Mapping public disability-inclusive awareness in Chinese cities: Insights from geotagged social media data

Public disability-inclusive awareness is a critical yet underexamined dimension of inclusive urban development. While existing studies has extensively addressed physical accessibility, services, and institutional arrangements, far less is known about how disability is perceived and discussed in daily urban life. This study investigates the spatiotemporal dynamics of public disability-inclusive awareness across more than 300 Chinese cities using large-scale geotagged social media data. Drawing on nearly 700 million geotagged Weibo posts from 2016 to 2022, we identified 459,694 disability-related posts using a Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT)-based model. City-level indicators were constructed to capture three interrelated dimensions of public awareness: attention, attitudes, and discourse. The results reveal substantial spatial and temporal heterogeneity in disability-inclusive awareness across Chinese cities. Contrary to conventional expectations, public attention and positive attitudes toward disability do not increase with city size. Instead, many smaller cities in central and western China exhibit higher attention levels and more positive attitudes, whereas several large eastern megacities show comparatively lower engagement. Nationally, disability-related discussions expanded over time in both intensity and thematic breadth, increasingly encompassing diverse disability types, social inclusion, and (in)accessible environments. However, local urban discourse became more concentrated around volunteering and service-oriented themes, accompanied by declining topic diversity across cities. By providing the first large-scale, city-level assessment of public disability-inclusive awareness in China, this study demonstrates the value of geosocial media data for capturing the socio-spatial dynamics of disability-related perceptions and contributes new empirical evidence to support more inclusive urban research and governance.