Understanding Public Spaces Through Citizen Perception: A Visual Exploration
2024-01-05
Before I trained models, I wanted to understand the language people already use to describe public space.
Why This Matters
Public spaces are not just physical settings. They are social settings, and that means people read them through memory, culture, mobility, identity, and experience. If planning tools ignore that complexity, they end up measuring only the easiest parts of urban life.
In Montréal, I worked with 15 participants representing varied identities, including LGBTQ+ people, elders, disabled residents, and people from different racial and gender backgrounds. Through interviews and focus groups, they described what makes a public space welcoming, functional, and meaningful.
How I Worked
I conducted semi-structured interviews and focus groups, then transcribed and analyzed the conversations with the open-source Mistral 32B language model. That process helped surface recurring concepts tied to inclusivity, aesthetics, functionality, safety, and public meaning.
From there, I organized the findings into two visual formats:
- a thematic network showing the major categories that structured the conversations
- a conceptual network showing the denser web of specific terms and associations that appeared within them
What Emerged
Seven broad themes stood out: accessibility and inclusivity, safety and security, community engagement and social interaction, aesthetic value and maintenance, historical and cultural significance, functional design and utility, and management and responsibility.
The point of the visualizations was not decoration. It was to make qualitative knowledge easier to inspect. The thematic network shows the large categories that shaped the discussion. The conceptual network reveals the finer web of associations beneath them.
Why the Visualizations Matter
These visualizations make it harder to treat public-space design as a narrow technical problem. They show that what people value in a place is inseparable from how they move through it, how they remember it, and whether they feel recognized by it.
For planners and policymakers, that means the work can function as a map of public meaning, not just public preference.
Explore the Network
Detailed conceptual network visualization
Related Links
Tags: Public Spaces · Citizen Participation · Data Visualization · Inclusive Urban Design · Montreal