How can cellphone activity shed light on the economic benefit created by a public art project? That’s the question MIT’s SENSEable City Lab set out to answer with its latest project, NYC Waterfalls, reports ReadWriteWeb. Conducted from June 13 to October 26, 2008 and commissioned by the New York Art Fund, the project placed four man-made waterfalls, created by Danish/Icelandic artist Olafur Oliasson, in the New York Harbor. Using aggregate (not individually identifiable) cellphone data from AT&T Research Labs and chronologically organized Flickr photos, the City Lab attempted to quantify the economic impact of the art project. The results are telling.
The project cost the city $20 million and brought in a total of $69 million during the study period. Nearly 1.4 million people viewed the waterfalls from a suitable vantage point, and as derived from cellphone data, the location was 39.1 percent more “attractive” than other tourist destinations in the vicinity. Other tourist attractions in the immediate harbor area also had an increase in visitors after the waterfalls were built.
The power of cellphone data and even publicly available datasets such as Flickr photos on tourism studies and urban planning is immediately apparent. Over time, as more studies like this are conducted in different urban areas, city planners will eventually be able to predict where to locate tourist attractions to maximize the potential economic benefits. It’ll take quite some time though I’d imagine. NYC Waterfalls is one of the first studies of its kind in a large and innovative city, so it won’t be something that trickles down to smaller cities and towns right away. But the future potential is fascinating. How many people in your city would willingly put their tax dollars to a $20 million art project? Probably not too many without quantifiable insurance that it would be an investment guaranteeing a solid return. In this case it seems tax dollars were put to good use.
