Why Do We Judge Some Areas As Being Safer Than Others?

This interesting project, borne from MIT’s Media Labs, juxtaposes two images from Google Street View, and asks subjective questions such as “which place looks safer?” and “which place looks more upper class?” But why does MIT want to know?

In their own words, “Place Pulse is a website that allows anybody to quickly run a perception study and visualise the results in powerful ways.” They hope to gather over a million votes, which could help them gather geotagged images into powerful groups, such as which area in New York City is deemed to look the safest.

Inspired by Kevin Lynch’s book The Image of the City, which published in 1960 and focuses on urban planning and how people perceive their surroundings, MIT hopes to make more sense of why we think the way we think. Once all of the information has been collated, the team of researchers will organise the data into graphs and present it in their report, but until then you can see a small taste of their results here. [Place Pulse]