Measurement and Spatial Distribution of Perception in Urban Blocks from the Perspective of Landscape Service

Abstract

As an important spatial environment for residents’ daily life and recreation, urban blocks provide not only material products, but also landscape services at the level of spiritual perception, and are thus deemed as the key to improving human well-being. Previous researches mainly rely on limited data sources, and thus can hardly quantitatively analyze the perception of large-scale urban areas, which is not conducive to the improvement of the landscape service evaluation system. Based on streetscape data, this research extracts three visual landscape elements of urban outdoor environment, namely green view index, sky view index and building view index. Additionally, the research measures the six indicators of safety, vitality, beautifulness, wealthiness, depression and boringness concerning residents’ perception of urban blocks, and reveals the relationship between visual landscape elements and residents’ spiritual perception through multiple linear regression analysis. Research results show that, green, blue and grey urban spaces all present the law of aggregation in correspondence to urban functional characteristics. Specifically, green visual elements are relatively scarce overall; there exists a significant spatial variation between positive perception and negative perception; the green view index has a highly significant positive effect on the overall perception of residents. By measuring the perception of urban block landscape on a large scale, this research provides a new idea and method for landscape service evaluation, in hope of providing guidance for future landscape improvement and city renovation.