The Prediction of Preference for Familiar Urban Places

Abstract

The experience of the urban environment was studied in terms of how it is categorized, what people's preferences are, and the extent to which complexity and familiarity can account for these preferences. College students rated urban scenes on these three variables under three methods of scene presentation: Slides, Label (name and location), and Imagery (Label with instructions to imagine the scene). A nonmetric factor analysis of the preference ratings for the Slide condition yielded five urban dimensions: Cultural, Contemporary, Commercial, Entertainment, and Campus. The pattern of results was virtually identical across the three presentation conditions. The five urban dimensions differed significantly in terms of each of the rating scales. Both complexity and familiarity were factors in accounting for the obtained preferences, pointing to the need for examining a variety of predictor variables. At the same time, the fact that the pattern of relationships was quite different across the content dimensions points to the need for caution in interpreting results based on relatively global prediction of preference.