Using social media data in understanding site-scale landscape architecture design: taking Seattle Freeway Park as an example

ABSTRACT

Social media is a fast-growing area in built environment studies used to understand public opinions and landscape usage. As most literature focuses on regional topics, this paper marks a pilot effort to study site-scale issues using social media data. Taking the Seattle Freeway Park as an example, 3314 Instagram posts from 2035 users for three years (2015–2017) were mined and categorised to answer two research questions: (1) how is Seattle Freeway Park used as a public space? (2) what are the users’ emotional or affective ties to the built environment of Seattle Freeway Park? An analytic procedure for analysing and understanding site-scale crowdsourcing data was developed and introduced. The results bring new perspectives and insights about public space design by discussing the associations between park usage in terms of design features, publicity, and climate.

KEYWORDS:

• Social media
• Seattle Freeway Park
• brutalism
• publicity
• open space usage

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Yang Song

Yang Song has a Master of Landscape Architecture and a Ph.D. in Environmental Design and Planning from Clemson University. From 2017 to 2019, Yang Song is an assistant professor in Landscape Architecture at North Dakota State University. He will be an assistant professor in Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning at Texas A&M University starting from Aug 2020. Yang's research interests lie in the intersection of environmental psychology, urban design, and public health. He integrates technologies in social media and data sciences to investigate the relationships between human experiences and built environment policies. His current focus is to use social media platforms to evaluate the effectiveness of public space design and development.

Bo Zhang

Bo Zhang holds a PhD in Landscape Architecture and Master of Architecture. He is currently an assistant professor in Landscape Architecture at Oklahoma State University. Dr Zhang’s research interests include three areas, such as using social media data in understanding public space social performance, Oriental influences on American garden design in the 19th and 20th centuries, and research methodology for design disciplines. Dr Zhang remains active in landscape architecture and urban design practice.