project link: Aesthetics of Exclusion

research question: How can we use computer vision techniques and machine learning to explore and analyse aesthetical styles that correlate with gentrification in Street View images archives?

Since 2005 companies such as Google, Microsoft, Baidu and Kakao (Daum), started to develop systems to digitally map urban areas across the world. They use cameras to create 360° views, developing a growing visual urban archive. As these archives get more extensive each year, new technologies enable us to do more than just ‘look back’. Computer vision, a field that is concerned with using computers to gain a high-level understanding of images, is rapidly becoming more and more sophisticated and make it possible to speculate on, and visualize, the future of urban growth or decline. Aesthetics of Exclusion aims to use these techniques to study the visual patterns of gentrification, an urban phenomenon that is reflected in the removal of communities of diverse classes, ethnicities, races, sexualities, languages, and points of view from central city neighborhoods, and their replacement by more homogeneous groups.

partners: KNAW Digital Humanities Lab