Why does the perception of street matter? A dimensional analysis of multisensory social and physical attributes shaping the perception of streets

ABSTRACT

Perception of space is a multifaceted process, where humans may direct their behaviour within the environment through the influence of sensory stimuli, cognitive processing and subjective evaluation. Yet in streets, perceptual studies commonly focus on the physical structure of the environment while undermining the psychological and subjective components that shape the environmental perception. This paper has adopted a perceptual-cognitive approach to construct a multisensory perceptual social and physical model. It addresses visual, auditory, haptic, and olfactory stimuli as well as pedestrians’ preference score to extract main components of the street perception. Critical review of the literature, the expert’s validation, a pilot study, and the exploratory factor analysis are thoroughly used in this study. Factor analysis extracted eight components associated with perception, including Sociability, Mobility, Convenience, Contentment, Urbanization, Pollution, Safety, and Nature. The results exhibit and discuss the latent correlations between street attributes and perception.

KEYWORDS:

• Urban street
• built environment
• pedestrians’ experience
• perceptual model
• social and physical attributes
• sensory stimuli

Acknowledgement

This paper is based on the study that is done in partial fulfilment of an extensive empirical study, which is funded by Fundamental Research Grant Scheme FP059-2018A programme.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This paper is based on the study that is done in partial fulfilment of an extensive empirical study, which is funded by University of Malaya Fundamental Research Grant Scheme programme no. FP059-2018A (FRGS/1/2018/WAB03/UM/02/3).