Evaluating the services and facilities of European cities using crowdsourced place data

Abstract

Statistics about citizen satisfaction regarding urban facilities and services are required for governing urban areas. Such statistics are often unavailable or outdated. At times, existing statistics are irrelevant to the major problems of most citizens. In this article, we propose a cost-effective method for estimating citizen satisfaction regarding urban facilities and services using crowdsourced place data. Two indicators are proposed based on place data derived from the Foursquare social media application. Both indicators are based on the hypothesis that the higher the number of places is that belong to a facility or service type on social media, then the higher the satisfaction of citizens regarding this facility or service type will be. This hypothesis was tested by using the Eurobarometer survey data as reference. The accuracy assessment revealed strong and statistically significant linear relationships (R2 ˃ 0.6) between the reference percentage of very satisfied citizens and some categories (i.e. “Sport facilities”, “Cultural Categories,” and “Streets & buildings”). Other categories showed moderate and statistically significant linear relationships (i.e. “Public spaces” and “Green spaces”). Therefore, the proposed indicators provide estimates about citizen satisfaction with regard to these five categories. The new indicators can be used to better design public opinion surveys by making them more relevant to the public in terms of topics, space, and time. © 2016, The Author(s) 2016.