Happy Places

    People’s wellbeing is extremely important to their connection to places. According to Turnbull (2021), a massive inequality in the comfort people feel from the places close to them can result in a massive ten-year disparity in life expectancy. Because of this, understand the locations of places which make people happy is a crucial part of making a city feel livable and incentivize people to live there. This turned mine, and others, attention to Seattle, Washington. Notoriously known for its frequent gloomy days of almost exclusively gray, understanding what makes people happy even in places like this is crucial to understanding where the best places are to feel happy, and what other places may otherwise be lacking. Using a selection of locals, we followed they day to day and found what their stories are in Seattle, understanding what makes them feel happy, in particular focusing on the neighborhood in which these events took place. In each space, each person’s actions and opinions about the space were collected. Next, using a count vectorizer, the top five most common words associated with each of these happy places. This was done as a way to quantify the amount of “happiness” in each quote so it could be compared to one another. Finally, each post was given a score based on the frequency each of the five words were found in each post and put onto the following tree map chart (figure 1). Observing figure 1, we see that the place with the most responses and the highest overall value of the neighborhoods is University District while the lowest overall value can be found at Queen Anne. This means that finding the best places to find something to do and feel happy is particularly found in the main University District and is possibly the best place to enjoy one’s time when in Seattle. Overall, each of these areas host a wide array of public parks, to various eateries, and even some other various activities to play games inside (and out of the rain). Much of these areas recorded show a picture of even some of the smallest things to do in an area even as supposedly gloomy as Seattle, showing that it is possible to enjoy one’s self if given enough different opportunities.

References

Turnbull, Rachel. “Healthy, Happy Places—a More Integrated Approach to Creating Health and Well-Being through the Built Environment?” British Medical Bulletin, vol. 140, no. 1, Dec. 2021, pp. 62–75. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1093/bmb/ldab026. 

Padlet Source:
https://padlet.com/gunwhaoh/happy-place-sp25-i33k3qtcvgp38mxa

Text Processing:
https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1kAU_XHPpXBH7p2YsnrtCwqyF6oZ3GfAR?usp=drive_link

Graphic:

https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1kAU_XHPpXBH7p2YsnrtCwqyF6oZ3GfAR?usp=drive_link

CSV file:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Vn9JfavKZuFkhUseRiXY2YZIHLkOokZf/view?usp=sharing