Search

Urban design context continually influences cognition and behavior and shapes human responses for pedestrians. Researchers have studied established the role of context well (Sussman and Hollander 2015; Robinson and Pallasmaa 2015; Zeisel et al. 2003; Wells et al. 2007), but less is known about how variations in the built environment impact behavior performance. The book, Cognitive Architecture: Designing for How We Respond to the Built Environment (Sussman and Hollander 2015), argues that a set of four architectural principles might explain impacts on human mental states. This study uses those four principles to provide a framework to empirically test the relationship between variations in the built environment and behavior performance using a go–no-go task. The findings suggest that context matters and the paper offers key implications for urban design theory and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent studies show that 85% of women have changed their traveled routes to avoid harassment and assault. Despite this, current mapping tools do not empower users with information to take charge of their personal safety. We propose SafeRoute, a novel solution to the problem of navigating cities and avoiding street harassment and crime. Unlike other street navigation applications, SafeRoute introduces a new type of path generation via deep reinforcement learning. This enables us to successfully optimize for multi-criteria path-finding and incorporate representation learning within our framework. Our agent learns to pick favorable streets to create a safe and short path with a reward function that incorporates safety and efficiency. Given access to recent crime reports in many urban cities, we train our model for experiments in Boston, New York, and San Francisco. We test our model on areas of these cities, specifically the populated downtown regions with high foot traffic. We evaluate SafeRoute and successfully improve over state-of-the-art methods by up to 17% in local average distance from crimes while decreasing path length by up to 7%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay argues that discourse related to residents of Boston's South End as environmental agents justified the removal of minority and working-class residents from the neighborhood, and, in particular, the New York Streets section in the 1950s. It combines analytical approaches of urban ecology and traditional elements of social history to examine how the neighborhood orientated to the city in an economic sense, how residents created a mixed-use neighborhood, how social institutions functioned as contested spaces of cultural production, how settlement house workers created a framework of discourse about the South End, how negative perceptions of working-class and minority residents coalesced across American life, and how city officials activated the discourse to create the first steps of urban renewal in Boston. The conclusion examines how minority groups understood environmental factors to be central to urban renewal and how social justice groups took an environmental focus in their activism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]