The Aalborg Survey / Part 3 - Interview Based Survey: Diverse Urban Spaces (DUS)

Background and purpose
The Aalborg Survey consists of four independent parts: a web, GPS and an interview based survey and a literature study, which together form a consistent investigation and research into use of urban space, and specifically into young people’s use of urban space: what young people do in urban spaces, where they are in the urban spaces and when the young people are in the urban spaces.
The answers to these questions form the framework and enable further academic discussions and conclusions in relation to the overall research project Diverse Urban Spaces (DUS). The primary aim of the DUS research project is to investigate why young people do what they do in the urban spaces, and how this knowledge can contribute to an increase in young people’s use of urban spaces.
It is the overall aim of the DUS research project to facilitate an increased and more diverse use of urban spaces, and consequently young people are used as target group, as they represent the future users of urban spaces. Moreover, it is easy to get in touch with young people through educational institutions and schools, which makes it possible to carry out the investigations in a fairly simple way, economically and logistically, and further enables eventual reproduction of similar empirical data.
The DUS research project is related to the general research focus found within the Urban Design section at Institute of Architecture, Design and Media Technology (AD:MT), Aalborg University (AAU) and the research focus within the cluster of Mobility and Tracking Technologies (MoTT), AAU.

Summary / Part 3 - Interview Based Survey
The 3rd part of the DUS research project has been carried out during the fall of 2009 and the summer and fall of 2010 as an interview based survey of 18 selected participants (nine boys and nine girls) from Part 2 – GPS based survey, who are still enrolled at the same school as they were during the GPS based survey.
This interview based survey supplements the quantitative data on young people’s use of urban space in Aalborg from the Web and GPS based surveys in part 1 and 2 with additional and more detailed qualitative data on these young people’s use of urban space in Aalborg. In the interviews the respondents are asked about their
use of urban space in relation to attractiveness, gender, protection against violence and crime, the internet, atmosphere and, finally, green urban spaces.