Evaluating city-scale urban mobility restriction in Jakarta due to the COVID-19 pandemic: the impact on subjective wellbeing

Abstract

ABSTRACT The COVID-19 pandemic has forced cities worldwide to implement social distancing on a large scale and even lockdowns. City lockdowns are considered a public health policy to reduce virus spread and at the same time to protect vulnerable groups of the population. However, studying the implications of city lockdowns on urban populations’ mental and emotional wellbeing has been widely neglected. Using a case study of Indonesia’s capital and the largest metropolitan area of Jakarta, this study investigates the temporal dynamics of emotions experienced by the citizen during two months of city-scale lockdown. This paper uses Twitter text data as the source for emotional analysis with almost 9000 tweets. The study suggests that positive emotions were more common than negative texts across all periods under study, with lockdown acting as momentum for enhancing family gatherings and serving as a reminder of the importance of health, as the common positive emotions identified. The study provides evidence on the possibility of crowdsourcing data such as Twitter as an alternative source of data for urban analytics that allows researchers to understand the effect of activities and events in a certain location on its citizens.