The Sentiments of Cities

I have an article in The Atlantic Cities about whether or not our opinions of cities fit all the statistics and rankings that we are constantly exposed to. Conducting a survey on Amazon Mechanical Turk, I set out to learn people's opinions of cities, and how much these sentiments varied depending on where you were from:

There's no shortage of information about cities. From population and unemployment to crime and traffic statistics, urban and regional data is swirling all around us. We're exposed to ranking after ranking, from the best places to raise families, to the metro areas with the best public transportation or local restaurant scene, all the way down to less tangible measures like say, the worst-dressed cities.

But do we really internalize all this information in a meaningful way? Are our opinions of cities actually affected by statistics and rankings? Or is popular sentiment toward a city based more on nebulous, harder-to-quantify properties? Furthermore, how consistent are our opinions of cities? Do they vary from region to region?

Along with Andrew Mauboussin, a research assistant at the Kauffman Foundation and a rising freshman at Harvard University, I set out to add a bit of rigor to these questions by creating a simple city sentiment survey. I asked 310 individuals from the United States for their mental reactions when they hear the names of the 50 largest metropolitan regions in the U.S., and recorded their home ZIP codes.

...

What we found is that our initial perceptions about cities are in fact often grounded in statistical reality. The positive or negative opinions of our survey respondents were correlated, often quite strongly, with such metrics as change in population, housing prices, and cost of living, and inversely correlated with measures like crime and unemployment. On the other hand, measures such as sales tax and traffic congestion appear to have little influence on people’s perceptions of different cities.

Also, while it didn't make it into The Atlantic piece, in addition to our opinions of cities correlating with various statistical metrics of different urban areas, our opinions even fit well with how happy the name of a city makes us. In a recent paper by Peter Dodds, an associate professor at the University of Vermont, and his colleagues, the happiness of words on Twitter was measured over time. In order to understand these words’ happiness, Dodds also used Mechanical Turk to measure the happiness of 10,000 words. And among these are the names of cities! Using their data, we found that that our opinions of cities are also closely correlated with how happy the names of cities make us.

A map that we constructed from the responses is above. Maps of opinions based on region, along with top and bottom ten cities based on opinion, can be found here.