URBAN SENSING · Urban Sensing through User Generated Contents

The project aims at bringing a new product to the urban design, city planning and urban management market: a platform extracting patterns of use and citizens' perceptions related or concerning city spaces, through robust analysis of User Generated Content (UGC) shared by the city users and inhabitants over social networks and digital media.Traditional data collection methods - such as surveys, interviews and ethnographic observations –have some limitations: high cost in terms of time and resources and limited size of the samples they can generally cover. More recently, methods based on real-time data and web harvesting have been adopted, but a focus on their spatial and temporal dimension is still lacking.Now it is time to experiment with new methods, which are made possible by the fact that an increasingly high number of citizens can produce and share geolocalized information about their everyday life experience on searchable social platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare etc.Applying text mining and conversation analysis to geolocalized UGC Urban Sensing will provide meaningful indexes and dynamic maps depicting citizens' shared perceptions, emotions, hints and opinions regarding public services, urban spaces, time-based events, and the city as a whole. A set of visualisation tools, targeting the needs of the involved SMEs, provide interaction with this maps and indexes.Based on the specific needs of the SMEs, a wide range of indicators will be defined and validated through iterative tests to be performed in 3 different countries.It will provide an insight into understanding how public policies, spatial interventions, events and transformations are perceived within a city, and at the same time it will give hints to designers, developers and entrepreneurs adopting a more human-centred approach toward our cities’ evolution. Urban Sensing, during 27 months of activities, can also be the basis for building innovative services based on distinct local spatial and temporalintelligence.