Speaker
Description
In recent decades, urban China has witnessed a significant shift in leisure patterns, marked by increased free time and disposable income among city dwellers. Within this context, walking has emerged as a universally appealing leisure pursuit, transcending age barriers and offering an accessible, cost-effective, and flexible form of physical activity. This rise in urban walking not only reflects changing lifestyle preferences but also represents a unique form of engagement with the city itself.
Urban walking tours have long provided an immersive way for people to experience urban spaces and their complex spatial relationships. The rise of geo-media has revolutionised how individuals interact with their urban environments, merging personal imagination with real space and enabling both information sharers and receivers to reconnect with particular places. Users actively participate in shaping urban narratives by creating and sharing diverse representations of specific places across multiple platforms. This digital place-making process blends virtual and physical aspects of urban life, leading to a reimagining of city spaces. The phenomenon of "Wang Hong urbanism" represents a cyclical process where digital representations inspire physical changes, which in turn generate new digital content, raising important questions about authenticity and the future direction of urban development.
This study explores urban glamour in the digital age, focusing on city walking as a significant cultural phenomenon in Chinese urban life that embodies the concept of exploring the nearby as a scope of seeing the world. We analysed photographs posted on the social media platform Douban under the hashtag #CityWalk using Class Activation Mapping (CAM), an advanced technique for interpreting Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) predictions. The study employs a scene classification model trained with the Places365 dataset to perform scene recognition on self-collected image samples. We propose a hierarchical classification framework that consolidates the 365 fine-grained scene categories identified by the model into 10 high-level semantic categories, aiming to determine which elements of urban design and landscape attract significant user attention when describing cities through social media content. The analysis categorised the visual content into three main elements: natural landscapes (e.g., vegetation), urban man-made structures (e.g., buildings and monuments), and the presence of people in these spaces.
The analysis results indicate a clear preference for human-made structures and unique urban locations over natural ones, with artificial outdoor environments, including common urban features such as streets, parking garages, and crosswalks, dominating the photographs. A more granular examination of the specific urban elements most frequently captured in city walk photography reveals that urban explorers are drawn to a wide spectrum of urban characteristics, from natural environments to cultural spaces, encompassing both large-scale elements (like sky and streets) and localized features (such as alleys and beauty salons). This diversity suggests an appreciation for both macro and micro aspects of city landscapes, extending beyond traditional tourist attractions. There is a marked preference for scenes that capture the interplay of light and shadow on urban surfaces, as well as moments of serendipity in daily urban life.
Notably, people give new meanings to these spaces by socialising and actively participating in their creation. Enchanting the mundane - rendering everyday urban scenes into captivating experiences - is at the heart of the digitally engaged city. The findings provide insights into how city-walkers reconfigure their perceptions and experiences of walkable urban spaces through social media, as well as an understanding of the urban character of urban tourism in the context of Wang Hong urbanism. By aligning urban design with the aesthetic preferences revealed through City Walk practices, cities can create more engaging, livable environments that resonate with residents’ everyday experiences and foster a stronger sense of place and community.
References
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| Keywords | city walk; visual content analysis; social media; urban design; geomedia |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | Yes |
