A livingscape approach to characterize urban historical places

Abstract

The quality of life concerned with open spaces has more and more become an essential part of urban culture. The evaluation of environmental effects as perceived by people is primarily a subjective issue, rather than being simply based on objective parameters. This paper presents an approach called livingscape, used to assess the quality of urban spaces. It consists of analyzing and correlating psychometric tools to measure the perception of environmental quality with different aspects related to the urban blight (both in architectural and environmental terms) and objective investigation of environmental quality through the measurement of acoustic, visual, thermal, and IAQ physical parameters. Livingscape data were collected in 13 key-spaces of St. Salvario, an historical district in Turin (Italy), during summer 2010 and winter 2011, selected based on an historical analysis to characterize the past and present district soundscape and subdivided in nodes, paths, and edges. The subjective environmental perceptions are delineated through the analysis of the questionnaires submitted to the users of the area, outdoor. Objective measures (acoustical, lighting, and thermal parameters) were combined to subjective responses, thus providing a more complete key-spaces characterization. The investigation aims to describe the changes in the key-spaces characterization from 19th century to nowadays.