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This study examines the spatial crime perception gap (SCPG), the mismatch between perceived and actual crime, which can lead to unnecessary avoidance behaviors, anxiety, or lack of vigilance. While few studies have explored this phenomenon from a spatial perspective, this research analyses the collective spatial perception of safety and unsafety in Vienna and Budapest and compares them with recorded crime patterns. Using a digital sketch map survey tool, 656 participants identified safe and unsafe areas as well as their daily routes. The responses were analyzed using spatial analytical and statistical methods to delineate the perception gaps in space, which were also diversified by crime type aggregations, including all crimes, violent crimes, property crimes, and visible crimes. Distance-based analyses were also conducted to examine the “spatial diffusion” and “spatial endowment” effects. The results show that many areas that are perceived as unsafe are not statistical crime hotspots. Perception aligns more closely with violent crime patterns than with property or visible crimes. The spatial diffusion effect illustrates that crime hotspots may influence and expand the perception of unsafety in adjacent and nearby areas. The spatial endowment effect suggests that people are more likely to perceive an area as unsafe if it is further away from their activity spaces, while overlooking crime hotspots that may intersect with it. These patterns were consistent across both cities, although the perception gap was larger in Budapest, while the endowment effect was more pronounced in Vienna. By highlighting where and how perception diverges from reality, this study provides insights that can inform strategies to reduce unfounded fear and strengthen the perceived safety and psychological resilience of urban populations.

Sketch maps are externalizations of cognitive maps which are typically distorted, schematized, incomplete, and generalized. Processing spatial information from sketch maps automatically requires reliable formalizations which are not subject to schematization, distortion or other cognitive effects in sketch maps. Based on previous empirical work, the authors identified different sketch aspects such as ordering, topology and orientation to align and integrate spatial information from sketch maps with metric maps qualitatively. This research addresses the question how these qualitative sketch aspects can be formalized for a computational approach for sketch map alignment. In this study, the authors focus on the ordering aspect: ordering of landmarks and street segments along routes and around junctions. The authors first investigate different qualitative representations and propose suitable representations to formalize these aspects. The proposed representations capture qualitative relations between spatial objects in the form of qualitative constraint networks. The authors then evaluate the proposed representations by testing the accuracy of qualitative constraints between sketched objects and their corresponding objects in a metric map. The results of the evaluation show that the proposed representations are suitable for the alignment of spatial objects from sketch maps with metric maps.

Urban green spaces (UGS) provide a range of benefits and services that enhance the quality of life for city residents and UGS visitors. However, the potential of UGS often remains unfulfilled. This study presents an application of the placemaking concept for UGS planning, using the example of an urban park in Pardubice, Czech Republic. Its aim is to gain a deeper understanding of both the physical and social dimensions of the park. This research involved the use of a geo-questionnaire to explore visitors’ motivations, perceived positive and negative aspects, and suggestions for improving the park area. The geo-questionnaire method enables people to directly influence planning decisions, contributing to a more inclusive and functional public space. The results show that the most common reasons for visiting the park are: walking, activities with children, the attractiveness of the environment, sports, and relaxation. The park’s positives include its greenery and natural character. In contrast, the greatest negative is insufficient amenities. The analysis showed that the suggested changes are spatially concentrated, mainly in the park’s central and northern areas. Frequently mentioned suggestions for specific improvements include new seating areas and refreshment stands. This study demonstrates a practical approach to engaging residents in the planning process and improving the quality of public spaces.

Our spatial mental representations allow us to give refined descriptions of the environment in terms of the relative locations and distances between objects and landmarks. In this study, we investigated the effects of familiarity with the everyday environment, in terms of frequency of exploration and mode of transportation, on categorical and coordinate spatial relations, on young and elderly participants, controlling for socio-demographic factors. Participants were tested with a general anamnesis, a neuropsychological assessment, measures of explorations and the Landmark Positioning on a Map task. The results showed: (a) a modest difference in performance with categorical spatial relations; (b) a larger difference in coordinate spatial relations; (c) a significant moderating effect of age on the relationship between familiarity and spatial relations, with a stronger relation among the elderly than the young. Ceteris paribus, the role of direct experience with exploring their hometown on spatial mental representations appeared to be more important in the elderly than in the young. This advantage appears to make the elderly wiser and likely protects them from the detrimental effects of aging on spatial mental representations.

Achieving legibility within the context of historical districts has become a controversial problem due to their widespread growth and unconventional constructions within, which has led to inconsistencies in the urban context system, and a decrease in the level of urban sociability. This paper aims to provide an empirical assessment towards facilitating the perception of spatial legibility and its association with human mobility patterns. To this end, a novel mix method was developed in order to comprehend the association between spatial legibility and human mobility patterns using Space Syntax, cognitive sketch maps, and time-lapse photography. The results revealed that there is a significant association between spatial legibility and human mobility patterns, such that the incorporation of objective and subjective factors affecting legibility, including highly integrated morphological characteristics along with the saliency of landmarks featuring historical values, can lead to increased human mobility patterns in terms of use frequency. Accordingly, this research aids urban planners and designers in recognizing how to deal with historical districts in order to foster the sociability of these areas and create a lively and socially sustainable urban environment.

Spatial perception is formed throughout our entire lives. Its quality depends on our individual differences and the characteristics of the environment. A sketch map is one way of visualising an individual’s spatial perception. It can be evaluated like a real map, in terms of its positional accuracy, content frequency and choice of cartographic methods. Moreover, the factors influencing the sketch map and/or its individual parameters can be identified. These factors should be of interest to geographers, cartographers and/or (geography) educators. The aim of this paper is to identify and describe the factors that clearly affect sketch map quality, by conducting a systematic review of 90 empirical studies published since 1960. Results show that most empirical studies focus on individual differences more than on environmental characteristics or information sources, even though the importance of these overlooked factors, especially source map characteristics and geographical education, has been proven in most analysed studies. Therefore, further research is needed in the field of sketch map quality parameters, especially in the use of cartographic methods. This paper could serve as a framework for such research.

Sketch maps are an abstract and conceptual expression of humans’ cognition of geographic space. Humans perceive geographical space at different spatial scales. However, few researchers have considered the spatial relationships of geographic elements in sketch maps at multiple spatial scales. Considering the meso and micro spatial scales, this study analyses the accuracy of the spatial relationships depicted in 52 sketch maps of urban areas, including qualitative orientation, order, qualitative distance, and topological relationships. We utilized OpenStreetMap (OSM) to assess the accuracy of the four spatial relationship representations in the sketch maps. This study evaluates the reliability of spatial relationships in capturing the invariant spatial information of geographic elements in sketch maps. It helps to understand the differences in human cognition of multi-scale space.

The analytical approach to navigation studies aims to identify elementary sensory motor processes that guide an animal to a remote site. This approach will be used here to characterize components of navigation in a flying insect, the honeybee. However, navigation studies need to go beyond an analysis of behavioral routines to come up with a synthesis. We will defend the concept of an active memory structure guiding navigation in bees that is best described as a mental or cognitive map. In our opinion, spatial/temporal relations of landmarks are stored in a mental map in such a way that behavioral routines such as expectation and planning, as indicated by shortcutting, are possible. We view the mental map of animals including the honeybee as an “action memory of spatial relations” rather than as a sensory representation as we humans experience it by introspection. Two components characterize the mental map, the relational representation of landmarks and the meaning of locations to the animal. As yet, there is little data to suggest that bees assign meaning to the experienced locations. To explore this possibility, further studies will be needed, whereby honeybees provide a unique model to address this question.

This community-based research aims to enhance local-level flood management by utilising participatory geographic information systems (PGIS) methods to capture the spatial dimensions of community member flooding concerns in Hopkins Village, Belize. We offer a mixed methodology, applying participatory sketch mapping as a way to collect local knowledge about community perceptions of flooding in this data-scarce context. We combine this local knowledge with quantitative geostatistical hot spot analysis of basic village infrastructure characteristics to reveal insights about community perceptions of and response to flood risk. The significance of this research lies in the application of PGIS methods to create two different primary datasets, which when analysed together offer a more complete story about community understanding and needs for flood management. One set of data (more qualitative in nature) originated from sketch maps with community members and answers descriptive questions about how people spatially conceptualise hydro-meteorological hazards within their community. The other (more quantitative in nature) is the village's first publicly accessible infrastructure dataset (including information on building structures, roads, and drainage infrastructure) digitised by our research team from high-resolution drone imagery. Attributes for the infrastructure dataset were developed in collaboration with community members to reflect their desires for data and information suited to conduct flood vulnerability assessment. Application of thematic coding and hot spot analysis to the data reveals concerns about hazards within their community and the measures they have taken to protect themselves in the absence of resources to develop community-wide mitigation plans. Our work offers contributions to the participatory GIS literature by providing an example of sketch mapping methods to facilitate multi-level management of community-level flood risk in a data-scarce setting, and demonstrating the multiple benefits of applied participatory GIS methods as a means of overcoming data scarcity.

Despite all distortions and incompleteness present in Sketch maps, they can be used for different purposes such as collecting and searching spatial data and organizing the spatial knowledge of individuals. Since the prerequisite for all of these cases is matching sketches with existing data in spatial databases or metric maps, several studies have been conducted in this field. These studies generally focus on the relationships between routes, landmarks, and regions, while data sources do not necessarily contain all of these data. Also, the subject of the incompleteness of data and evaluation of the results has been less considered in previous studies. Therefore, in this paper, a new solution for matching routes from sketches to metric maps is presented. The proposed solution uses the Genetic Algorithm to measure the similarities between routes in two phases, and in each phase, a set of geometric/topological criteria is considered to improve the matching. The proposed algorithm is implemented to match routes of 25 sketches with the routes in a metric map. The average FMeasure of matching is 45.59%. The results show that by considering the specific conditions (not availability of descriptive data of routes and geometric/descriptive information of landmarks), this paper has been able to take an important step toward finding an acceptable solution for the matching problem. The proposed methods can be used to deal with the incompleteness of the thematic information in metric maps.