CityPulse: Fine-Grained Assessment of Urban Change with Street View Time Series

Urban transformations have profound societal impact on both individuals and communities at large. Accurately assessing these shifts is essential for understanding their underlying causes and ensuring sustainable urban planning. Traditional measurements often encounter constraints in spatial and temporal granularity, failing to capture real-time physical changes. While street view imagery, capturing the heartbeat of urban spaces from a pedestrian point of view, can add as a high-definition, up-to-date, and on-the-ground visual proxy of urban change. We curate the largest street view time series dataset to date, and propose an end-to-end change detection model to effectively capture physical alterations in the built environment at scale. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method by benchmark comparisons with previous literature and implementing it at the city-wide level. Our approach has the potential to supplement existing dataset and serve as a fine-grained and accurate assessment of urban change.

Detecting Neighborhood Gentrification at Scale via Street-level Visual Data

Neighborhood gentrification plays a significant role in shaping the social and economic well-being of both individuals and communities at large. While some efforts have been made to detect gentrification in cities, existing approaches rely mainly on estimated measures from survey data, require substantial work of human labeling, and are limited in characterizing the neighborhood as a whole. We propose a novel approach to detecting neighborhood gentrification at a large-scale based on the physical appearance of neighborhoods by incorporating historical street-level visual data. We show the effectiveness of the proposed method by comparing results from our approach with gentrification measures from previous literature and case studies. Our approach has the potential to supplement existing indicators of gentrification and become a valid resource for urban researchers and policy makers.