Assessing verticalization effects on urban safety perception

TL;DR

This study investigates how building height and urban verticalization influence perceived safety in New York City, revealing that safety perceptions vary with building height and are affected by spatial factors.

Contribution

It models the impact of urban verticalization on perceived safety using computer vision and street view data, highlighting the nuanced effects of building height.

Findings

Perceived safety increases with building height for 1-7 floors.

Perceived safety decreases for high-rise buildings.

Other spatial factors also influence safety perceptions.

Abstract

We describe an experiment with the modeling of urban verticalization effects on perceived safety scores as obtained with computer vision on Google Streetview data for New York City. Preliminary results suggests that for smaller buildings (between one and seven floors), perceived safety increases with building height, but that for high-rise buildings, perceived safety decreases with increased height. We also determined that while height contributing for this relation, other zonal aspects also influences the perceived safety scores, suggesting spatial structuring also influences such scores.