Speakers
Description
Cities today face shortages of urban construction space and a lack of funding for large projects, necessitating alternatives to traditional urban regeneration models. Recently, temporary urban regeneration explorations, such as pop-up markets, have become more prevalent in major Chinese cities and may be able to solve the problem. They leverage point-to-point connections in the virtual world to facilitate interactions in real urban public spaces. This approach is implicitly in line with the connotation of "tactical urbanism," which appeals to low-cost and short-term actions that promote social capital. However, the relationship between these temporary events and their sited neighbourhood has not yet been clarified, given the truth that they are now more than just commodity exchange platforms as traditional markets, but can also serve as social centers for community interactions or supplements for temporary business formats.
The research focuses on measuring the theme-consistency between temporary markets and the long-lasting built environment in Beijing, a city with unique cultural, economic, and social advantages. The concept “theme-consistency” refer to the similarity between the theme of a pop-up market perceived by visitors and that of the long term format and function of its sited neighbourhood. While a higher score hints that markets tend to align with the pre-existed urban functions, a lower score reveals the markets that tend to surprise the community with a totally different theme. Such consistency score are then compared with the results of sentiment analysis and the popularity of markets, thus to measure whether such respond is welcomed or not by the visitors. The bridge between visitors comments and the urban functions are developed through NLP tools including Word2Vec and LDA model.
The study period spans from December 2023 to November 2024, and it involves analyzing 25 typical case studies.Data sources include pop-up market information from WeChat public accounts, POI data from Gaode Map, and social media data from Xiaohongshu. The study uses social media data to calculate market popularity, satisfaction, themes, and surrounding community attributes. Built environment data includes POI data, nighttime light data, and land use data.
Results show that approximately 80% of market themes align with the functional themes of surrounding communities. Pop-up markets offer flexible and temporary solutions to urban development challenges, which are manifestations of tactical urbanism. However, market satisfaction is negatively correlated with theme consistency, suggesting that markets with themes differing from the community functions receive higher satisfaction ratings. The study concludes that while NLP tools are effective in bridging physical and virtual spaces for temporary events, further research is needed to refine social media analysis and expand the sample size for more robust conclusions.
| Keywords | Public space;Pop-up markets;Social media analysis;Tactical Urbanism;Built environment |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | No |
