Abstract
Urban green space provides a series of esthetic, environmental and psychological benefits to urban residents. However, the relationship between the visibility of green vegetation and perceived safety is still in debate. This research investigated whether green vegetation could help to increase the perceived safety based on a crowdsourced dataset: the Place Pulse 1.0 dataset. Place Pulse 1.0 dataset, which was generated from a large number of votes by online participants, includes geo-tagged Google Street View images and the corresponding perceived safety score for each image. In this study, we conducted statistical analyses to analyze the relationship between perceived safety and green vegetation characteristics, which were extracted from Google Street View images. Results show that the visibility of green vegetation plays an important role in increasing perceived safety in urban areas. For different land use types, the relationship between vegetation structures and perceived safety varies. In residential, urban public/institutional, commercial and open land areas, the visibility of vegetation higher than 2.5 m has significant positive correlations with perceived safety, but there exists no significant correlation between perceived safety and the percentage of green vegetation in transportation and industrial areas. The visibility of vegetation below 2.5 m has no significant relationship with the perceived safety in almost all land use types, except for multifamily residential land and urban public/institutional land. In general, this study provided insight for the relationship between green vegetation characteristics and the perception of environment, as well as valuable reference data for developing urban greening programs.
Highlights
Urban green spaces have long been recognized as critical landscape design elements in urban environments [1,2,3]
Bivariate correlation analysis was conducted to investigate the correlations between the perceived safety and percentage of green vegetation and image quality (Table 2) for all Place Pulse sites
Statistical analysis results based on crowdsourced dataset Place Pulse 1.0 show that the visibility of vegetation and vegetation vertical distribution both affect human perceived safety in Greater Boston
Summary
Urban green spaces (i.e., trees, shrubs, lawns and other forms of vegetation) have long been recognized as critical landscape design elements in urban environments [1,2,3]. Urban green spaces provide many benefits for the human wellbeing and health. There is increasing interest in studying the relationship between the amount of green space and perceived safety in urban areas in the literature [4,5]. Different from actual safety, perceived safety is an experienced feeling that is often connected to the fear of crime and other unsafe perception factors [5]. Low perceived safety could affect human behaviors, which could cause further negative consequences. Li et al [8] found that low perceived safety causes the elderly to lose the possibility for a physically-active life. It was reported that fear of crime has a negative relationship with mental and physical health [9,10]
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