Tweeting the High Line Life: A Social Media Lens on Urban Green Spaces

Abstract

The objective of this study is to investigate elevated parks as urban green spaces using social media data analytics. Two popular elevated parks, the High Line Park in New York and the 606 in Chicago, were selected as the study sites. Tweets mentioning the two parks were collected from 2015 to 2019. By using text mining, social media users’ sentiments and conveyed perceptions about the elevated parks were studied. In addition, users’ activities and their satisfaction were analyzed. For the 606, users mainly enjoyed the free events at the park and worried about possible increases in housing prices and taxes because of the 606. They tended to participate in physical activities such as biking and walking. Although the 606 provides scenic observation points, users did not seem to enjoy these. Regarding the High Line, users frequently mentioned New York City, which is an important aspect of the identity of the park. The High Line users also frequently mentioned arts and relaxation. Overall, this study supports the idea that social media analytics can be used to gain an understanding of the public’s use of urban green spaces and their attitudes and concerns.

Patterns of Urban Green Space Use Applying Social Media Data: A Systematic Literature Review

“…In contrast, research conducted in Seoul revealed that park users tended to spend time with friends, eat or drink, do their hobbies, such as photography, or commute through the park [33]. Researchers grouped the tweeted activities in parks in New York and Chicago into five main clusters: (I) social: spending time with friends and family; (II) physical: walking and running; (III) cultural: art and galleries; (IV) picnics: food, lunch, and coffee; (V) overlooking: viewing and watching [25]. In both the High Line park in New York and the 606 park in Chicago, the most frequent activities mentioned were in the cultural cluster.…”

“…Applying these methods provides researchers with a wealth of detailed information about visitors' personal experiences, behaviour, and perceptions of the parks they visit [21][22][23]. However, the way in which researchers word their questions may affect responses [24,25]. Observations and questionnaire surveys usually have a limited sample size and are constrained by time and space, and the results may not represent the broad public [5,26,27].…”

Finding the “Heart” in the Green: Conducting a Bibliometric Analysis to Emphasize the Need for Connecting Emotions with Biophilic Urban Planning

“…The few scholars who have conducted large-scale sentiment analyses have primarily leveraged the social media platform Twitter and used text mining methodologies to quickly collect and analyze pre-existing user-generated data [ 20 , 21 , 22 ]. Platforms such as Twitter allow researchers to gain insight into individuals’ emotional reactions to green spaces as they experience those spaces in “real” time [ 20 , 22 ]. Each study, however, highlights critical limitations to applying controlled methodologies to analyzing uncontrolled data.…”

“…Tweets and other posts may also contain highly subjective, multiple, conflicting, or even non-alphabetic emotions that resist easy classification [ 20 ]. Finally, Twitter users may only represent limited demographics of platform subscribers and/or green space visitors, with adult users taking precedence over younger, elderly, and underrepresented users [ 21 , 22 ]. While controlled qualitative studies are potentially more time-, labor-, and cost-intensive, it is clear simply lifting readily-available user data from social media platforms is not a viable, long-term approach for planners who hope to develop a more accurate body of results to confirm or challenge these Twitter-based studies.…”

“…By focusing on humans’ emotional experiences with, in, and around green spaces, researchers can begin to assign such spaces a “human value” to further highlight their benefits [ 21 ] and to endorse their implementation and maintenance within urban environments [ 20 ]. Such studies may also reveal hidden or unexpected functions of green spaces and how each of those functions variably impacts users’ emotional experiences [ 22 ].…”