Liked and Disliked Streetscape Imagery: Relation to Emotional Motivation and Block Distribution From Tourist Bus Visitors

Abstract

Streetscape is an important factor that forms the image of a city. The visual value and preference in streetscape images need to be measured by examining the interaction between places and visitors in the real environment. The study applied a method to recognize and evaluate urban streetscape from the perspective of tour bus passengers, and proved its effectiveness in streetscape visual attraction research. In this study, a visitor-employed photography (VEP) survey was conducted along 32 blocks on the No. 1 urban tour bus (with an average speed of 28 km/h) in Suzhou, China; the visual attributes and significance of urban streetscapes were recognized through empirical research on tour bus visitors’ on-site experience. The researcher cultivated the emotional motivations and block distribution captured by 30 respondents through analyzing the types of photos the respondents liked and disliked. The results of this study show that, in general, positive streetscape types tend to be of regional landscape, with cultural and readable emotional motivations. Negative streetscape types tend to be of modern architecture and construction sites, with unreadable and unattractive emotional motivations. The block cluster analysis, based on the average frequency/km of positive and negative streetscape photos, shows that the four block unit clusters were perceived by visitors with deviation between the land use image and the planned land use. The bus VEP method revealed that the visual attractiveness and preferences of streetscape were highly context-specific, rather than for performance.