Open source platform for subjective polling of urban environments: OpenUrbanOpticon

Abstract

One of the problems that the world has to face in the next years is the fact that more and more people are moving to cities. To accommodate these people in the actual cities will be a challenge and the governors have to work on it. There are a lot of different ways to investigate how people is interacting with the city to make it better but one of them is the recognizability map that everyone have on their mind of the city. This will be very important in the future, how much they know their city and what things can relate with the places. For example, it could be interesting for an administrator of a city to know which areas need to increase their visibility or for a manager that wants to know which are the well­known streets or places of a city to spread his business. The web page Urban Opticon runs a game which permits to know through a crowdsourced gamification web application, the well­known points of London. Images of Google Street View are shown and users have to point the closest borough or tube station. But this solution has been tailored for the city of London, with all their specific characteristics such as the boroughs or tube stations. Because of these constraints, and despite the interest of the result obtained using this platform, the developed code is not transportable to any city. Therefore, we decide to extend this previous basic project into a new project named Open Urban Opticon that allows to deploy a server with any city of the world easily for everyone. Our main goals are to make a friendly interface easy to manage that allows to make new studies without writing a single line of code.