MIT's "Hot Or Not" Site For Neighborhoods Could Help Shape Cities 103
Daniel_Stuckey writes "When you walk around a city, there are things you can just sense, like if you've wandered into a dodgy neighborhood, or where the new happening spot is. Intuitively, we know that a city's more intangible characteristics, like class or uniqueness, play a big role in what it’s like to live there, but until now there was no way to actually quantify that idea.
Researchers from MIT Media Lab may have found a way to measure this 'aesthetic capital' of cities, with their website Place Pulse, a tool to crowdsource people's perception of cities by judging digital snapshots—a sort of 'hot or not' for urban neighborhoods.
Some 4,000 geotagged Google Streetview images and 8,000 participants later, the team found that by using digital images and crowdsourced feedback, they can accurately quantify the diverse vibes within a city (pdf), which in turn can help us better understand issues like inequality and safety."
Re:MIT Researchers have created a Starbucks counte (Score:2, Informative)
I do too. If the neighborhood is all-white, I don't want to live there. I am a Caucasian. I decided early on that I want a more diverse area for raising my kids. It has worked out very well. E pluribus unum.
I used to say that too, but then it took a few break ins before I realized you can't always tell the difference between "diversity" and "ghetto" until you live there. Multa adversus paucos.
I've lived in a majority hispanic neighborhood for the past 17 years and it's been quite nice. Lots of families and children and the neighborhood is quite diverse (I live a few blocks from a major university). I suspect that you are confusing poor neighborhoods with neighborhoods with people of color. They are not necessarily the same thing. I've been to places which are lily white and very poor, where the crime is just out of control. The issue is poverty and hopelessness, not the amount of melanin in the skin of the residents.