Abstract
ABSTRACTThis study provides empirical insight into the extent to which pedestrians visually engage with urban street edges and how social and spatial factors impact such engagement. This was achieved using mobile eye-tracking. The gaze distribution of 24 study participants was systematically recorded as they carried out everyday tasks on differing streets. The findings demonstrated that street edges are the most visually engaged component of streets; that street edge visual engagement is impacted by everyday social tasks as well as the spatial and physical materiality of edges on differing streets; and that street edges, which attract a lot of visual engagement while undertaking optional tasks, also attract greater amounts of visual engagement while undertaking necessary tasks. These findings offer new insight into urban street edge engagement from the direct perspective of street inhabitants and in doing so provide greater understanding of how street edges are experienced.
Highlights
Street edges are frequently considered the most experientially important component of urban streets (Bobic 2004; Glaser et al 2012; Thwaites, Simkins, and Mathers 2013; Heffernan, Heffernan, and Pan 2014; Kickert 2016)
The current investigation provides insight into the extent to which pedestrians visually engage with urban street edges and how this engagement is influenced by different everyday social tasks and differing streets with varying street edges
It achieves this through using mobile eye-tracking glasses, which captured study participants’ gaze distribution on the environment around them as they walked along urban streets
Summary
Street edges are frequently considered the most experientially important component of urban streets (Bobic 2004; Glaser et al 2012; Thwaites, Simkins, and Mathers 2013; Heffernan, Heffernan, and Pan 2014; Kickert 2016). Using mobile eye-tracking outdoors has provided insight into a range of different everyday urban actions, e.g. how people visually attend to and negotiate differing paths and stairs (Marius’t Hart and Einhäuser 2012); how people distribute gaze differently across night and day (Davoudian and Raynham 2012; Fotios et al 2014); and how people use maps during real-world wayfinding (Kiefer, Giannopoulos, and Raubal 2013; Koletsis et al 2017) This current study builds upon these precedents, using mobile eye-tracking to capture insight into people’s visual engagement with street edges as they walk along a number of urban streets while undertaking differing everyday tasks. Building on limited existing evidence, it is hypothesized that street edges that attract a lot of visual engagement while undertaking optional tasks will attract greater amounts of visual engagement while undertaking necessary tasks (Gehl 2010; Thwaites, Simkins, and Mathers 2013; Simpson 2018)
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