Urban life is often described as “rapid rhythm”. A new study suggests that it is more true than ever.
Research, co-written by MIT researchers, shows that the average walking speed of pedestrians in three cities in the northeast of the United States increased by 15% from 1980 to 2010. The number of people who persisted in public spaces also decreased by 14%.
Researchers used automatic learning tools to assess video sequences from the 1980s captured by renowned urban planner William Whyte, Boston, New York and Philadelphia. They compared the old equipment with more recent videos of the same locations.
“Something has changed in the past 40 years,” said the MIT professor of the practice Carlo Ratti, co-author of the new study. “How much we walk, how people meet in public space – what we see here is that public spaces work somewhat differently, more like an artery and less a meeting space.”
Paper, “Explore the social life of urban spaces through AI“, Is published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The co-authors are Arianna Salazar-Miranda MCP '16, Phd '23, assistant professor at the Environment School of the University of Yale; Fan Zhuanguan from the University of Hong Kong; Michael Baick; Keith N. Hampton, professor at Michigan State University; Fabio Duarte, associate director of the Senseable City Lab; Becky Py Loo from the University of Hong Kong; Edward Glaeser, Fred and Eleanor Glimp professor of economics at Harvard University; And Ratti, who is also director of the Senseable City Lab du MIT.
The results could help to clarify town planning, because designers seek to create new public areas or modify those existing.
“Public space is such an important element of civic life, and today in part because it thwarts the polarization of digital space,” explains Salazar-Miranda. “The more we can continue to improve public space, the more we can make our cities adapted to the concession.”
Meet you at the Met
Whyte was an eminent social thinker including the famous 1956 book, “The Organization Man”, surveying the apparent culture of business compliance in the United States, has become a touch of her decade.
However, Whyte has spent in recent decades from her career focused on town planning. The images he filmed, from 1978 to 1980, were archived by a non -profit organization based in Brooklyn called The Project for Public Spaces then digitized by Hampton and his students.
Whyte has chosen to make her recording in four places in the three combined cities: the crossing area of the city center of Boston; Bryant Park from New York; The markets of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, a famous gathering point and a place of observation of people; and rue Chestnut de Philadelphia.
In 2010, a group led by Hampton then shot new images in these places, at the same period of the day that Whyte had, compare and contrast the current dynamics with those of Whyte. To conduct the study, the co-authors used models of computer vision and AI to summarize and quantify the activity in the videos.
The researchers discovered that some things have not changed much. The percentage of people who walked alone barely passed, from 67% in 1980 to 68% in 2010. On the other hand, the percentage of people entering these public spaces which have become part of a group have decreased a little. In 1980, 5.5% of people approaching these spots met a group; In 2010, it was 2%.
“There may be a more transactional nature in public space today,” explains Ratti.
Less outdoor groups: anomie or Starbucks?
If people's behavior models have changed since 1980, it is natural to ask why. Certainly, some of the visible changes seem to be consistent with the omnipresent use of mobile phones; People are now organizing their social life by phone, and perhaps zipting more quickly from one place to another accordingly.
“When you look at the images of William Whyte, the inhabitants of public spaces looked at each other more,” said Ratti. “It was a place where you could start a conversation or meet a friend. You couldn't do things online then. Today, the behavior is more based on SMS first, to meet you in public space.”
As the researchers note, if groups of people drag together slightly less often in public spaces, there could still be another reason for this: Starbucks and its competitors. As the newspaper indicates, the socialization of the outdoor group can be less common due to “the proliferation of cafes and other indoor sites. Instead of linger on the sidewalks, people may have moved their social interactions in air -conditioned and more comfortable spaces. ”
Admittedly, Coffeeshops was much less common in major cities in 1980, and the Big Chain Coffeeshops did not exist.
On the other hand, the behavior of public space could have evolved all this time, regardless of Starbucks and others. The researchers say that the new study offers concept proof for its method and encouraged them to carry out additional work. Ratti, Duarte and other researchers from the Senseable City Lab of MIT turned their attention to an in -depth study of European public spaces in order to shed light on the interaction between people and the public form.
“We collect images of 40 squares in Europe,” explains Duarte. “The question is: how can we learn on a larger scale?” This is partly what we do. ”