Measuring the Spatial-Temporal Heterogeneity of Helplessness Sentiment and Its Built Environment Determinants during the COVID-19 Quarantines: A Case Study in Shanghai

Abstract

The COVID-19 outbreak followed by the strict citywide lockdown in Shanghai has sparked negative emotion surges on social media platforms in 2022. This research aims to investigate the spatial–temporal heterogeneity of a unique emotion (helplessness) and its built environment determinants. First, we scraped about twenty thousand Weibo posts and utilized their sentiments with natural language processing (NLP) to extract helplessness emotion and investigated its spatial–temporal variations. Second, we tested whether “helplessness” was related with urban environment attributes when other real estate economic and demographic variables were controlled using the ordinary least squares (OLS) model. Our results confirmed that helplessness emotion peaked in early April when the lockdown started. Second, residents in neighborhoods characterized by higher rents and property management fees, higher population density, lower housing prices, lower plot ratios, or surrounded by less tree view and higher perceived visual complexity, are found to exhibit higher degree of “helplessness”. This study provides an effective data-driven framework to utilize social media data for public sentiments monitoring. The helplessness emotion identified is a unique mental distress under strict quarantine measures, which expands the growing literature of urban governance in the post-pandemic era. Decision makers should pay attention to public opinions and design tailored management measures with reference to civic emotion dynamics to facilitate social sustainability and resilience in face of future crises.