Can our Tweets help us build better cities?

ARTICLE

Poppy Johnston, The Fifth Estate, 4 September 2018

By pooling publicly-available data from social media and other unconventional information sources – such as reviews and ratings sites, travel wikis, mapping sites, and event promotion pages – the company is able to depict in real-time the unique social fabric of a neighbourhood.

“We have memories and thoughts about spaces, and it’s that intangible stuff that makes somewhere sticky,” Ms Hartley, who is also the company’s chief innovation officer, told The Fifth Estate.

“It’s traditionally been hard to put data behind this and hard to put a value to it. Determining social value has also been hard because neighbourhoods are in a constant state of change,” she said


To visit Lucinda Hartley and co-founder Jessica Christiansen-Franks’s social analytics platform Neighbourlytics click here. To visit their placemaking consultancy Co-Design Studio click here.

Tools for measuring public life

TOOLS

Gehl Institute

We offer tools that draw on decades of applied research demonstrating how a walkable human scale is part of what makes cities interesting. The public life tools available on this page will help you measure how people use public spaces and better understand the relationship between those spaces and the public life that takes place in them.

If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. 

Peter Drucker, management consultant 

Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.

John Adams, second President of the United States

We measure what we care about.

Jan Gehl, urbanist

In God we trust. Everyone else bring data.

Mike Bloomberg, mayor

Making data mean more through storytelling

TALK

Ben Wellington, Ted Broadway, 20 April 2015

So I consider those to be making impact as well … To do that, once again, I think you really need to think about some of the things about storytelling, like Connect with People, Try to Convey one Idea, Keep it Simple and Explore the Things You Know Best.


For more of Ben Wellington’s quantitative analysis of NYC Open Data click here.