Development of Urban Landscape Design Procedure through Psychometric Methods.

Abstract

This paper develops simple and convenient methods of estimating the numerical value of psychological rating of a street space in a city center. More than twenty physical elements comprised in a street space are taken to describe the space condition in a mathematical way of expression. The measurement data of the elements were collected from more than two hundred street spaces. In order to obtain the data of psychological rating values several color pictures taken at each of the street paces were administered to a group of subjects with instruction to check categories which best indicated their degree of like or dislike for the space. Data from those category ratings were transformed in accordance with some scaling models to yield psychological scale values. Analyses were carried out by four multivariate statistical methods to obtain models which should estimate the psychological rating from measurements of the physical elements of the street space. The resulting models were applied to estimate the effect of improvement plans of some real streets to demonstrate that they can be of practical use.