Subscribe to WIRED Magazine  Can ‘Hot or Not’ Help Us Design
Better Cities?  Place Pulse is an online tool developed by MIT
researchers that gauges people’s emotional responses to their
surroundings.  Within seconds of walking through an unfamiliar
neighborhood, you can already tell whether or not you feel
comfortable. Little visual cues help you out: Things like
graffiti, cracked pavement and empty streets might speed up your
heartbeat, while bright lights, clean buildings and bustling
sidewalks probably make you feel safe. These gut feelings are
just that—feelings, but they help you decide if you’re going to
wander around and discover a new restaurant or get back on the
subway as fast as possible, which ultimately has an impact on a
neighborhood’s health.  Social scientists have long suspected
that a neighborhood’s aesthetic value might be a good gauge of
its safety and vitality, but the proof was slippery. After all,
it’s not easy to quantify an emotional response to a graffiti
tag. But two years ago, that