Navigating the urban environment

In a darkened lab at SFU’s Surrey campus a computer monitor lights up. On screen we see a virtual reality (VR) model of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. What we are looking at will eventually help assess how pedestrians are influenced by crime or fear of crime in choosing their routes in an urban environment. 

The model is the PhD project of Andrew Park of the school of interactive arts and technology (SIAT). Park and his senior supervisor, Tom Calvert, SIAT professor emeritus, began to think about the project two years ago when criminologist Paul Brantingham spoke at the Surrey campus. 

“I was fascinated and began to think I could relate my research to what the Brantinghams were doing,” remembers Park. The Brantinghams subsequently shared their data with Park and Calvert and soon another interdisciplinary project was under way.  

A computer-generated landscape of the Downtown Eastside will help researchers assess fear.

Social research shows that certain features of the physical environment – narrow walkways with no escape routes, hidden spaces, threatening individuals, and tall bushes – may make people feel uncomfortable in some situations. These features, included in Park’s model, can be added or removed at will to test people’s reactions. The Downtown Eastside neighbourhood was used as the background because it is an area that generates fear for many people. 

“We wanted to generate a realistic fear of certain streets,” says Park. “We wanted to test if people will avoid particular areas depending on what those areas look like.” 

When the model is fully functioning – likely within a year – animated human figures will populate the area and the participants will move through it as if they were actually walking the streets of the Downtown Eastside. There will be points at which the participants will have to choose which streets or alleys to go down. Those choices will then be analyzed in terms of the characteristics of the route they followed. Did they avoid certain streets because they were narrow? Because they had hidden spaces? Because there were frightening-looking people loitering on them?  

Never before have animated figures been used to make a computational model of a pedestrian in the Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) field, so it is a significant advance on other computer simulations. Park has also been careful to ensure that the computational model accurately reflects social research findings.  

“This is a great advance on other research related to fear of crimes, [which] has been done qualitatively with surveys or field research,” says Park. “[Our] model can be a great tool for criminology or urban planning research because human subjects can navigate the VR environment without real dangers. And we can easily change the VR environment to test different layouts.”

Adding and subtracting things on the computer simulation can test what works and what doesn’t before architects and planners actually start to build. The process can also provide hard data to validate perceptions of how they should be designing and building. Using the model will be a major advance for CPTED, which is becoming a key element of the new built environment.

“[CPTED] can have a tremendous impact on crime and on the fear of crime,” concludes Calvert . aq

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