Urban Emotions - development of methods for production of contextual emotion information in spatial planning with the help of human sensory assessment and crowdsourcing technologies in social networks

• Applicant: Dr.-Ing. Peter Zeile
• Subject Area: City Planning, Spatial Planning, Transportation and Infrastructure Planning, Landscape Planning
• Term: from 2014 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 252146704

Due to the increasing availability of public spatial data in the context of networked cities, a variety of research potentials open for the Spatial Planning and Geoinformatics. However, the human being as a fundamental component of urban spaces with his feelings and emotions so far only plays a minor role in research approaches. This proposal aims to be a contribution for filling this gap in the research. The development of new technologies, such as mobile communication devices or wearables, enables fundamentally new methods for spatial research and opens up many opportunities for the creation of knowledge, especially in the intersection of Spatial Planning and Geoinformatics. Especially the possibility to detect, to analyse and to visualize spatial data in near real time has to be considered as very promising in this context. Furthermore, in particular the consideration of the human being as sensors for himself and his environment (human sensory assessment) belongs to the scientific research field which is not yet fully covered. However, it is not just sensory data, but especially user-generated spatial data (VGI), its social and emotional aspects and the mutual interactions, which are of high importance. This research proposal aims to capture the citizens perceptions and feelings in the environment and to enrich and to correlate it with additional information gained from social networks. This is to attempt fundamentally new approaches on how to make the monitoring of human emotions used gainfully in urban spaces. This includes in particular issues like data collection, data analysis, and the potential use in planning processes as well as the requirements concerning the critical reflection about privacy. With this holistic approach, it should be possible to uncover hidden urban patterns and causalities and to achieve new insights for the functioning of the organism City. Living Labs with the topics of accessibility, bike mobility and perception of space help to integrate this efforts in a daily life set-up. Another question in our research will be, if it is possible to transfer the knowledge about perception in a real world environment to virtual and augmented reality and how can these combined technologies be integrated into planning processes.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Austria
• Partner Organisation: Fonds zur Förderung der wissenschaftlichen Forschung (FWF)
• Cooperation Partner: Professor Dr. Bernd Resch