Katja Schechtner

The Collaborative Image of The City: Mapping the Inequality of Urban Perception

A traveler visiting Rio, Manila or Caracas does not need a report to learn that these cities are unequal; she can see it directly from the taxicab window. This is because in most cities inequality is conspicuous, but also, because cities express different forms of inequality that are evident to casual observers. Cities are highly heterogeneous and often unequal with respect to the income of their residents, but also with respect to the cleanliness of their neighborhoods, the beauty of their architecture, and the liveliness of their streets, among many other evaluative dimensions. Until now, however, our ability to understand the effect of a citys built environment on social and economic outcomes has been limited by the lack of quantitative data on urban perception. Here, we build on the intuition that inequality is partly conspicuous to create quantitative measure of a citys contrasts. Using thousands of geo-tagged images, we measure the perception of safety, class and uniqueness; in the cities of Boston and New York in the United States, and Linz and Salzburg in Austria, finding that the range of perceptions elicited by the images of New York and Boston is larger than the range of perceptions elicited by images from Linz and Salzburg. We interpret this as evidence that the cityscapes of Boston and New York are more contrasting, or unequal, than those of Linz and Salzburg. Finally, we validate our measures by exploring the connection between them and homicides, finding a significant correlation between the perceptions of safety and class and the number of homicides in a NYC zip code, after controlling for the effects of income, population, area and age. Our results show that online images can be used to create reproducible quantitative measures of urban perception and characterize the inequality of different cities.

Developing Landmark-Based Pedestrian-Navigation Systems

Pedestrian-navigation services enable people to retrieve precise instructions to reach a specific location. However, the development of mobile spatial-information technologies for pedestrians is still at the beginning and faces several difficulties. As the spatial behavior of people on foot differs in many ways from the drivers performance, common concepts for car-navigation services are not suitable for pedestrian navigation. Particularly, the usage of landmarks is vitally important in human navigation. This contribution points out the main requirements for pedestrian-navigation technologies and presents an approach to identify pedestrian flows and to imply landmark information into navigation services for pedestrians

Developing landmark-based pedestrian-navigation systems

Pedestrian-navigation services enable people to retrieve precise instructions to reach a specific location. However, the development of mobile spatial-information technologies for pedestrians is still at the beginning and faces several difficulties. As the spatial behavior of people on foot differs in many ways from the drivers performance, common concepts for car-navigation services are not suitable for pedestrian navigation. Particularly, the usage of landmarks is vitally important in human navigation. This contribution points out the main requirements for pedestrian-navigation technologies and presents an approach to identify pedestrian flows and to imply landmark information into navigation services for pedestrians.

What Makes You Bike? Exploring Persuasive Strategies to Encourage Low-Energy Mobility

This paper explores three persuasive strategies and their capacity to encourage biking as a low-energy mode of transportation. The strategies were designed based on: (I) triggering messages that harness social influence to facilitate more frequent biking, (II) a virtual bike tutorial to increase biker’s self-efficacy for urban biking, and (III) an arranged bike ride to help less experienced bikers overcome initial barriers towards biking. The potential of these strategies was examined based on self-reported trip data from 44 participants over a period of four weeks, questionnaires, and qualitative interviews. Strategy I showed a significant increase of 13.5 percentage points in share of biking during the intervention, strategy II indicated an increase of perceived self-efficacy for non-routine bikers, and strategy III provided participants with a positive experience of urban biking. The explored strategies contribute to further research on the design and implementation of persuasive technologies in the field of mobility.

Gamification and Social Dynamics: Insights from a Corporate Cycling Campaign

Cycling is an essential transport mode in a well-balanced urban transportation system. While most approaches for achieving an increase from today’s usually low levels of biking are focusing mainly on infrastructure measures and policies, this study presents the effects of the Biking Tourney, a bike commuting challenge between 14 companies aiming at motivating employees to commute by bike. This six-week study involved 239 participants using a socially influencing system for reporting commutes and watching the rankings. The frequency of bike commuting increased for 15 % of overall participants due to their participation. Within the subgroup of occasional bike commuters an even higher share of 30 % commuted by bike more frequently. Further analysis discusses multiple factors contributing to the engagement of employees in the tourney. As the results show the persuasiveness of the intervention, implications for a large-scale implementation are discussed.

Shared Mobility in Asian Megacities: The Rise of the Apps

In August 2015, the Philippines became the first country in Asia to legalize app-based shared mobility services by defining a framework for “Transport Network Companies” (TNCs). With the country’s long history of shared transport, the underlying concept was already culturally ingrained. However, given that only around 31% of Filipinos have bank accounts, with an estimated 4% access to credit card, and smart phone penetration around 21%, the current market for TNC services is limited to a small segment of the population, compared to the overall shared transport market. While it remains unclear whether TNC services will add to congestion by helping to spur some suppressed demand trips, or ultimately reduce car ownership by providing an alternative shared model, the quick uptake and growth of the TNC services also show that they are improving the overall mobility of certain population segments. However, the services remain out of reach for the majority of the population and add to mobility inequality. Both issues traffic congestion and inequality of access reflect the discussion in the developed countries, but are magnified by the extreme growth rates of cities like Manila, Jakarta, and Bangkok, where the future of those services will likely be shaped and decided by daily practice far ahead of the West.

Bridging the Adoption Gap for Smart City Technologies: An Interview with Rob Kitchin

Rob Kitchin talks about how we can bridge the adoption gap between city administrations and developers of smart city technologies. This interview is part of a special issue on smart cities.