Abstract
Given the importance of parks and green spaces for outdoor recreation in cities, numerous studies have attempted to describe patterns of usage and understand their determining factors. Recently, social media has emerged as a potentially valuable tool to examine people’s use of parks. This study examines park use in Singapore based on the count and visual content of photographs geo-located within parks. Measures of park use—the number of photo-user-days (PUD)—derived from 325,173 and 94,890 photographs on the respective platforms Instagram and Flickr were compared with results from household surveys (n = 2000). We analysed the spatial attributes of parks and their relationships with PUD at an aggregated-level, and for content categories on the Flickr platform produced by automated classification: birds, wildlife, plants, flowers, recreation, water/skyscapes. In contrast to studies of large national parks, we found that PUD at city parks reflected residents’ preferences better than their frequency of visits to parks, and that park size had a limited effect on PUD. Some relationships were specific to a particular platform; Instagram users were more likely to upload photographs at parks that were closer to the coast and with more canopy cover, while Flickr users tended to do so at parks with an event space and that had lower-density housing nearby. We conclude that social media can provide reasonable assessments of park popularity, but future studies need to consider scale-effects, the integration of data sources for better accuracy, as well as a diversity of goals beyond park use.
Highlights
Urban parks are important places for outdoor recreation in cities (Kaczynski & Henderson, 2007)
This paper examines the spatial drivers of park use across the study city of Singapore, and compares between measures of park use derived from both online social media and nationwide household surveys
Results showed that the number of PUD on both social media platforms matched the popularity of parks (τ = 0.55 and 0.45 on Instagram and Flickr respectively; see Fig. 3) much better than the frequency of visits to parks (τ = 0.35 and 0.19 on Instagram and Flickr respectively; Appendix D Fig. D1)
Summary
Urban parks are important places for outdoor recreation in cities (Kaczynski & Henderson, 2007). Studies have found that having parks close to homes may not increase the frequency of their use (Ives et al, 2017; Schipperijn et al, 2010), and that the perception of accessibility might be more important than geographic proximity (Wang et al, 2015). Park attributes such as size have been shown to affect visit frequency and feelings of connectedness to nature (Schipperijn et al, 2010; Scopelliti et al, 2016). It is recognised that usage does not necessarily increase by having parks close to residents, and that factors such as park size and amenities must be considered (Rossi et al, 2015; Schipperijn et al, 2010; Zhang & Tan, 2019)
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