Stimulating urban walking environments – Can we measure the effect?

Helge Hillnhütter

doi:10.1177/23998083211002839

Abstract

Walking is an outdoor mobility. Understanding how urban environments influence the experience of walking enables walking to be supported through urban planning and design. This research demonstrates that the effect of a stimulating walking environment is a measurable factor. Psychological knowledge provides a background for quantifying the amount of visual stimulus that pedestrians receive unconsciously from the surrounding environment. While walking, people capture the visual environment through frequent head movements. By looking downwards to the walking surface, pedestrians turn away from what surrounds them. Socially active urban squares and pedestrian streets are highly stimulating. Head movements increase by 71% and looking down decreases by 54%, compared to environments designed for cars. Underpasses are the least stimulating. Head movements drop by 64% and time looked down increases by 164% in an underpass, compared to the busiest urban square in the study. A second analysis introduces a method to quantitatively represent the visual walking environment. Two multiple linear regression statistics uncover the environmental features that attract pedestrians’ visual attention. If not crossing streets, pedestrians do not look at cars; they look at other people, non-monotonous facades and green features. Shop windows receive prolonged viewings, to inspect what is going on behind transparent facades. Narrower streets are more stimulating, as more details are closer to the eyes. The distance at which human sense organs can collect sensory information from the environment is limited. Walking environments that do not fit with this human scale are less stimulating.

Highlights

Walking is an important part of urban mobility but is often not considered as a form of transport (Pooley et al, 2014)
This research focuses on three questions: 1. How can we investigate the amount of stimulation that pedestrians receive from their walking environment?
When we investigate the influence of differing environmental characteristics on head movements, we gain some insight into the environmental features that attract pedestrians visually

Summary

Introduction

Walking is an important part of urban mobility but is often not considered as a form of transport (Pooley et al, 2014). Collecting visual information while being mobile requires frequent head and eye movements. Visual information, collected through eye and head movements, is assembled in the human brain into a panoramic picture of the surrounding environment (Gibson, 1950: 157–158). On the basis of the initial unstructured observations, more structured observations allow head movements to be counted and the time pedestrians look down in different walking environments to be measured. Observations at sites 01–12 in Table 1 investigated the variation in head movements between car-dominated and pedestrian-oriented walking environments. More interesting is to understand whether and how features of walking environments, like trees or building facades, increase pedestrians’ visual attention Such understanding provides information on how to plan and design stimulating walking environments in cities. The number of seconds people looked down per minute is included as a linear control variable in the regression for head movements

1: Variation in head movements in 18 walking environments

2: The influence of seven environmental features on head movements

Findings

Discussion of the methodology

Conclusion