May 21, 2025
Contact: Eric Stann, StannE@missouri.edu
When Jayedi Aman looks at a city, he notices more than just its buildings and streets — he considers how people move through and connect with those spaces. Aman, an assistant professor of architectural studies at the University of Missouri, suggests that the future design of cities may be guided as much by human experience as by physical materials.
In a recent study, Aman and Tim Matisziw, a professor of geography and engineering at Mizzou, took a fresh approach to urban research by using artificial intelligence to explore the emotional side of city life. Their goal was to better understand the link between a city’s physical features and how people feel in those environments.
Using public Instagram posts with location tags, the researchers trained an AI tool to read the emotional tone of the images and text of the posts, identifying whether people were happy, frustrated or relaxed. Then, using Google Street View and a second AI tool, they analyzed what those places looked like in real life and linked those features to how people felt in the moment they posted to social media.
As a result, Aman and Matisziw created a digital “sentiment map” that shows what people are feeling across a city. Next, they plan to use this information to create a digital version of a city — called an urban digital twin — that can show how people are feeling in real time.
This kind of emotional mapping gives city leaders a powerful new tool. Instead of relying solely on surveys — which take time and may not reach everyone — this AI-powered method uses data people already share online.
“For example, if a new park gets lots of happy posts, we can start to understand why,” Aman, who leads the newly established Spatial Intelligence Lab at Mizzou, said. “It might be the green space, the quiet nature or the sense of community. We can now connect those feelings to what people are seeing and experiencing in these places.”
Beyond parks, this tool could help officials improve services, identify areas where people feel unsafe, plan for emergencies or check in on public well-being after disasters.
“AI doesn’t replace human input,” Matisziw said. “But it gives us another way to spot patterns and trends that we might otherwise miss, and that can lead to smarter decisions.”
The researchers believe this information about how people feel could one day be shown next to traffic and weather updates on digital tools used by leaders to make decisions about city operations.
“We envision a future where data on how people feel becomes a core part of city dashboards,” Aman said. “This opens the door to designing cities that not only work well but also feel right to the people who live in them.”
The study, “Urban sentiment mapping using language and vision models in spatial analysis” was published in Frontiers in Computer Science.
