Analyzing Safety Perceptions in Urban India through Crowdsourced data:

Abstract

The vitality and livability of urban spaces are entwined with the collective perception of safety held by urban inhabitants. Urban environments of various scales are experienced differently by individuals, each with distinct levels of engagement and ownership. India has an array of cities in its urban landscape, ranging from major megacities like Delhi, Bangalore, and Mumbai to cities with a population of over a million like Pune, Hyderabad, and Ahmedabad. These urban classifications vary in terms of development, infrastructure, population, and size. Although urban settings offer superior infrastructure for citizen’s safety, the dense population can occasionally give its citizens a sense of unease about their safety. Citizens overlay the physical and social settings that offer a chance or likelihood of harassment to create mental risk mapping while exploring cities. The analysis for the factors dependent on these mapping is carried out through crowdsourcing from the most common platform to provide opinions. In a constantly evolving urban landscape, the capacity to harness the insights offered by the internet is indispensable. Google reviews, existing within the public domain, are accessible to a global audience and serve as a significant source for shaping perceptions. These unfiltered expressions, rooted in personal experiences, possess the influential power to guide choices, mold public sentiment, and influence urban planning decisions. These decisions, in turn, are then tailored to analyze how and why it differs in different scales of cities to further enhance urban safety. This research underscores the significance of the gendered urban experience and the pivotal role that public expressions in Google reviews play in influencing the perception of safety. By systematically assessing the reliability of these reviews through advanced NLP and geospatial techniques, the aim is to provide a foundation for shaping urban planning strategies that prioritize citizen's well-being and security in cities. The variables are assessed from the existing literature and then further analyzed in the Google Reviews found from around 400 locations found in the cities of Chennai and Delhi. The ranking of each of these variables when compared for both the cities, give an insight of how people perceive urban spaces in terms of safety differently in respective cities.