
Tweets of Transformation: Investigating Tactical Urbanism and Social Interactions in Jeddah’s Colorful Corniche Initiative
2023, Sustainability (Switzerland)
SENSORY GARDENS AS A NEW FORM OF URBAN GREEN SPACE IN SMART SUSTAINABLE CITIES
2023, Czasopismo Geograficzne

View all citing articles on Scopus

View full text

Chapter 6 - Understanding sentiments and activities in green spaces using a social data–driven approach

Abstract