Venture

UrbView

Jury Award Germany 2022

Women and members of the LGBTQ+ community have been suffering from different forms of physical, verbal, and non-verbal harassment in the streets and public places, regardless of location and time. According to studies, at least 40% of women in Germany have already been confronted with this form of harassment in their lifetime. Crimes in public spaces such as sexual harassment are the result of a variety of factors. Based on our research, one of the main causes of this issue is urban planning and the design of built environment in our cities which has been widely overlooked. According to our meetings with urban planners, there is a lack of technological tools that enable urban planners/designers to incorporate a social perspective regarding gender equity and crime prevention in their designs/plans. Therefore, UrbView intends to incorporate crime and sexual harassment prevention in the urban planning process by providing an innovative model based on artificial intelligence technology. The UrbView AI model, for which a prototype has already been created is able to detect urban planning and architectural errors in current and future designs of cities. Its use will significantly improve urban environments and help reduce the occurrence of street harassment and crime rates overall. The UrbView concept is currently built based on the images of places in the cities as well as textual and statistical reports of street harassment and crime incidents by victims. With the help of the model, city planners and architects can evaluate the safety of their design and are provided with the tools and suggestions to change their design accordingly.