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 P. Zeile (&) J.-P. Exner Department of CAD and Planning Methods in Urban Planning and Architecture—CPE, University of Kaiserslautern, Kaiserslautern, Germany e-mail: [email protected] J.-P. Exner e-mail: [email protected] B. Resch G. Sagl Department of Geoinformatics—Z_GIS, University of Salzburg, Salzburg, Austria e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] B. Resch G. Sagl Chair of GIScience, University of Heidelberg, Heidelberg, Germany B. Resch Center for Geographic Analysis, Harvard University, Cambridge, USA G. Sagl Department of Geoinformation and Environmental Technologies, Carinthia University of Applied Sciences, Salzburg, Austria © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015 S. Geertman et al. (eds.), Planning Support Systems and Smart Cities, Lecture Notes in Geoinformation and Cartography, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-18368-8_11 209 approach into planning processes. This approach will potentially reveal new insights for the perception of geographical spaces in spatial planning.