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.
In contrast to previous approaches, Urban Emotions defines Smart Cities not only as technology-enriched cities, but also emphasises the human factor -Smart Citizens. This is due to the fact that the question of how people perceive a city and how they feel about it has always been important in urban planning and management. In this paper we present our approach for crowdsourcing physiological conditions and subjective emotions by combining data from technical sensors (measuring psycho-physiological parameters) and human sensors ("People as Sensors" contributing subjectively perceived emotions). Furthermore, we couple this crowdsourcing approach with a technical architecture to harmonise and integrate the sensor data via standardised service interfaces (Sensor Web Enablement -SWE) to allow for generic access for further analysis and visualisation. Finally, we discuss the use of emotion information in urban planning and point out related privacy issues together with a number of strategies to mitigate those.
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