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 approach into planning processes. This approach will potentially reveal new insights for the perception of geographical spaces in spatial planning.