Opening alternative data imaginaries in urban studies: Unfolding COVID place attachments through Instagram photos and computational visual methods

Abstract

Planners, policy makers, and scholars are increasingly using social media data to study public life in cities. Yet, such projects tend to be limited by three commitments that shape the imaginaries of such data-driven urbanism, namely 1) bias towards textual social media; 2) fixation on geotag-ontologies; and 3) seeing the subjective nature of data as a bias. The consequence is that the potential of digital traces for renewing the empirical ground of digital urban studies is not fully realized. To open alternative imaginaries around data-driven urbanism, we provide a bibliometric review of these trends and suggest that social media images could be used to study place attachments and explore how people experience cities, bridging ethnographic research questions with the computational agenda. Second, to exemplify what can be gained from such a re-orientation of urban projects, we deliver a digital methods study of 39K Instagram posts from 2020 and explore how people in Denmark attached to different environments during the first nine months of COVID-19. The case demonstrates that we might open new empirical routes in urban studies by centering image data, moving beyond geotag-ontologies, and foregrounding the subjectivity of data as an analytical opportunity, rather than a problem.