The Mushrooms' Lesson: Instagram as a tool to evaluate users' perception of urban transformations

Since few years, a growing number of researchers has started to develop methods to use Location-Based Social Networks to describe socio-spatial patterns of the city. Beside the more consolidated positions of Facebook and Twitter, Instagram has become, since its founding in 2010, one of the most used social networking in the world. In early 2015, it was reported that over 2000 million of users around the world use this service to share 70 million pictures per day. This paper aims at exploring the use of Instagram networking to visualize differences in the perception of urban spaces through geotagged posts. The case-study investigated the “Mushrooms Street” in Alicante (Spain), where an urban regeneration intervention was performed in 2013. The study aimed at evaluating the impact of the physical transformation in users’ perception through Instagram images, which were selected according to the use of hashtags and location-tags chosen by Instagram users. An open issue regards the possibility of using Instagram as a tool not just for building urban and territorial analysis but also to give sense and meaning to urban projects and to planning and design interventions