Client: Strelka KB (Moscow)
Location: 38 Russian cities, national scope
Year: 2016–2017
Sector: Social Media Data · Computer Vision · National Scale · Sports Legacy
A million-post-scale social media study of public life across 38 Russian cities, commissioned as “World Cup Heritage” analysis ahead of the 2018 tournament — deliberately going far beyond the 11 official host cities.
Hosting the World Cup brings investment and attention to a handful of cities — but Strelka KB wanted to understand public space and youth activity across a much wider set of Russian regional centres, using the tournament as the occasion rather than the sole focus.
Commissioned as “Metamorphology Russia” (Agreement No. 1702-35a, December 2016), scoped as legacy/urban-impact analysis to identify high-value, high-youth-activity public spaces at both city and individual-space scale — deliberately covering 38 cities across three population tiers, not just the 11 official 2018 World Cup hosts.
Roughly 2.5–3 million geolocated social media posts were collected across the 38 cities; a sample of 3–10% per city was tagged (by subject, feeling, youth, gender, activity, monument type, indoor/outdoor) both manually and via machine-learning scene classification, cross-validated against each other. Hourly activity curves for leisure, social, and youth-tagged content, corrected for each city’s time zone, mapped the daily rhythm of public life.
Delivered as a seven-part large-format map atlas plus per-city analytical dashboards for all 38 cities, completed February 2017.
- Youth dominate public-space content — teens and kids together outweigh other demographics in tagged imagery, with teens at 61% of youth-tagged content.
- Public space reads as safe far more than unsafe: 61% neutral, 33% enjoyable, only 7% unsafe sentiment in tagged content, aggregated across all 38 cities.
- Leisure and social activity dominate (roughly 42% and 31% respectively in the sample city), far outweighing civic, mobility, or income-related content.
- A consistent daily rhythm emerged everywhere — activity troughs in early morning, rising steadily to peak near midnight.
- Historic and contemporary monuments are almost evenly represented in citizens’ own photography — heritage isn’t crowding out newer civic architecture in how people document their cities.
Gave Strelka KB a national-scale evidence base for public-space investment decisions tied to the World Cup, at a breadth (38 cities, millions of posts) well beyond what a conventional planning study would attempt.