Place Pulse

Place Pulse is a crowdsourcing effort that aims to map which areas of a city are perceived as safer, livelier, wealthier, more active, beautiful and friendly. By asking users to select images from a pair, Place Pulse has collected the data needed to evaluate more than 100,000 images from 56 cities.

Launched in 2010, Place Pulse has allowed the generation of an algorithm powered by the clicks of each user through a collection of nearly 1.5 million responses. This experiment gave rise to other innovative tools for urban planners, such as Streetscore a collection of interactive map visualizations that depict perceived safety of street views from cities in the United States- and Streetchange -a computer vision algorithm that captures the physical urban change based on Google Street View images.

For curious researchers, the Place Pulse dataset can even be used to study the association between urban perception and other datasets, such as violent crime, creativity or economic growth.