Nan CUI, School of Geography, University of Leeds, United Kingdom
Alexis COMBER, School of Geography, University of Leeds, United Kingdom
Nick MALLESON, School of Geography, University of Leeds, United Kingdom
Victoria HOULDEN, School of Geography, University of Leeds, United Kingdom
Urban green space (UGS) plays an essential role in supporting physical and social wellbeing for visitors[1], especially during the COVID-19 pandemic when lockdown measures restricted individual activities to local areas[2]. However, a key research challenge is how to appropriately measure activities in UGS. This study uses Twitter data to investigate the impact of COVID-19 on UGS activities during lockdown periods. Twitter data was collected for Greater London, covering a three-month period (23rd March to 23rd Jun) for three consecutive years: 2019, 2020, and 2021. Six types of UGS activities were identified: Art, Leisure, Nature, Physical, Picnic, and Social activities. The changes in the percentage of Tweets related to each kind of activity were analysed. Results showed that Art activities accounted for the largest proportion of all activities across the three years; Physical activities in UGS became more popular during lockdown; leisure activities became more popular after the lockdown period. However, an evident decline was found in the proportion of Social activities from 2019 to 2020 and 2021. In order to understand how these changes had influenced users’ mental health and wellbeing, sentiment analysis [3] was conducted, and a specific sentiment lexicon was constructed for UGS activities. The results indicate the temporal nature of changes in sentiments associated with UGS activities in London pre-, during-, and post- lockdown. Future work will develop data mining techniques to investigate the impact of COVID-19 on park visitation, semantic topic detection from Tweets using Latent Dirichlet allocation[4] (LDA) and k-means[5] clustering in order to examine how the semantics associated with UGS activities changed over the study periods.
Mots clés : Park activities| Social media, COVID-19|COVID-19|Urban green space
A103699NC