Flowers as attractions in urban parks: Evidence from social media data

Highlights

• Microblog data is utilized as an indicator of park visitation.

• Chinese word segmentation techniques are used to extract phenological information.

• Co-word analysis is introduced to study the flowers–visitation connection in parks.

• Significant visitor peaks are observed during flowering periods.

• The results verify that flowers contribute to urban parks’ total attractiveness.

Abstract

Urban parks are among the most important urban public services. Quantifying their visitation intensity and understanding the driving forces behind their popularity is of great relevance to urban planning. We analyze the behavior of park visitors in Beijing based on phenological information extracted from social media data. Specifically, we built a dataset utilizing natural language processing techniques and co-word analysis methods to explore the connection between flowers and park visitation. Our findings revealed that: (1) According to the changing trend of visitor volumes and their peak times, urban parks can be divided into “single-peak” (visitor volumes show a single peak, with significant seasonal characteristics) and “multi-peak” (visitor volumes show multiple peaks with no obvious seasonal characteristics) parks; (2) There is an association between flowers and visitor volumes to urban parks, with a noticeable increase in the frequency of visits to parks especially in spring (i.e., during flowering); (3) Different types of flowers have varying appeal to attract visitors. Further, parks with one or few “dominant flowers” appeal to more visitors than parks without a clear dominating flower (or flowers). Our results provide implications for urban park design and management for improving their scenic qualities.

Introduction

Urban parks are an important part of urban ecosystems and urban landscapes. They play a vital role in maintaining the natural environment of cities as well as the stability of social systems (Chiesura, 2004) by contributing to the sustainable development of cities. Previous research has suggested that urban parks provide multiple benefits to human life. For example, urban parks provide both essential environmental services for urban residents and also significant social and psychological benefits enhancing mental health and well-being (Saw et al., 2015, Kim and Miller, 2019, Zhang and Tan, 2019, Buckley, 2020). They can also enhance the physical health of urban residents by providing space for exercise and social interaction (Kaczynski A T, 2007, Santos et al., 2016). The aesthetic, historical and recreational values of urban parks strengthen the attractiveness of cities (Chiesura, 2004), which is conducive for tourism and the local economy.

Urban parks have been an important topic in urban construction and management research. Most previous literature focuses on specific functions of urban parks, such as improving mental health (Coldwell and Evans, 2018), providing opportunities for leisure (McCormack et al., 2010), enhancing happiness (Kim and Jin, 2018), and releasing social pressure (van den Berg et al., 2010). Earlier research has also investigated the factors affecting park usage. These studies have shown that, for instance, park size and the distance visitors are willing to travel affect the frequency of park visits (Schipperijn et al., 2010). Also, the living context and quality of vegetation influence the satisfaction levels with urban parks (Zhang et al., 2015). At the same time, the presence and quality of park facilities (McCormack et al., 2010), and the number of organized activities (Cohen et al., 2010) are conducive to encouraging park use. Also, other factors such as traffic convenience, the socio-demographic traits and visit-related preferences of users influence park visitation (Swapan et al., 2017, Guo et al., 2019, Mak and Jim, 2019). While most of the earlier studies on urban park visitation have relied on traditional survey data, which are limited to specific sample populations and, thus, hard to generalize beyond the survey respondents, more recent studies have begun to take advantage of the possibilities offered by big data.

Due to the rapid development of communication and information technologies, new data sources, in particular social media data, have become available that provide novel material for researchers in understanding human behavior in urban parks. Such data contain a wealth of information about visitors’ behavior and experiences, and also furnish opportunities to study topics such as behavioral patterns and recreational preferences (Song et al., 2020a, Song et al., 2020b), factors affecting visitation frequency (Zhang and Zhou, 2018, Guo et al., 2019, Song et al., 2022), and landscape design quality within urban parks (Song and Zhang, 2020). Social media data have been proven to reliably represent the frequency of park visitation (Tenkanen et al., 2017, Song et al., 2020a, Song et al., 2020b). This novel type of data has been used to investigate visitors’ activities in (Roberts, 2017) and opinions of urban parks (Roberts et al., 2019), as well as to understand the driving factors behind urban park visitation (Donahue et al., 2018).

In the context of global climate change, many scholars have begun to focus on parks, a relatively small-scale type of urban green spaces. Only a few studies have, however, associated phenological phenomenon with park visitation and tourism and explored their connections. In recent years, tourism activities based on ornamental plants have become popular tourist attractions (Tao et al., 2015). Many ornamental activities held in parks, for example, around the time of peach and cherry blossoms have attracted large numbers of visitors to urban parks and generated considerable economic benefits for the surrounding local economy. For example, the 36th China Luoyang Peony Cultural Festival in 2018 received 26.473 million visitors and generated an estimated value of 24.196 billion yuan in tourism revenue (Luoyang Municipal Culture, Radio, Television and Tourism Bureau, 2018). In the same year, the 69th Keukenhof Flower Show attracted more than 1 million visitors from more than 100 countries and circa 75% of the visitors came from abroad (Sohu News, 2019). Holding flower viewing activities, thus, seems to attract extensive numbers of visitors to urban parks, but at the same time might also threaten their limited carrying capacities. Therefore, we argue that, as an important element of park visits, flowers are of great significance to the management of urban tourism in many cities.

A considerable amount of research has investigated the effects of plants from the ecological and environmental perspective based on phenological observation data (Gao et al., 2018, Yu et al., 2019). Some studies have also explored the impact of changes in phenological periods on tourism management (Ma and Fang, 2006, Zang et al., 2020), and assessed the influence exerted by changes in plant phenological events on visitor volumes (Liu et al., 2019a, Liu et al., 2019b). Nonetheless, to the best of our knowledge, there is no previous research exploring the association between ornamental plants and visitor volumes to urban parks based on social media data. Since social media data have been shown to accurately and efficiently represent floral phenological characteristics associated with tourism and park visitation (Liu et al., 2019a, Liu et al., 2019b), the data offers us the possibility to explore the influence of flowers on park visitation patterns. Therefore, we propose a framework to study the association between the number of visits and flower viewing events by utilizing natural language processing techniques to extract information about visitors’ flower appreciation activities from social media data. We test the framework with data from Beijing municipal urban parks. Our aim is to address the following questions:

• Is there a connection between flowers and visitor volumes to urban parks?

And if there is a connection:

• Are there differences (in this connection) between different types of urban parks based on their seasonal visitation characteristics?

• Are there differences (in this connection) between different kinds of flowers in urban parks?

Our findings provide advice for the design and management of urban parks by underlining the seasonal imbalance in visitor flows and by discussing how to facilitate park visitation (and tourism) in connection with flower viewing.