Abstract
This article reviews current research in visual urban perception. The temporal sequence of the first few milliseconds of visual stimulus processing sheds light on the historically ambiguous topic of aesthetic experience. Automatic fractal processing triggers initial attraction/avoidance evaluations of an environment’s salubriousness, and its potentially positive or negative impacts upon an individual. As repeated cycles of visual perception occur, the attractiveness of urban form affects the user experience much more than had been previously suspected. These perceptual mechanisms promote walkability and intuitive navigation, and so they support the urban and civic interactions for which we establish communities and cities in the first place. Therefore, the use of multiple fractals needs to reintegrate with biophilic and traditional architecture in urban design for their proven positive effects on health and well-being. Such benefits include striking reductions in observers’ stress and mental fatigue. Due to their costs to individual well-being, urban performance, environmental quality, and climatic adaptation, this paper recommends that nontraditional styles should be hereafter applied judiciously to the built environment.
Highlights
Introduction and BackgroundSince the first cities, human needs were the primary drivers in creating built environments
Evidence shows that understanding aesthetic experience requires biological underpinnings that help to explain how the aesthetic experience promotes better walkability and navigation
Based on the collective literature review, we jointly identified common themes that re-appeared in several fields, namely: fractal dimensionality, beauty or aesthetic pleasure, visual perceptual processing and their associations with well-being and movement or navigation in one’s environment
Summary
Human needs were the primary drivers in creating built environments. Following other directions and exigencies adopted since World War I, urban design nowadays often causes physical and psychological distress to humans, the environment, and the planet. Planners and designers have been challenged by what to lay people is obvious—the necessity of biologically-based beauty, appropriate urban scale, and the possibility of extending or embellishing traditional environments without marring them. Today we know that aesthetics play a central role in judgments of built environments. We aim to support civic and urban interaction through making beautiful cities. The present article necessarily mixes qualitative and quantitative approaches. We review here the quantitative evidence from psychology and neuroscience to substantiate qualitative claims about the necessary changes in how we design the built environment
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