Abstract
One of the challenges of heritage cities is sustainably balancing mass tourism and the daily life of its residents. Urban policies can modulate the impact of tourism through regulations focusing on areas with outstanding visitor pressure, which must consequently be delimited accurately and objectively. Within a traditionally data-scarce discipline, urban practitioners can currently employ a wide range of tracking technologies, but because of their limitations can also greatly benefit from new sources of data from social media. Using Barcelona as a testbed, a methodology is presented to identify and visualize hot spots of visitor activity using more than a million public geotagged images collected from the Flickr photo-sharing community. Multiple complementary visualization approaches are discussed that are suitable for different scales of analysis, from global to sub-block resolution. The presented methodology is firmly grounded in a well-established spatial statistics framework, adapted to a “big data” environment, to extract knowledge from social media. It is designed to generalize to other urban settings, providing substantial advantages over other surveying methods in terms of cost-efficiency, scalability, and accuracy, while capturing the behavior of a larger number of participants and covering more extensive areas or temporal spans.
Highlights
After parsing the 69 fields of the collected records in the JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) format, the coordinate pair of each geotagged picture was projected into the spatial reference used by the cartographic services of the city of Barcelona (EPSG:25831) with the maximum accuracy possible using the PROJ.4 library [83]
The graphical summary provided by the L(r) function described the clustering behavior of the different user profiles visually, and was supported by a robust spatial statistics framework
The panel corresponding to the locals confirms a more dispersed pattern around the central areas of the city and reveals a high number of pictures taken by residents on the main landmarks of the city, indicative that the photographic attractiveness of these hotspots is aligned with the interests of both locals and the tourists, and that locals behave like tourists in these locations
Summary
Since the mid-20th century, the number of people living in urban areas has steadily increased in absolute and relative terms [1]. With the majority of the world’s population living in urban areas, and projections indicating that over the 30 years, most of the population growth will occur in cities, urban practitioners (planners and designers) require a deeper understanding of urban phenomena [2] and the mechanisms that drive their processes [3]. One of the challenges modern cities face is the management of mass tourism [4], which despite being capable of driving substantial economic growth [5], can hamper the daily life of their inhabitants [6] and negatively influence the experience of visitors themselves [7], as well as the environment [8]. Sustainability 2021, 13, 3159 procurement of a mandatory license within these zones, can sustainably balance local and visitor presence in the public space
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