A public space is a daily life environment for peoples’ social, cultural and recreational activities.
Understanding people’s use and experience of urban public space is essential to create a better ground to design
and improve the everyday spaces of people. Conventional methods for post-occupancy evaluation, like surveys,
have common limitations: high-cost, time-consuming and non-real time interactions. Can social media data
provide real-time and valuable insights about public space uses more effectively and promptly? This data-driven
qualitative study explores the potential use of social media data for public space evaluation, focusing on the
utilization of user-generated contents from social media as the source of user feedbacks. The High Line in New
York City was selected as a case, and its related 9974 tweets were collected from Twitter over 14 months (August
2014–Oct 2015). The Twitter data were pre-processed through text-mining techniques and, for analysis, advanced
computational techniques in social media analytics were performed. The research findings help us identify
opportunities and challenges of using social media data analytics that can be adapted for research and practice in
urban design, as part of public space evaluation in particular

• Exploring public space through social media: an exploratory case study on the High Line New York City