Client: UNDP (Armenia country office)
Location: Yerevan, Armenia
Year: 2019–2021
Sector: Placemaking · Social Media Data · Mobile Data · Public Health
Analysing Yerevan’s historic ring-park during a pandemic — combining social media, mobile-tower, and space-syntax data to find why one half of the park thrives while the other struggles.
UNDP wanted to give Yerevan’s planning process for its historic Circular Park a genuinely evidence-based starting point — understanding not just what the park looks like, but how, when, and by whom it’s actually used, before proposing any redesign.
Commissioned by UNDP’s Armenia country office as consulting GIS expert services, running from initial scoping in late 2019 through delivery in mid-2020 and follow-on presentation work into 2021. Data collection for mobility patterns fell in May 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic — a limitation the team explicitly flagged in their own findings.
Combined SPIN Unit’s necessary/optional activity framework (Foursquare data), OpenStreetMap land use, anonymised mobile-tower connection data for hourly activity patterns, and space-syntax street-centrality analysis to model pedestrian movement and cross-reference it against traffic and air-pollution risk — across five segments of the park at both site and city scale.
Delivered as a 54-page analytical report (July 2020) and an extended final presentation (May 2021).
- A clear north-south “edge effect”: the northern half of the park has dense venues, good transit access, and high activity; the southern half has markedly lower activity, worse transit, and higher traffic and pollution — splitting the park in two, perceptually and functionally.
- Park size doesn’t predict popularity — the largest and smallest green spaces in the study were both among the least visited; visit density, not area, drives use. Republic Square alone recorded nearly 14,000 visits against a long tail of far less-used spaces.
- A small set of “exceptional” landmark venues dominate footfall citywide, while most locations see only routine, local-level use — a polarised rather than evenly distributed activity pattern.
- Activity intensity closely tracks the public transport network — reinforcing transit quality as a primary driver of how much a public space gets used.
- The team explicitly flagged their own data’s pandemic-era limitation — a rare, useful example of transparent caveat-setting in a client deliverable rather than presenting a single snapshot as if it were normal, year-round behaviour.
Gave UNDP and its Yerevan partners a segment-by-segment, evidence-based diagnosis of the Circular Park to inform its future placemaking and urban design — including a clear account of where the pandemic context might be distorting the picture.