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Streetwise: Mapping Citizens’ Perceived Spatial Qualities

Abstract:

Streetwise is the first map of spatial quality of urban design of Switzerland. Streetwise measures the human perception of spatial situations and uses crowdsourcing methods for this purpose: a large number of people are shown pairs of street-level images of public space online; by clicking on an image, they each give an evaluation about the place they consider has a better atmosphere, which is the focus of this article. With the gathered data, a machine learning model was trained, which allowed learning features that motivate people to choose one image over another. The trained model was then used to estimate a score representing the perceived atmosphere in a large number of images from different urban areas within the Zurich metropolitan region, which could then be visualized on a map to offer a comprehensive overview of the atmosphere of the analyzed cities. The accuracy obtained from the evaluation of the machine learning model indicates that the method followed can perform as well as a group of humans.