Peter Zeile

Urban Emotions—Geo-Semantic Emotion Extraction from Technical Sensors, Human Sensors and Crowdsourced Data

How people in the city perceive their surroundings depends on a variety of dynamic and static context factors such as road traffic, the feeling of safety, urban architecture, etc. Such subjective and context-dependent perceptions can trigger different emotions, which enable additional insights into the spatial and temporal configuration of urban structures. This paper presents the Urban Emotions concept that proposes a human-centred approach for extracting contextual emotional information from human and technical sensors. The methodology proposed in this paper consists of four steps: (1) detecting emotions using wristband sensors, (2) “ground-truthing” these measurements using a People as Sensors location-based service, (3) extracting emotion information from crowdsourced data like Twitter, and (4) correlating the measured and extracted emotions. Finally, the emotion information is mapped and fed back into urban planning for decision support and for evaluating ongoing planning processes.

Urban Emotions: Benefits and Risks in Using Human Sensory Assessment for the Extraction of Contextual Emotion Information in Urban Planning

This chapter introduces the ‘Urban Emotions’ approach. It focuses on integrating humans’ emotional responses to the urban environment into planning processes. The approach is interdisciplinary and anthropocentric, i.e. citizens and citizens’ perceptions are highlighted in this concept. To detect these emotions/perceptions, it combines methods from spatial planning, geoinformatics and computer linguistics to give a better understanding of how people perceive and respond to static and dynamic urban contexts in both time and geographical space. For collecting and analyzing data on the emotional perception to urban space, we use technical and human sensors as well as georeferenced social media posts, and extract contextual emotion information from them. The resulting novel information layer provides an additional, citizen-centric perspective for urban planners. In addition to technical and methodological aspects, data privacy issues and the potential of wearables are discussed in this chapter. Two case studies demonstrate the transferability of the approach into planning processes. This approach will potentially reveal new insights for the perception of geographical spaces in spatial planning.

Menschen als „smarte Sensoren“? Neue Möglichkeiten für die Stadtplanung

Unter dem Stichwort der Smart City wird die umfassende Vernetzung von mobilen Geraten und Sensornetzwerken verstanden, die eine digitale Erfassung von urbanen Prozessen ermoglichen. Mobile Sensoren zeichnen Daten der stadtischen Umwelt auf. Dabei ruckt der Mensch als smarter Sensor in den Fokus, da hier im Crowdsourcing-Verfahren Daten kollaborativ erhoben werden. Eine wichtige Methode, welche den deduktiven Monitoringsystemen zugeordnet wird, ist das „Participatory Sensing“ und die damit verbundene „Emotionale Stadtkartierung“. Hierbei werden physiologische Daten erfasst, aggregiert und digital ausgewertet.