Abstract
The research presented in this paper describes an evaluation of the impact of spatial interventions in public spaces, measured by social media data. This contribution aims at observing the way a spatial intervention in an urban location can affect what people talk about on social media. The test site for our research is Domplatz in the center of Hamburg, Germany. In recent years, several actions have taken place there, intending to attract social activity and spotlight the square as a landmark of cultural discourse in the city of Hamburg. To evaluate the impact of this strategy, textual data from the social networks Twitter and Instagram (i.e., tweets and image captions) are collected and analyzed using Natural Language Processing intelligence. These analyses identify and track the cultural topic or “people talking about culture” in the city of Hamburg. We observe the evolution of the cultural topic, and its potential correspondence in levels of activity, with certain intervention actions carried out in Domplatz. Two analytic methods of topic clustering and tracking are tested. The results show a successful topic identification and tracking with both methods, the second one being more accurate. This means that it is possible to isolate and observe the evolution of the city’s cultural discourse using NLP. However, it is shown that the effects of spatial interventions in our small test square have a limited local scale, rather than a city-wide relevance.
Highlights
Visualizing tweets and Instagram posts by frequency over time allowed for the detection of general activity trends without specific linkage to a particular topic: the aggregate activity of the discursive space as a consequence of physical events in the city and caused by immaterial actions
Social media use was associated with strong routine activity patterns, in line with Manovich’s [24] approach to social media to portraying “the everyday” rather than “the extraordinary”, which situates online social content within the narrative of mass cultural production
Open and crowd-sourced data services are a popular source to describe the multiple dynamics hosted by urban spaces
Summary
A notion of something beyond streets and buildings in urban space matures over modern and postmodern understandings of cities as twofold constructions assembled by tangible space and the people inhabiting it. This notion emerges with the acknowledgment of certain aspects of space, continues with the study of its role in identity formation from a psychosocial perspective [1], and expands into sophisticated socio-spatial theories. Rapoport’s [2] human–environment formulation described reciprocity in which people shape the environment, and places influence people According to this theory, people and places cannot be conceptualized without each other; individuals construct places as a consequence of everyday social practice, and spaces have an impact on people’s cognition, behavior, identity, and the whole construction of the self [3,4,5]
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