Measurement of urban vitality with time-lapsed street-view images and object-detection for scalable assessment of pedestrian-sidewalk dynamics

Principles of dense, mixed-use environments and pedestrianisation are influential in urban planning practice worldwide. A key outcome espoused by these principles is generating “urban vitality”, the continuous use of street sidewalk infrastructure throughout the day, to promote safety, economic viability and attractiveness of city neighbourhoods. Vitality is hypothesised to arise from a nearby mixture of primary uses, short blocks, density of buildings and population and a diversity in the age and condition of surrounding buildings. To investigate this claim, we use a novel dataset of 2.1 million time-lapsed day and night images at 145 representative locations throughout the city of Accra, Ghana. We developed a measure of urban vitality for each location based on the coefficient of variation in pedestrian volume over time in our images, obtained from counts of people identified using object detection. We also construct measures of “generators of diversity”: mixed-use intensity, building, block and population density, as well as diversity in the age of buildings, using data that are available across multiple cities and perform bivariate and multivariate regressions of our urban vitality measure against variables representing generators of diversity to test the latter’s association with vitality. We find that two or more unique kinds of amenities accessible within a five-minute walk from a given location, as well as the density of buildings (of varying ages and conditions) and short blocks, are associated with more even footfall throughout the day. Our analysis also indicates some potential negative trade-offs from dense and mixed-use neighbourhoods, such as being associated with more continuous road traffic throughout the day. Our methodological approach is scalable and adaptable to different modes of image data capture and can be widely adopted in other cities worldwide.