Use of mobile digital footprint to understand how COVID-19 impacts the visitors to art places in Singapore

Abstract

As Singapore strengthens its position as a Creative City, the importance of art places is increasingly evident. The time and frequency of visitors spent on the art places are indications of how successful the art places are. The understanding of the footfall for art places using traditional methods, such as ticket sales, and person-count can be expensive and inaccurate. With the prevalence of mobile phone adoption, our digital footprints are silently collected. These digital footprints can be used to understand the number of visitors who have visited art places, as well as their time spent at the different art places. This data is collected by CITYDATA.ai, a geospatial AI platform and registered data broker compliant with global and regional privacy regulations. An interesting but almost unobserved trend is to understand how COVID-19 affects the visitors to art places. During this period, there could also be a fundamental shift in how people feel and react towards art places. The contribution of this paper helps planners to understand the dynamics of change for the visitors to art places and subsequently enables the planners to have the right strategies to reposition Singapore as a Creative City.