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Can ‘Hot or Not’ Help Us Design Better Cities?

Place Pulse is an online tool developed by MIT researchers that gauges people’s emotional responses to their surroundings.

Within seconds of walking through an unfamiliar neighborhood, you can already tell whether or not you feel comfortable. Little visual cues help you out: Things like graffiti, cracked pavement and empty streets might speed up your heartbeat, while bright lights, clean buildings and bustling sidewalks probably make you feel safe. These gut feelings are just that—feelings, but they help you decide if you’re going to wander around and discover a new restaurant or get back on the subway as fast as possible, which ultimately has an impact on a neighborhood’s health.

Social scientists have long suspected that a neighborhood’s aesthetic value might be a good gauge of its safety and vitality, but the proof was slippery. After all, it’s not easy to quantify an emotional response to a graffiti tag. But two years ago, that’s exactly what a group of researchers from MIT’s media lab did.

It was dubbed Hot or Not for Cities, but its scope goes far deeper.

The team built Place Pulse, an online tool that enabled them to gather empirical data on how a city’s architecture, design and general aesthetic affect its social and economic outcomes. Place Pulse is basically a website that encourages visitors to rank two side-by-side images of cities on the basis of their appearance. Using randomly chosen Google Street View images from Boston, New York City, and Linz and Salzburg in Austria, the site asked questions like: Which place looks safer or which place looks more upper-class?

Visitors clicked accordingly and that bit of data was fed to algorithms that helped determine overarching trends. When it first launched in 2011, the tool was cleverly dubbed Hot or Not for Cities, but its scope goes far deeper than just the superficial. “People’s built surroundings have an impact on how they view and feel about a place,” explains Cesar Hidalgo, an MIT professor who is leading the research. “By identifying the features that are associated with each response, it allows people to incorporate that knowledge into the process of design.”

The findings, which were published recently in the journal PLoS ONE, are fascinating, but they mostly just reinforce what we already know—cities like New York are plagued with inequality. Generally, Hidalgo found that notoriously wealthy neighborhoods ranked high on safety, while more needy neighborhoods were deemed unsafe by voters. The triggers? Graffiti, cracked pavement and empty parking lots.

Hidalgo says the outcomes of the first experiment were important for establishing the project’s research methodology, but he believes there are other associations that can be explored to connect behavior and the aesthetics of urban environments. “They haven’t been explored yet because we haven’t had good data on the way places look,” he explains. Which is why he and his team expanded their research to 56 cities and switched up the questions to bess less pointed. Drawing on more than 100,000 Google images from cities around the world, the MIT team is looking to measure people’s reactions to inquiries such as, Which place is more beautiful? Or more lively, boring, depressing or wealthier?

The current rankings based on Place Pulse responses. Gaborone, Botswana ranks low on liveliness, while Washington, D.C. and Taipei are generally believed to be less boring.

Hidalgo believes Place Pulse can put help keep the government in check.

Hidalgo purposefully stayed away from questions of mechanical objectivity like if a place is clean or dirty. “Asking if a place is clean or not is almost computational,” he explains. “But asking if a place is depressing is very human.” He hopes tapping into human emotions, they’ll be able to quantify the idea of what makes a city desirable. “There is a zeitgeist of people thinking about cities and the idea of a city being a lively place,” he explains. “So how do you design a place to be lively?” Considering the recently launched second phase of Place Pulse research only has only accumulated 360,000 clicks so far (they need more than 2 million to get a statistically sound sample), the answer is inconclusive. But eventually he hope they’ll have enough quantifiable data to really inform the future planning and design of cities.

Ultimately, Hidalgo believes the most powerful application of Place Pulse’s data is to use it to keep the government in check. If you’re able to pinpoint a city’s healthy and wounded neighborhoods, it will be easier to hold governments accountable for where they’re funneling their resources. “Are they making efforts in a way that will enhance this contrast or in a way that will ameliorate or reduce this contrast?” Hidalgo asks. “Hopefully this will be a balancing force.”