Measuring the relationships between landscape aesthetics suitability and spatial patterns of urbanized lands: an informed modelling framework for developing urban growth scenarios

Abstract

This study develops an informed modelling approach that follows a bottom-up planning strategy to define plausible urban growth scenarios. In this case, landscape aesthetics suitability of the area was first generated using multi-criteria evaluation method. Then, a buffer zone of 1 km was considered to extract the average values of aesthetics suitability scores surrounding urban patches with medium physical size (10–30 hectares). The averaged values were considered as the dependent variable. In the next step, landscape metrics of these urban patches, as explanatory variables, were also computed to measure compositional and configuration-based attributes of urban clusters. Bivariate associations (Pearson correlation analysis) and statistical relationships (linear regression algorithm) between landscape metrics and their associated aesthetics values were measured and modelled. According to the results, both composition and configuration values are significantly correlated to the dependent variable in which configuration-based attributes depicted a stronger explanatory power.

Keywords:

• Urban growth scenarios
• landscape aesthetics suitability mapping
• landscape metrics
• linear regression
• urban planning