Perceptions of Urban Architectural Environments and Weibo Sentiment in the Yangtze River Delta: Spatial Differentiation and Same-Grid Correspondence

Urban visual environments and social media sentiment offer different perspectives on how urban places are experienced. Yet it remains unclear whether their spatial patterns correspond across cities and whether city-level averages capture their local combinations. This study combines street view imagery and geotagged Weibo posts across 27 cities in China’s Yangtze River Delta to compare six dimensions of visual perception with expressed sentiment at the 500 m grid level. More than 95% of the variation in both indicators occurred within cities, while their same-grid associations were consistently weak across the region. The direction and magnitude of these associations varied among cities, and cities with similar average sentiment contained different local combinations of visual perception and sentiment. These findings show that regional averages conceal substantial differences within cities and that visual perception and online sentiment provide distinct information about urban places. Their joint analysis can help identify contrasting locations for further investigation.