Understanding Urban Waterfront Behaviors Through Social Media

An Investigation of Instagram Posts Along the Coastal Areas of Osaka City

Abstract

Conventional methods for understanding behaviors in urban waterfront areas have been constrained in both dimensions of space and time. This study aimed to explore the possibilities and challenges of grasping waterfront behaviors through Instagram posts, focusing on the growing use of social media in recent years. The study targeted publicly accessible coasts and riversides in five wards of Osaka City’s bay area, and observed images and texts of posts detected using place names on web maps. Waterfront behaviors were ascertained from 80% of the 1,329 observed posts. Both certain length of time and breadth of space were observed in the posts. Those facts suggested the potential to capture waterfront behaviors comprehensively. However, challenges were identified such as the difficulty in detecting posts of waterfronts without place names on maps, significant differences in the number of posts among the places, the influence of the poster's intention on detection results, and a bias in the types of behaviors influenced by the location of facilities. Furthermore, it was found that two-thirds of the posted images included the water surface, suggesting that a qualitative analysis of the appearance of water in the images is a task for future research.