American Economic Review
ISSN 0002-8282 (Print) | ISSN 1944-7981 (Online)
Cities Are Physical Too: Using Computer Vision to Measure the Quality and Impact of Urban Appearance
American Economic Review
vol. 106,
no. 5, May 2016
(pp. 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.Citation
Naik, Nikhil, Ramesh Raskar, and César A. Hidalgo. 2016. "Cities Are Physical Too: Using Computer Vision to Measure the Quality and Impact of Urban Appearance." American Economic Review, 106 (5): 128–32. DOI: 10.1257/aer.p20161030Additional Materials
JEL Classification
- D31 Personal Income, Wealth, and Their Distributions
- H75 State and Local Government: Health; Education; Welfare; Public Pensions
- I31 General Welfare; Well-Being
- R11 Regional Economic Activity: Growth, Development, Environmental Issues, and Changes
- R23 Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics: Regional Migration; Regional Labor Markets; Population; Neighborhood Characteristics
- R58 Regional Development Planning and Policy