Abstract

Human emotional perceptions are context-dependent insights of our surrounding urban environment. Today, thanks to new technologies, social media platforms give people the possibility to express their emotions about different situations, topics, and places. These platforms generate a wide range of data and make open information available for all. However, its potential benefits for the urban field are still not largely explored. This fact raises several questions: can we use this information to map urban emotions of a city? Can this information help us understand the human/urban space relationship? To tackle these questions, we propose a new approach to use social media platforms as a source of urban emotion data. The paper focuses on Kakaostory as a database to map the patterns of emotions across the city of Seoul. It shows the potential benefits of using such a platform for detecting emotions in urban areas. Our research aims to better understand the urban environment and its interaction with people, which can help improve the city’s urban spaces through maintaining the existing urban tissues and creating emotionally pleasant spaces for citizens.