A Sense of Place — Turku

Turku wanted to know whether a proposed new tram line would actually activate the streets it ran through — but Finnish privacy law ruled out using mobile-operator positioning data to study how people move through the centre. The team needed another way to see the city’s real rhythm.

Published as Research Report 1/2015 of the City of Turku’s own Turku Urban Research Programme, delivered in partnership with the Estonian Academy of Arts. The project received national press coverage from Yle, Finland’s public broadcaster, confirming both its public delivery and its resonance beyond the client.

A year of geolocated Instagram data (the only platform with a large enough Finnish user base — Twitter and Foursquare/Swarm proved too thin), analysed alongside space-syntax accessibility modelling, City of Turku traffic data, and the public transport network. Photo-content analysis of five specific public spaces gauged “sense of place” directly from what people chose to photograph, combined into composite “gravity map” visualisations by time of day and day of week.

A short, explorative pilot commission, delivered as an 83-page report with an accompanying public presentation and press engagement.