Where People Are Happiest — and Saddest — in Big Cities
An analysis of geotagged tweets reveals a range of emotions, depending on where you are in a city.
A crowd of pedestrians enter the stairs leading to London Underground metro station at Oxford Circus in 2017.
Photographer: Simon Dawson/Bloomberg
Big cities have long inspired a love-hate relationship with tourists and residents alike. A new study breaks down the types of places within cities that inspire the most anger and disgust — and those that spark the most joy.
The analysis of almost 2 million geotagged tweets from London and San Francisco found that people expressed more positive emotions in places like restaurants and parks and more negative ones in offices and sports stadiums. Using computational tools known as neural networks, researchers at the Kyoto Institute of Technology identified when and where tweets expressed anger, anticipation, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, surprise or trust. The research, based on social media posts from 2016 and 2017, was published Wednesday in the online journal PLOS One.