Photosharing on flickr: a data source for assessing cultural values in urban landscapes

The urban landscape is a stratification of natural, cultural, and socio-economic processes that shape it spatially and experientially over time. The different cultural values embedded in the tangible and intangible attributes of the urban landscape are essential to its unique sense of place, and cultural identity. In the era of globalization, rapid urbanization, and unsustainable urban development, cultural heritage has been recognized as an enabler for sustainable development that adapts, and evolves through time with the changes occurring in the city, and at the same time maintains its identity, integrity, and continuity. In this context, UNESCO recommended the application of the Historic Urban Landscape (HUL) approach to the management of thoughtful change and the conservation of cultural heritage. According to the HUL approach cultural values should be taken as a starting point in urban management and development. It is important that decision makers and experts are aware of the potential and variety of cultural values present within exceptional, ordinary, and even deteriorated urban landscapes. In recent years we have witnessed rapid advances in social networking and photo-sharing communities that are generating big data including geographic information, photos, and commentaries. Our assumption is that the phenomenon of user-generated data from social media offers awareness about the dynamic social interactions within places, and express moments, experiences, practices, and identities contributing to the understanding of cultural values associated with the urban landscape. Accordingly, this paper extracts, analyses, and visualizes photos metadata of Tripoli, Lebanon published on Flickr for the application to the fields of urban management and conservation.