Sensafety: Crowdsourcing the Urban Sense of Safety

Abstract. Today, community initiatives to improve the urban quality of life can be conducted in a more focused way because local authorities and urban planners are able to reveal urban hotspots through the investigation of location-annotated crime and accident data. However, urban areas, which according to well-recorded incident data are characterized by a high level of public safety, but which are generally perceived by citizens as unsafe, remain undiscovered and therefore untreated. This work presents Sensafety, a citizen-centric crowdsourcing approach that enables users by means of a mobile application to report their personal feeling of safety anytime and at any site. Sensafety’s goal is to reveal a comprehensive and complete picture of the perceived safety in urban environments in order to identify blind spots that have not been further investigated due to lack of data. To encourage citizens to participate and contribute, Sensafety’s mobile application offers different ways to explore and experience the collected data depending on the user’s location. This paper gives a detailed description of Sensafety’s integrated concept and outlines the major technical and non-technical findings.