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."
Great. Crowdsourced profiling. (Score:2, Insightful)
Sounds real reliable.
Re:MIT Researchers have created a Starbucks counte (Score:3, Insightful)
I just judge a neighborhood by the number of black and hispanic people in it.
And so do you. But YOU won't say it.
Re:Great. Crowdsourced profiling. (Score:3, Insightful)
Statisically-speaking they often are. We can't let facts get in the way of our PC beliefs, right?
Re:Um.... (Score:4, Insightful)
That assumes that the "vibe" of a location correlates well with income, which I would consider a highly suspect assumption - we already know that income does not correlate with happiness, honesty, etc. much beyond the point where people can reliably keep a roof over their heads and food in their belly - i.e. very little within the US.
One example is artist communities - they have a tendency to spring up semi-organically in low-rent areas (the starving artist stereotype having a solid grounding in reality) and transform them into vibrant communities. I've heard firsthand stories of the transformation of Cannery Row in Monterrey - started out with a bunch of hippies moving into the largely abandoned fish-canning district because the rents were cheap, and once you had a bunch of creative, good natured people in one place things just sort of took off. Of course eventually people with money took notice of the new atmosphere and moved in, driving prices up, but for quite a while it was a cheap and desirable place to live, provided you didn't mind the smell of cannabis smoke.
Re:MIT Researchers have created a Starbucks counte (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:MIT Researchers have created a Starbucks counte (Score:2, Insightful)
My black neighbor drives a Mercedes, has a swimming pool, and a nicer lawn than I do.
Does he live in a black neighborhood?