A QUANTITATIVE APPROACH MEASURING STREETSCAPE

Abstract

Since 1960s, Kevin Lynch had raised the importance of people’s perception of urban space, as the part of it, the role of street spaces became very important, so did the streetscape in the research and design aspects. Usually photo pictures or street perspective drawings are used to indicate the streetscape for studying, which means that three-dimensional street space has to turn into a two-dimensional object. For this reason many researches have tried to study photo pictures or street perspective drawings for developing a spatial measuring tool, our work belongs to this field. The previous study has shown that street widths and heights of side buildings could be evaluated based upon a streetscape image or a perspective drawing, however, there are questions needed to answer. If a street photo reflects streetscape of human’s view experience, how perspective drawings can refer to the relevant street photo? What are the regularities between a street width, a building height, its position and lines of a drawing? And how we should judge if the height of an object in perspective refers to the real height of the building in the city. All those questions are worthwhile to be studied for urban design. This research has tried to develop a method or a tool for measuring urban street spaces based upon the street perspective drawings. Various street experimental digital models have been built according to the urban regulations and 2D measurement scales have been established simultaneously for measuring and a statistical analysis. Through the statistical analysis we have found the answer, and then a measuring tool has been made. Finally, we have validated the tool by testing a real street view, the results will be discussed. This experiment successfully shows the possibility of street space measurement by using 2D perspective drawing, which is a useful tool for architects and urban designers.