Urban Forestry & Urban Greening has published our new study on COVID-era public space visitation in Las Vegas, which integrates machine learning, GPS, and review data to compare the nonlinear impacts of environmental features and human perception—highlighting the divergent resilience of parks and commercial areas, and calling for perception-informed, adaptive urban design.
Nature AI Lab
2025-04-30
🥳 We are delighted to announce that our team’s article:
Cai, Yuxuan+., Huang, Yongming+., Chen, Anzhi., Yang, Zhuohao., Chen, Mingze,. Wen, Yuhan., Yang, Qiuyi., Li, Xiaowei*. ASubjective Perception or the Physical Environment: Which Matters More for Public Area Visitation Thresholds Across Different COVID-19 Pandemic Stages? rban Forestry & Urban Greening 2025 | | https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ufug.2025.128835.[download]
📢 What we did :
We combined large‑scale GPS mobility, Google review text, and street‑view imagery covering 2019‑2023 in Las Vegas. Using BERT‑based topic‑and‑sentiment analysis, computer vision, and interpretable machine‑learning models to untangle how emotion and environment jointly shaped visits to parks and commercial districts before, during, and after the pandemic.
🔍 Research Objectives and Question :
(1) What potential topic does people focus on when visiting commercial areas and parks?
(2) How do these perception topics and environmental factors respectively influence urban visiting patterns, and which one has a stronger explanatory power for these patterns?
(3) How can the nonlinear relationship and detailed threshold effects between environmental factors and review topic on visiting patterns, be explained? How have external shocks, such as the pandemic, influenced these effects?
The study shows that natural elements and infrastructure drive faster recovery in parks, while service experience and sentiment explain commercial‑area visits more strongly.
Identified clear, nonlinear “thresholds” in behavior that planners can use to build greener, more resilient cities
💡 Our takeaway for planners:
Combine targeted greening and basic infrastructure upgrades in open spaces with service‑experience management in business corridors, and cities to strengthen urban resilience, promote equity, and elevate overall city vitality.
