ABSTRACT
We have been interested in behaviours people exhibit in public spaces of the city. Particularly, we take interest in behaviours which are volitional and are often unscripted. One of those involves consuming food in public space. There are a variety of public spaces in which food may be consumed: indoor restaurants, sporting arenas, public lobbies, parks, patios, etc. In this paper, we train our attention on the public street/sidewalk. Sometimes—perhaps often—people eat while walking on the street. We hypothesized that number of eaters is influenced by social facilitation—eaters slowly instigate non-eaters. We collected survey data on likelihood of eating on street. We extracted parameters into an agent-based model and conducted multiple runs.
