Cities Are Physical Too: Using Computer Vision to Measure the Quality and Impact of Urban Appearance

Nikhil Naik, Ramesh Raskar and Cesar Hidalgo

American Economic Review, 2016, vol. 106, issue 5, 128-32

Abstract: For social scientists, developing an empirical connection between the physical appearance of a city and the behavior and health of its inhabitants has proved challenging due to a lack of data on urban appearance. Can we use computers to quantify urban appearance from street-level imagery? We describe Streetscore: a computer vision algorithm that measures the perceived safety of streetscapes. Using Streetscore to evaluate 19 American cities, we find that the average perceived safety has a strong positive correlation with population density and household income; and the variation in perceived safety has a strong positive correlation with income inequality.

JEL-codes: D31 H75 I31 R11 R23 R58 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
Note: DOI: 10.1257/aer.p20161030
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (19)

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