Abstract

Jane Jacobs proposed that city diversity brings various benefits, including economic and cultural prosperity, enhanced individual security, and increased city vibrancy.  However, what’s the specific correlation between city diversity and public sentiment? Does higher level of diversity always result in a more positive public attitude? Our study aims to reevaluate Jacobs’ theory of city diversity by utilizing urban data from multiple sources. Our research (Figure 1.) primarily focuses on two categories of data. The first category is city diversity data including building uses, building ages, and architectural styles which were predicted with image classification machine learning tools (Figure 2.). The second category is public sentiment data collected from Twitter. We gathered tweets and measured the levels of positivity, negativity, and neutrality expressed by the public using natural language processing tools. Through spatial distribution analysis (Figure 3.) and correlation analysis of environmental and social media data (Figure 4.), we revealed the relationship between city diversity and public sentiment. The results indicate that higher city diversity relates to more positive as well as negative sentiments among individuals, reducing their neutral and indifferent attitudes in Manhattan. This demonstrates that city diversity can influence public sentiment in a comprehensive way, which validates and enriches Jane Jacobs’ theory. Therefore, we suggest a more nuanced and careful attitude towards city diversity in the contemporary urban agenda.

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