Using social media data in understanding site-scale landscape architecture design: taking Seattle Freeway Park as an example

Social media is a fast-growing area in built environment studies used to understand public opinions and landscape usage. As most literature focuses on regional topics, this paper marks a pilot effort to study site-scale issues using social media data. Taking the Seattle Freeway Park as an example, 3314 Instagram posts from 2035 users for three years (2015–2017) were mined and categorised to answer two research questions: (1) how is Seattle Freeway Park used as a public space? (2) what are the users’ emotional or affective ties to the built environment of Seattle Freeway Park? An analytic procedure for analysing and understanding site-scale crowdsourcing data was developed and introduced. The results bring new perspectives and insights about public space design by discussing the associations between park usage in terms of design features, publicity, and climate.