Master of Landscape Architecture / Department of Landscape Architecture/Regional & Community Planning / Brent Chamberlain / Narratives of urban experiences influence understanding of space and urban form. Narratives give meaning to space, creating memories of places and helping to define an individual’s cognitive map. The representation of narratives within cognitive maps impacts day to day activities, as well as, emotional, cultural, and social characteristics of one’s self. Planners and designers play an important role in crafting narratives through the implementation of designs and policies that together shape urban form. This research investigates the relationship between spatial cognitive schemas and narratives within cognitive maps. Specifically, how college students develop and use narratives within their cognitive map to help with living in a new and initially unfamiliar place of residence. Through mixed method analysis of drawn individual cognitive maps, an online survey, and a group discussion, results show that different types of experiences within narratives influence the likelihood of it appearing within the spatial cognitive schema. The findings suggest that narratives created by peak emotional experiences contain a longer and clearer representation within cognitive maps because of their personal value. By better understanding the role of these emotional responses and their connection with urban form, design professionals can aim to frame projects toward influencing individual’s lives. Understanding how individuals develop narratives of their new city may influence planning and design with the goal of creating urban projects that provide social and cultural significance through meaning of place.

Rapporten handlar om olika metoder för att lokalisera smartphones och skapandet av en Androidapplikation. Applikationen skulle visualisera Campusområdet vid Örebro universitet för att öka medvetenheten och säkerhetskänslan för personer som är där kvällar och nätter. Implementationen av systemet beskrivs tillsammans med de problem som uppstod, samt dess lösningar. / The report is about different methods of localizing smartphones and the creation of an Android application. The application should visualize the Campus for Örebro university to raise awareness and the sense of security for people who are there at night. The implementation of the system is described along with the problems during development, and how they were solved.

The fast-developing industry of electric vehicles is growing, and so is the driver community, which puts pressure on the electric charging grid. The purpose of this thesis is to simplify for the drivers of electric cars to charge their cars during trips. The research questions investigated are” How do the technologies and algorithms behind navigation APIs differ from each other?” and “What information is provided by the charging station APIs and how do they collect data about new stations?”. Information for the thesis was collected by reading and analyzing both documentation and previous work, as well as by conducting experiments. The study was limited to purely electric vehicles. We created an application to conduct experiments on the API combination Mapbox and Open Charge Map, we call it ChargeX. We compare, TomTom, Tesla, Plugshare, Google Maps and ChargeX. The most common shortest-path algorithms are Dijkstra’s, A* and Bidirectional A*. They provide reasonable solutions to the shortest path problem. The algorithms can be improved by considering traffic flow, travel time and distance between origin and destination and apply it as weights on the edges. What has the largest impact on the final route is the choice of charging stations. The algorithm for picking charging stations can be optimized in several ways for example by considering real time availability information of the charging stations, prioritize highways, calculate the temperature and altitude impact on the battery or prioritize faster chargers such as superchargers for Tesla.