An Exploration into SG and KL’s food scenes
An unscientific exploration
This is an EXPLORATION (done for an online course) — and I would like to stress that, because this can be sensitive for some people. This is an imperfect exercise in looking at the food scenes in SG and KL, and part of this is because I wasn’t sure how to define KL, so I took an eclectic approach. This is also a limited exploration into Foursquare’s Places API, and I used a low number for ease of exploration (less things to crunch, less time used to, more time to fix mistakes, etc). The point is also not about which city is ‘better’ or ‘worse’ — as you will see, there is much greater complexity than simple judgements of ‘better’ or ‘worse’. I also made no attempt to look at the scores (requires Premium API call$ from Foursquare).
With that in mind, here’s the exploration .
Introduction
I wanted to illustrate the qualitative differences of two neighborhoods in two cities — Singapore and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. This exercise could presumably be helpful in two ways: a guide for potential visitors of these two cities on the kinds of places they offer and the food scenes these two places offer; and for potential restauranteurs in thinking about what kinds of dining options to offer in these two places.
Singapore and Kuala Lumpur are two cities that are often compared with each other. They are physically just 400km from each other — about four hours ride, and share several qualities: both are diverse multicultural cities where people of different ethnicities, faiths, and cultures live with each other. They have also developed their own food cultures, which often compete with each other. This exercise does not claim to be definitive in either way — merely using Foursquare data to look at how visitors interact with both cities on Foursquare, and how that data might reveal patterns about the food culture as experienced by users who check in on Foursquare.
The findings from this small limited study will still provide interesting nuggets of information for potential visitors and businesses to consider as they find out more about both cities.
Data
The data from this comes from the Foursquare API. Foursquare API calls offers information on the venue and category of the venue — which is sufficient information for the tasks to perform. The file format can be organized for further analysis in the pandas dataframe.
The…
