Urban Week 2021

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Eyewitness misidentification is the most common contributing factor in wrongful convictions – appearing in 69% of cases (Innocence Project, 2021). Furthermore, Black defendants are disproportionately hurt by mistaken identification. Research reveals that people, specifically those with high (compared to low) prejudicial beliefs, show biased visual attention for out-group members’ faces. My research tests if attention instructions for how to watch a crime video attenuates the influence of prejudicial beliefs by decreasing reliance on prototypical markers of a criminal (i.e., skin color). I found that participants instructed to give attention naturally selected a highly prototypical suspect, whereas those instructed to give equal attention to all elements of the video did not show this bias for prototypically. Additionally, I used participants’ zip codes, NYC Open Data, and US Census data to compute crime rate statistics to investigate if neighborhood-specific crime rates influence participants’ legal decisionmaking and who they rate as more criminal looking.

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With a progressively older world population, visual impairment is increasing, drastically affecting the lives of millions of individuals and society at large, which has to cope with healthcare costs and related downstream consequences. In particular, mobility is severely affected by visual impairment, whereby visually impaired individuals are threatened by a number of fixed and moving obstacles, that increase the chance of falling-related injuries. To overcome this problem, we propose an integrated advancedwearable system based on computer vision and a haptic feedback wearable device, in the form of a belt. The belt utilizes piezoelectric-based actuators, capable of providing vibrotactile feedback about the position of obstacles in the surrounding of the user, which are identified from the computer vision system. This architecture allows real-time,
dynamic hazard negotiation and enables low-profile integration into commercial backpacks and hip belts, increasing the acceptance of the device by the visually impaired.

This research project investigates how several municipalities in Metro Vancouver accelerated the area’s transition to renewable energy by crafting a competitive lowemissions district energy (DE) market. DE provide centralized heating and cooling for buildings at the neighborhood level and can be effective at reducing emissions. Some municipalities used traditional zoning, regulation and procurement tools, while others also established city-owned utilities. As a result, new district heating systems in metro Vancouver grew from six to fifteen between 2004 and 2015, and some reduced
emissions up to 70% (Lee 2015). Preliminary results indicate private investment was initially crowded out but now new private utilities have entered the market and publicprivate partnerships and new technologies are being developed. However, potential
conflicts of interest and unintended consequences are arising: increase use of natural gas, politization of rates and conflicts between city agencies striving for the same social and environmental goals, with different policy tools.

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The COVID-19 outbreak has dramatically changed travel behavior in cities across the world. With changed travel demand, economic activity, and social-distancing/stay-athome policies, transportation systems have experienced an unprecedented shift in demand and usage. Since the start of the pandemic, the C2SMART research team has been collecting data and investigating the impact of COVID-19 on mobility and sociability, including: Passenger travel and freight traffic trends Mode shift and usage based on various policies Effect of social distancing policies on transit use and emissions Sidewalk, crosswalk, and intersection crowd density Effect of COVID-19
Policies on Transportation Systems Leveraging open data from multiple sources, this project features both traditional and innovative techniques such as data mining and visualization, agent-based traffic simulation model and real-time computer vision technique, to help researchers and transportation authorities understand and observe the impact of the pandemic on transportation. As a result, we have created a one-of-akind, free, and publicly accessible, open-data dashboard aggregating multiple data feeds in one place.

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This study examines how a category's fuzzy boundaries, due to spanning actors in the category or to undefined category attributes, affect the competitive dynamics in different categories. We use a unique, hand-coded longitudinal dataset of approximately 90,500 service providers on Airbnb, matched with real estate market data in 10 U.S. cities in the 2008–2015 period, and the legislative changes implemented in three of these cities. We find that the entry of spanners in Airbnb leads to an increase of real estate property prices. We also find that the effect of spanners’ entry on real estate prices diminishes in those cities that implement regulations to define the attributes necessary for actors to compete in the category and therefore the boundaries of the emerging sharing economy category itself. Our findings contribute to extant conversation on category boundaries, on the effect of spanning on competition, and particularly on regulatory categories.

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Protesting is a spatial practice that takes place in, and makes use of, our urban environments. To make change possible, protesters need to be seen and heard en masse. Protests, in this sense, are performative. But in the way they are planned and regimented to safely and effectively convey bodies through streets, they also have a distinctly militaristic quality. What happened on the ground during the June 2020 protests in New York City? John Xavier Acosta, an anti-racist movement and protest leader, and architect and protest photographer Gabriel Hernández Solano document the month’s events verbally and visually. Our group created detailed diagrams that not only help explain how these protests and occupations unfolded in place, but also serve as a visual record of police brutality, and as a catalogue of the diverse and evolving roles of protesters to claim public space. There is much to learn from these fleeting, yet radical spatial practices that are laden with inspirational scenes of kinship and joy.