Image of a City through Big Data Analytics: Colombo from the Lens of Geo-Coded Social Media Data

The image of a city represents the sum of beliefs, ideas, and impressions that people have of that city. Mostly, city images are assessed through direct or indirect interviews and cognitive mapping exercises. Such methods consume more time and effort and are limited to a small number of people. However, recently, people tend to use social media to express their thoughts and experiences of a place. Taking this into consideration, this paper attempts to explore city images through social media big data, considering Colombo, Sri Lanka, as the testbed. The aim of the study is to examine the image of a city through Lynchian elements—i.e., landmarks, paths, nodes, edges, and districts—by using community sentiments expressed and images posted on social media platforms. For that, this study conducted various analyses—i.e., descriptive, image processing, sentiment, popularity, and geo-coded social media analyses. The study findings revealed that: (a) the community sentiments toward the same landmarks, paths, nodes, edges, and districts change over time; (b) decisions related to locating landmarks, paths, nodes, edges, and districts have a significant impact on community cognition in perceiving cities; and (c) geo-coded social media data analytics is an invaluable approach to capture the image of a city. The study informs urban authorities in their placemaking efforts by introducing a novel methodological approach to capture an image of a city.