Quantifying urban revitalization
For years, researchers at the MIT Media Lab have been developing a database of images captured at regular distances around several major cities. The images are scored according to different visual characteristics — how safe the depicted areas look, how affluent, how lively, and the like. In a paper they presented last week at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Multimedia Conference, the researchers, together with colleagues at the University of Trento and the Bruno Kessler Foundation, both in Trento, Italy, compared these safety scores, of neighborhoods in Rome and Milan, to the frequency with which people visited these places, according to cellphone data. Adjusted for factors such as population density and distance from city centers, the correlation between perceived safety and visitation rates was strong, but it was particularly strong for women and people over 50. The correlation was negative for people under 30, which means that males in their 20s were...