Expressions on social media can both enhance and deteriorate the way neighbourhoods are perceived. But how exactly does this work? And how can cities deploy methods to improve the reputation of areas? For the Centre for BOLD Cities, the scholars Jay Lee, John Boy and Daniel Trottier analysed Moerwijk, a supposedly problematic neighbourhood in The Hague. “We were surprised by how much residents have been able to shape the image of their neighbourhood.”
Read the full research article at the Journal of City, Culture and Society
What was the reason you dove into this topic?
John Boy: For our project at the Centre for BOLD Cities, we were interested in how digital media serve to shape the image and reputation of neighbourhoods. We were drawn to Moerwijk because this is a marginalised and overlooked neighbourhood in The Hague, even in relation to other disadvantaged neighbourhoods like Schilderswijk, while at the same time having a kind of iconic infamy. As a team of three non-Dutch outsiders who care about the ideal of the just city, we found this compelling.
Jay Lee: The premise was that various power imbalances play a role in neighbourhoods’ ability to upgrade their representation or remain stigmatised. Thus, digitalisation was expected to play a role in ‘shaping the city’s neighbourhoods’ symbolic geography’. In this, the digital sphere can both mitigate such imbalances and amplify them.
How did you figure out in what way you should research this?
Daniel Trottier: John’s initial fieldwork in the neighbourhood was useful in terms of discovering and getting to know relevant social actors, thus getting a sense of the people and concerns beyond the data we collected remotely. COVID frustrated our initial plan for long-term on-site research, but we were still able to gain quite a bit of insight with our mixed-methods approach, which drew substantially on the computational methods that Jay Lee knows a lot about.
Despite its marginalisation, Moerwijk had active community stakeholders promoting the neighbourhood on social media. We were somewhat surprised by this and we identified these as ‘bottom-up place branding’.
Lee: Mixed methods was deemed appropriate early on. It consists of an online and urban ethnographic study, with querying neighbourhood residents and stakeholders, married with investigation of neighbourhoods’ digital representation and footprint. This could reveal both perception and stigmatisation, and activities for ‘upgrade’.
What role did digitalisation and technology play in your research?
Lee: We recognised digital platform data as relevant to how the neighbourhood is represented by various stakeholders. Neighbourhoods’ digital presence on various platforms – not just social media but also other indicative sites such as TripAdvisor and Yelp – could reveal their relative stratified position. Then, our further exploration involved an in-depth analysis of Instagram and Twitter posts that mention Moerwijk.
Trottier: An important step for us was to not only make these various representations legible, but also to contextualize them at various levels. John Boy’s ethnographic observations were pivotal, as were broader data from the CBS and the land registry.
What are the most important insights and conclusions that you can draw from this?
Boy: We know from sociological research that the ‘symbolic’ and the ‘material’ are closely connected in cities. Neighbourhood reputation is not just about images, but about the allocation of resources and thus fundamentally about people's life-chances.
For instance, resident initiatives such as the Moerwijk Cooperative and mutual aid organising that have been going on in Moerwijk, can have a meaningful impact on both the symbolic and the material conditions of the neighbourhood. They have been able to do so despite an often inhospitable climate, both in terms of policy and the dominant media frame.
What results were the most surprising for you?
Lee: Despite its marginalisation, Moerwijk had active community stakeholders promoting the neighbourhood on social media. We were somewhat surprised by this and we identified these as ‘bottom-up place branding’. These activities were observed to have been increasing in recent years. But still, significant indicators of stigmatisation, such as police activities and problems with rats, were found in the public’s perception and representation of Moerwijk. Higher level ‘upperground’ stakeholder presence, for instance politicians, on social media was sparse.
Also surprising was that – again, despite Moerwijk’s status as a marginalised, stigmatised neighbourhood, it was represented by a variety of themes of representation, both affirmative and defamatory.
Boy: We were surprised by how much residents have been able to shape the image of their neighbourhood, often managing to counter stigma with more positive representations over the past decade. We think one explanation for this is the neighbourhood's relative marginalisation. The absence of major institutions from the neighbourhood gives representations created by bottom-up initiatives greater chances of gaining visibility.
Finally, what can policymakers do with these insights?
Boy: During our research, we learned that some residents would like to be involved in neighbourhood initiatives, but cannot because they grapple with long-term unemployment and other challenges. Anything that alleviates these kinds of pressures, and thus enables residents to be actively involved in the life of their community, could pay off tremendously.
Lee: Given the influence and increasing consumption of social media, cities could at least aid marginalised neighbourhoods in improving their physical and digital representations. Via a mixed-methods or digital-only study like ours, they could identify which aspects of place branding reach and influence the general public.
What follow up are you working on?
Lee: We’ve made some progress in comparing the trajectories of affirmative and defamatory representations for three other distinct Den Haag neighbourhoods: Statenkwartier, the most affluent area in the city, Binckhorst, a developing former-industrial area, and Schilderswijk, which is also marginalised and can be compared with Moerwijk. And we intend to extend our investigation with Airbnb data. These data cater to a population segment of hosts and renters that would only partly overlap with the other platform users, thus possibly offering a different angle on how the neighbourhoods are represented.
Jay Lee and Daniel Trottier work at the Department of Media and Communication at Erasmus University. John Boy is from Leiden University and works in the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology.