The Evaluation of Urban Neighbourhoods 1: Perception

Abstract

Studies of residential location have shown that intraurban migrants usually confine their search for a house to areas which they consider suitable and of which they have strong images. Multidimensional scaling was used to examine neighbourhood perception among a sample of residents in Dublin, Ireland. The social status of the neighbourhoods was the most important characteristic perceived, and this was closely related to objective indices of socioeconomic status. The familiarity and housing style of the areas were also considered. There was a high degree of consensus in the perception of these attributes, and individual differences in the importance attached to them were only tenuously related to the characteristics of the respondents. The use of the perceived attributes for the formation of preferences is examined in a second paper.

Divided Cities: Increasing Socio-Spatial Polarization within Large Cities in the Netherlands

“…While it could be argued that subjective measures are unstable over time, are incomparable across individuals, and might not correlate with objective measures (McCrea et al, 2006;Veenhoven, 2007); subjective measures are important because they drive individual behaviour (Logan and Collver, 1983;Rabe and Taylor, 2010). Moreover, research has shown that people have the ability to rank local areas by socioeconomic status and that people from different income groups generally share the same general perception of neighbourhood status (Coleman and Neugarten, 1972;Hourihan, 1979;Semyonov and Kraus, 1982;Logan and Collver, 1983;Permentier et al, 2011). As such, we believe that the subjective indicators can be used as proxies for neighbourhood social status and we will henceforth refer to them as social status indicators.…”

Identifying the dimensions to retail centre image

“…Such an approach leads to a consideration of behavioural research methodologies such as MDS that aim to identify "in the head" processes. Within the area of property market research MDS has been applied as a means of understanding residential choice and hence price (Hourihan, 1979), weighting of property attributes and hence value (Horner, 1984), as well as retail centre image and hence patronage (Jain and Etgar, 1977;Burt and Carralero-Encinas, 2000). Based on a large sample of professional valuers in Sydney, Parker (1997) was able to identify the relative positions in perceptual space of capitalisation rate determinants such as planning, location, alternative investments, economic environment, tenant and risk assessment.…”

Neighbourhood Perception, Preference, and Household Mobility in the Glasgow Private Housing Market

“…Everitt and Cadwallader (1981) and Pacione (1983) have delimited perceived home-area boundaries based on the results of questionnaire survey, and have related these to life-styles, activity spaces, and patterns of community and social interaction. Bible andBrown (1981), Cadwallader (1979), and Hourihan (1979) have used techniques ranging from simple importance ratings to multidimensional scaling in an attempt to assess the relevance of different housing and neighbourhood attributes for different groups of households. More recently still, Smith and Clark in their work on housingmarket search behaviour (1982a; 1982b) have studied the entire search process at the scale of the individual dwelling and household, commencing with presearch location and following through the characteristics and spatial distribution of all intermediate housing alternatives, before arriving finally at the outcome choice of the present or current residence.…”

“…(4) Examples of the graphic display of the positions of city and neighbourhood stimuli in the cognitive spaces of different groups of respondents are provided by Lueck (1976, pages 287-290),Hourihan (1979Hourihan ( , page 1346, andDemko (1974 pages 25-30).…”