Street perceptions: A study of visual preferences for New Zealand streetscapes

Abstract

City leaders often make reference to their built and natural environments when they compete domestically or internationally for financial investment, tourism spending and high quality workers. These leaders are aware that people in the workforce, investors and tourists would prefer to be associated with vibrant and attractive places. Research has confirmed the important role the appearance of the built environment plays in people’s physical, financial and psychological wellbeing, not the least of which is helping to foster a sense of individual and community pride. However, there is also literature critical of the appearance of many individual buildings and urban streetscapes, particularly those that have arisen through the well-intentioned but uncoordinated efforts of those involved in the development of individual sites.

Recognising that wider public interests have not always been well-served by private development, governments and local authorities become involved to control development outcomes. One aspect of development control is design review, which aims to improve the quality of urban places by influencing the design of individual buildings. However, given that design review is administered by professional experts and that design guidance is based on normative expressions of what good design should be, what assurances are there that urban transformation meets with public expectations? The research reported in this thesis addresses this question.

This research seeks to identify those streetscape design characteristics that are best liked by people and those that they dislike. A methodology based on mixed research methods was developed. An initial study sought people’s preferences for six different urban streetscapes, as depicted photographically. Analysis of nearly 200 responses to the survey questionnaire identified several building and streetscape characteristics that were consistently liked and disliked. To explore these and other responses from another perspective, a second study was designed that would examine people’s preferences in more detail and on the basis of their actual experience of the streetscapes. Study Two was developed around three separate case studies and two focus group discussions. Demographic information about the 156 survey respondents was collected, along with their aesthetic perceptions about individual buildings, relationships between buildings and overall streetscapes. This enabled comparisons to be made on the bases of gender, age and occupational background. Of particular interest was to understand the streetscape preferences of lay members of the public, those whose interests design review aims to ensure, and change professionals, who make the design and planning decisions. Two focus group discussions were convened, one for change professionals and the other for lay people, to explore findings from the survey in more detail.

The results indicate that people prefer older buildings whose façade designs are based on more traditional composition patterns, and that the activities with which a building is associated have considerable influence on perceptions. These are two matters about which design control of new building development is not interested. In general, people prefer moderate variations in height between buildings along the length of a street and change professionals seem to tolerate/prefer bigger variations than others. Abrupt differences in height between adjoining buildings were viewed negatively by lay people, in large part because blank walls on internal boundaries become evident. On the other hand, change professionals were less sensitive to such differences, in part because they understood the nature of change and anticipated that future change would help heal such conflicts.

In addition to exploring people’s perceptions of New Zealand streetscapes the thesis discusses several of the best-liked and the least-liked buildings in the context of design control processes in order to speculate about which methods might hold the greatest promise for creating well-liked urban streetscapes. While this discussion is relevant it sits outside the main thrust of the project and is necessarily brief. In anticipation that this discussion will continue the thesis concludes with a summary of the matters around which design control could, and perhaps should, be interested, based on the collected evidence. The findings of the research help us to better understand how people perceive urban streetscapes and therefore these become a platform for future work, one aspect of which could explore how people’s preferences can be better integrated with development control.