title: Quantifying the link between art and property prices in urban neighbourhoods.
abstract: Is there an association between art and changes in the economic conditions of urban neighbourhoods? While the popular media and policymakers commonly believe this to be the case, quantitative evidence remains lacking. Here, we use metadata of geotagged photographs uploaded to the popular image-sharing platform Flickr to quantify the presence of art in London neighbourhoods. We estimate the presence of art in neighbourhoods by determining the proportion of Flickr photographs which have the word 'art' attached. We compare this with the relative gain in residential property prices for each Inner London neighbourhood. We find that neighbourhoods which have a higher proportion of 'art' photographs also have greater relative gains in property prices. Our findings demonstrate how online data can be used to quantify aspects of the visual environment at scale and reveal new connections between the visual environment and crucial socio-economic measurements.
authors.affiliation: Data Science Laboratory, Behavioural Science, Warwick Business School , University of Warwick , Coventry CV4 7AL , UK.
authors.forename: Chanuki Illushka
authors.initials: CI
authors.lastname: Seresinhe
authors.affiliation: Data Science Laboratory, Behavioural Science, Warwick Business School , University of Warwick , Coventry CV4 7AL , UK.
authors.forename: Tobias
authors.identifier: 0000-0001-9185-0892
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Preis
authors.affiliation: Data Science Laboratory, Behavioural Science, Warwick Business School , University of Warwick , Coventry CV4 7AL , UK.
authors.forename: Helen Susannah
authors.identifier: 0000-0001-8974-9277
authors.initials: HS
authors.lastname: Moat
keywords: art; computational social science; data science; online data; urban economics; urban gentrification