Walk Safe Project - Urban safety perception related to light, sound and architectural decay

Nowadays there is a deep separation between phenomena and perception of them due the influences that medias have over human information method. The attention is focalized on problems like immigration and crime facts by leveraging people's fear or preoccupation, other factors that influence are certainly crime rate, environmental conditions and social conditions. Also for these reasons, urban safety perception suffers a crisis, especially during night-time, in isolated areas of city that didn’t joy of design attention over artificial lighting, soundscape or urban and architectural quality of public spaces. People feels insecure themselves walking in these places even if there’s no reasons to feels so. Starting from these premises, some questions spontaneously come to mind. The urban and architectural conditions can influence the perception of people that live in urban areas? The differences in answer change with occasionally or habitually use of places? Which light or sound characteristics of the environment that surround the respondents mainly influence their perception? Presence of other people help to feel more comfortable or, in opposite way, make the walker more worried? The safety perception can influence psychological well-being of people that live in particular critical sites? To answer to this kind of questions, the project of this thesis analyzed the perception of safety related to the conditions of light, sound and urban and architectural decay of places considered particularly critical inside the city. The study was based on analysis of four neighborhoods of the city of Turin (Italy) reported by municipality, such as Vanchiglia, Parco Dora, Lingotto and San Salvario and in addition two areas in Barriera di Milano. Because the necessity to understanding the importance of Big Data in social strategies it was started a collaboration with investigation office of Municipal Police Department that helped the research giving analysis tools for measuring people fluxes and social sentiments of neighborhood. The perceptions were collected through three different types of questionnaires, one of these in collaboration with University of Turin, developed keeping in mind the implications that they report, or the distribution channels and the reasons for each questionnaire. Contemporaneously, it was collected light, sound and urban and architectural decay condition data. Data coming from people were analyzed using statistical tools to find correlation and regression model in order to estimate the safety perception on repetition of the same condition. Another interesting part of the strategy was the opening of social channels, PhD in semiotics collaboration, with the purpose of communicate the results and giving communication the most scientifically possible information. Under the name of Walk Safe Project it has started an engagement campaign aim to propose a focused survey on social channels and to spread the topic of urban safety among citizens. The last portion of the work has represented by the analysis of data obtained from another questionnaire developed in collaboration with PhD in psychology, that confirm the result of previous searching. At the end, the results were presented in guideline form, hoping they could be the first step toward a prediction model for perception and pleasantness helpful to urban and architectural design strategies.