NYU Urban Seminar: Cesar Hidalgo on Urban Perception and Neighborhood Amenities
On September 8th, the NYU Urban Seminar series, co-hosted by the NYU Furman Center and the Marron Institute, hosted a presentation by Cesar Hidalgo, leader of the Macro Connections group at the MIT Media Lab and Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT. He presented his work on urban perception and neighborhood amenities, and demonstrated how the MIT Media Lab is using new techniques to analyze the physical aspects of urban environments.
Hidalgo's work focuses on understanding the evolution of information in natural, social, and economic systems. Theories pertaining to the physical aspect of cities are not tested as rigorously as social theories related to urbanization, he argued. To remedy this, the Macro Connections group at the MIT Media Lab is creating cutting edge techniques to map and quantify the urban experience by connecting people’s perception of urban environments to social and economic outcomes.
His presentation demonstrated two web-based tools designed to measure urban perception. The first, Place Pulse, is a crowdsourced, web-based survey that aims to quantify city aesthetics. By comparing two images of urban areas side-by-side, users are posed a question and able to vote on which images they perceive to be more wealthy, modern, safe, lively, active, unique, central, adaptable, or family friendly. With enough user participation, Place Pulse will be able to quantify how certain specific physical elements of urban areas alter people’s perceptions of safety, beauty, etc.
StreetScore is a machine learning algorithm that predicts how safe the image of a street looks to a human observer. The algorithm predicts perceived safety of over 3,000 street views in New York and Boston by aggregating rankings for perceived safety which were obtained from Place Pulse data.
Hidalgo closed by discussing preliminary findings from a recent gentrification study with Ed Glaeser, which aimed to characterize agglomerations of amenities at the neighborhood scale. Using Dive, a data visualization program under development by the MIT Media Lab, researchers are developing algorithms to predict missing neighborhood amenities.
A video of Cesar Hidalgo’s NYU Urban Seminar presentation can be viewed here.
The NYU Urban Seminar series is co-hosted by the NYU Furman Center and the Marron Institute. The speaker series is focused on research with implications for urban policy, and features a variety of researchers from across the U.S. discussing their work. View the full list of fall 2015 speakers. The NYU Urban Seminar is open to the public; registration is required.
