Measuring How the Biome Influences your Perception of Nature in Cities
An increasing number of studies suggest that our interaction with nature positively impacts our health and happiness. The physical and mental wellbeing benefits we reap from increased contact with the natural world also produces high levels of self-reported satisfaction and pro-environmental behaviors. Yet many modern urban dwellers spend as much as 90% of their daily lives indoors, disconnected from the natural world. The extent to which this disconnect impacts individuals has been challenging to study because individual perceptions of nature, or biophilia, have been difficult to quantify and qualify. In a project called Feeling Nature, researchers from MIT’s Senseable City Lab used a survey 400 residents living in eight global biomes to train a machine-learning model which leverages street view imagery to detect biophilic settings. The model generated parameters for 25 visual biophilic classes in each city and biophilic perception -- which biophilic classes residents value the most -- in each biome.
“Although biophilia relates to all senses, in this paper we prioritise the visual perception of biophilia because the literature says this is our primary contact with natural elements, and, moreover, the abundance of visual datasets for cities worldwide enables our method to be used to quantify and compare biophilia on a global scale,” says Fábio Duarte, a co-author of the study in their npj Urban Sustainability article. “In addition to contributing to the understanding of the universality of biophilia, our research provides novel biophilic metrics derived from a scalable visual AI model application. These measurement tools can be deployed in any city worldwide to enhance biophilic experiences and to inform urban planning decisions accordingly,” adds Deborah Lefosse, Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the Delft University of Technology and lead author of the paper.
In addition to Duarte and Lefosse, researchers and authors of the paper include: MIT Senseable City Lab’s Duarte, Rohit Priyadarshi Sanatani, Yuhao Kang, and Carlo Ratti as well as Arjan van Timmeren from the Delft University of Technology.
Read their full paper, Feeling Nature: Measuring perceptions of biophilia across global biomes using visual AI.