Using social media data to understand the urban green space use before and after a pandemic

Urban green spaces (UGSs) are essential components of urban ecosystems that provide considerable benefits to residents, including recreational opportunities, improved air and water quality, and mental and physical health benefits. The COVID-19 pandemic and related restriction measures have affected people's daily lives in numerous ways, such as remote working and learning, online shopping, social distancing, travel restrictions, and outdoor activities. During the COVID-19 pandemic, UGSs have become the main places for outdoor activities. Understanding human-environment interactions in UGSs is an important research field that has broad implications for improving policies in response to a social crisis and informing urban planning strategies.
The main challenges of investigating human-environment interactions lie in effectively collecting research datasets that can reflect or reveal human behaviour patterns within UGSs. Volunteered Geographical Information (VGI) and social media can provide better information about real-time perceptions, attitudes and behaviours than traditional datasets such as surveys and questionnaires. This provides great opportunities to investigate human-environment interactions in UGS in real-time. Additionally, Twitter is one of the most popular social networks, and it can provide more comprehensive and unbiased datasets through a new academic research Application Programming Interface (API).
The overall aim of this thesis is to evaluate the contributions of UGS to human well-being, during a time of crisis, by investigating the characteristics and spatial-temporal patterns of UGS use across three periods: pre-, during- and after the COVID-19 pandemic. The thesis will document the process of examining spatial-temporal changes in UGS use associated with COVID-19 related pandemic, by using Twitter datasets incorporating approaches including text mining, topic modelling and spatial-temporal analysis. This is the first study to examine social media data over consistent time period before, during and after the lockdown in relation to UGS. The results show that the findings and method can potentially inform policy makers in their management and planning of UGS, especially in a period of social crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic. This research has great potential to help improve urban green space planning and management in urban areas.