City Walk Neighborhood Selection and Route Design from the Perspective of Placeness: A Case Study of Singapore

City walk is an emerging form of short-term urban activity in which participants explore city streets and alleys to perceive distinctive cultural symbols, social connections, and spatial organizations of a place. This practice provides a new pathway for understanding urban placeness. Drawing on both humanistic and structuralist geographical theories of placeness, this study applies the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic model to identify latent themes in online textual data and constructs an evaluation framework for placeness together with a set of indicators for selecting city walk neighborhoods. Taking Singapore as a case study, the research identifies neighborhoods with high potential for city walk experiences and visualizes walking routes using ArcGIS10.8.1 network analysis tools. The case study demonstrates the feasibility and applicability of the proposed methodological framework, offering practical insights for urban design and place-based spatial planning.