A new study from the Livable City Lab uses AI to compare past and present urban public spaces, and reveals how people are shifting away from using them as places for social gatherings.

The Yale Livable City Lab collaborated with the Senseable City Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to present an exhibit titled “Eyes on the Street” at the 2025 Venice Biennale. The exhibit explores the evolving social dynamics of public spaces, and poses a central question: “If public spaces are no longer primarily places to gather, what new roles should they serve in our cities?” 

Drawing on William Whyte’s 1980 film recordings of urban public life, the labs used computer vision techniques to analyze and compare his historical footage with contemporary videos of the same locations in New York, Boston, and Chicago. Their analysis reveals that pedestrians walk faster, linger for shorter periods, and engage less frequently in group encounters today than they did four decades ago.

These behavioral shifts are detailed in a paper published in PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences), which finds a notable decline in the use of public space for casual social interaction. Their research highlights how AI methods can analyze videos to study group dynamics in public spaces, and opens the door for future work to study how different design choices shape social interactions in public spaces.

Link to article: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2424662122

Link to Yale Today press release: https://environment.yale.edu/news/article/city-streets-are-shifting-soci…?