Abstract
Abstract. Today, community initiatives to improve the urban quality of life can be conducted in a more focused way because local authorities and urban planners are able to reveal urban hotspots through the investigation of location-annotated crime and accident data. However, urban areas, which according to well-recorded incident data are characterized by a high level of public safety, but which are generally perceived by citizens as unsafe, remain undiscovered and therefore untreated. This work presents Sensafety, a citizen-centric crowdsourcing approach that enables users by means of a mobile application to report their personal feeling of safety anytime and at any site. Sensafety’s goal is to reveal a comprehensive and complete picture of the perceived safety in urban environments in order to identify blind spots that have not been further investigated due to lack of data. To encourage citizens to participate and contribute, Sensafety’s mobile application offers different ways to explore and experience the collected data depending on the user’s location. This paper gives a detailed description of Sensafety’s integrated concept and outlines the major technical and non-technical findings.
Highlights
Studies on the quality of life (QoL) in urban spaces have lately become increasingly popular, especially to compare the QoL of different cities (Mercer, 2019)
This paper proposes a new integrated concept to leverage the power of crowdsourcing to uncover hotspots in an urban environment that are commonly perceived to be safe or unsafe
Since citizens are supposed to proactively report their personal perceived safety voluntarily and more than once by means of a mobile application, a simple rating interaction concept with a single dichotomous question was favored over capturing all potential aspects of the perceived safety, their intensities and weighting via a more complex and time-consuming user interface
Summary
Studies on the quality of life (QoL) in urban spaces have lately become increasingly popular, especially to compare the QoL of different cities (Mercer, 2019). The fear of crime, as a major subjective indicator and partially determinable by capturing the perceived safety in public spaces, has been proven to have a non-negligible impact on the urban QoL (Michalos and Zumbo, 2000)(Møller, 2005). Another important aspect of the perceived safety is related to the fear to become a victim of an accident. Sensafety is designed to minimize the required effort for users to share their rating at the expense of the rating’s information content It provides, in addition, multiple value-added services for users to explore and experience the commonly perceived safety in different ways such as via an interactive map or augmented reality view.
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