Urban Change & Well-being

The visible environment plays an important role in shaping the well-being of both individuals and communities. This set of projects draws on novel approaches—including measures generated from computer vision and large language models, eye-tracking, and real-time dynamic sensing—to investigate the relationships between neighborhood conditions, perceptions of them, collective social processes, and individual responses. Our projects examine how these relationships vary across ethnoracial and socioeconomic compositions of neighborhoods and factors that lead to changes in neighborhood environments.

Academic Publications

Arash Tavakoli, Isabella P. Douglas, Hae Young Noh, Jackelyn Hwang, Sarah L. Billington. Psycho-behavioral responses to urban scenes: An exploration through eye-tracking, Cities, Volume 156, 2025.

Nima Dahir, Hwang, Jackelyn, and Ang Yu. 2024. “Cleaning Up the Neighborhood: Using Computer Vision to Assess Differential Requests for Services.” Socius, 10:1-18. 

In an effort to make our findings accessible, where possible, we provide a link to preprint versions of our publications. We are also steadily assembling our data and code to share publicly when possible.