Gender and Mobility: Utilising Smart City Technologies to Improve the Feeling of Safety in Pedestrian Women
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2021-02-28
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en
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Abstract
Women are disproportionately affected by feelings of unsafety when walking alone on the streets
at night. Yet, current navigation systems such as Google Maps and Waze do not account for
feelings of unsafety and only suggest the fastest route. Within the framework of Value-Sensitive
Design - an approach that aims to include societal values in the design of technologies - this
poses a value-infringement in the technology as it is not free of a certain gender bias. Current
advancements within smart cities may alleviate the issue by creating a dynamic navigation
system that utilises the data collected by smart city technologies to determine the “Safest
Perceived Path” (SPP). This thesis proposes a pipeline for the calculation of an SPP so that it can
be implemented in path-finding problems. The pipeline is realised in three steps; 1) a set of
relevant factors that improve feelings of safety i.e. safety factors are determined and
contextualised in research, namely “lighting”, “density”, “security”, “entrapment”, and
“maintenance”; 2) proof-of concept (smart) technologies are presented that can measure the
safety factors; 3) by means of an online survey, the weighting of each safety factor is obtained in
order to determine to what extent the identified factors need to be considered when proposing the
SPP . To retrieve the weights from the survey, Bayesian Multivariate Models were applied. The
results showed that “lighting”, “density”, and “maintenance” were the most important safety
factors in determining an SPP for both men and women. Possible limitations include the
generalisability of the results. Furthermore, by accounting for an existing value-infringement in
navigation systems, new value trade-offs may arise.
Keywords: Smart City, Smart Technologies, Value-Sensitive Design, Gender Inequality,
Freedom of (Gender) Bias, Navigation Systems, Graph Search, Artificial Intelligence, Fear of
Crime, Pedestrian Mobility
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Faculteit der Sociale Wetenschappen