Quantifying the Link Between Art and Property Prices in Urban Neighbourhoods
Seresinhe, C. I., Moat, H. S., & Preis, T. (2016) Royal Society Open Science, 3(4), 160146.
Our findings demonstrate how online data can be used to quantify aspects of the visual environment at scale and reveal new connections between the visual environment and crucial socio-economic measurements.
Our study investigates whether photographs uploaded to Flickr can help quantify if the presence of art is associated with improvements in economic conditions of urban neighbourhoods.
For each neighbourhood, we calculated the proportion of Flickr photographs labelled with the word “art”, and compared this to changes in property prices between 2003 and 2014. Our analysis reveals that neighbourhoods with a higher proportion of "art" photographs also experienced greater relative gains in property prices.
These findings suggest that online data might be used to reveal new connections between the environment in which we live and important socioeconomic measurements.