Assessing the perception of urban visual quality: an approach integrating big data and geostatistical techniques

Abstract

Human well-being is affected by the design quality of the city in which they live and walk. This depends primarily on specific physical characteristics and how they are aggregated together. Many studies have highlighted the great potential of photographic data shared on the Flickr platform for analyzing environmental perceptions in landscape and urban planning. Other researchers have used panoramic images from the Google Street View (GSV) web service to extract data on urban quality. However, at the urban level, there are no studies correlating quality perceptions detected by social media platforms with spatial geographic characteristics through geostatistical models. This work proposes the analysis of urban quality in different areas of the Livorno city through a methodological approach based on Geographical Random Forest regression. The result offers important insights into the physical characteristics of a street environment that contribute to the more abstract qualities of urban design.

Understanding the dynamics and factors affecting cultural ecosystem services during urbanization through spatial pattern analysis and a mixed-methods approach

“…The kernel density method is a flexible and popular model to use point data for approximating regions (Wu et al, 2019). It produces a circular area (kernel) of a certain bandwidth around an indicator by fitting a smooth surface over each point based upon a quadratic kernel function of point density (Sottini et al, 2018). This study used a 500 m search radius as the circular neighborhood in the 30 m raster map, following the precedent of Fagerholm et al (2019), Guerrero et al (2016), andPeng et al (2019).…”

Research for Rural Development 2023 : annual 29th international scientific conference proceedings

“…Jovanovska et al (2020) were combining two data collection methods and adapted the visual quality index method once again by using remote and field observations of the Shar Planina mountain landscapes. Two other methods are based on landscape visual values, viewshed modelling which calculates the object diversity in a view and the views from specific points in landscape (Swetnam, Harrison-Curran, & Smith, 2017;Van Berkel et al, 2018;Yoshimura & Hiura, 2017) and nowadays more and more popular geo-tagged photo analysis method derived from social media (Havinga et al, 2021;Sottini et al, 2019;Van Berkel et al, 2018;Yoshimura & Hiura, 2017). Social media photo analysis methods can give an insight into tourist and local inhabitant preferences regarding landscape aesthetics and also point out the demand and supply of CES (Yoshimura & Hiura, 2017).…”

Stewardship and everyday governance: Managing materialities in a south‐eastern village community, Estonia

“…Valuable strategies for obtaining individual place‐based wisdom through stewardship are explained through individually oriented place‐based concepts such as sense of place or place attachment, including the subjective perceptions of the landscape and place preferences (Chapin, 2017; Sottini et al., 2018). Individual place attachment resonates with care, knowledge and agency (Enqvist et al., 2018), where care is directly connected to individual place attachment and the knowledge of the past (Spek, 2017, p. 154), which offers self‐trust in local self‐actualisation (Stobbelaar & Pedroli, 2011).…”