Abstract
Is there an association between art and changes in the economic conditions of urban neighbourhoods? While the popular media and policymakers commonly believe this to be the case, quantitative evidence remains lacking. Here, we use metadata of geotagged photographs uploaded to the popular image-sharing platform Flickr to quantify the presence of art in London neighbourhoods. We estimate the presence of art in neighbourhoods by determining the proportion of Flickr photographs which have the word ‘art’ attached. We compare this with the relative gain in residential property prices for each Inner London neighbourhood. We find that neighbourhoods which have a higher proportion of ‘art’ photographs also have greater relative gains in property prices. Our findings demonstrate how online data can be used to quantify aspects of the visual environment at scale and reveal new connections between the visual environment and crucial socio-economic measurements.
Highlights
The story of art playing a central role in the transformation of deprived urban neighbourhoods is a compelling one that has greatly engaged popular media and policymakers alike
A comparison of the relative change of mean residential property price and the proportion of ‘art’ images suggests that the higher the proportion of ‘art’ images, the greater the relative gain in house price, as measured by the change in rank of mean residential property prices
A Kendall rank correlation test provides further evidence of this relationship (τ = −0.23, p < 0.001, n = 119, Kendall’s rank correlation). This is initial evidence in support of our hypothesis that the presence of art is associated with improvements in economic conditions of urban neighbourhoods
Summary
The story of art playing a central role in the transformation of deprived urban neighbourhoods is a compelling one that has greatly engaged popular media and policymakers alike. Researchers of urban policy maintain that the creative industries are key to building a successful city economy [1,2]. Governments around the world make significant investments in the arts in order to incentivize gentrification and regeneration in specific neighbourhoods [3,4,5]. Quantitative evidence linking the presence of art with changing economic conditions of urban neighbourhoods is lacking. Several studies focus on specific neighbourhoods that fit this narrative, rather than carrying out broader investigations.
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