Visual Quality Assessment of Urban Scenes with the Contemplative Landscape Model: Evidence from a Compact City Downtown Core

Abstract

In the face of rapid urbanization and the growing burden of mental health disease, there is a need to design cities with consideration for human mental health and well-being. There is an emerging body of evidence on the importance of everyday environmental exposures regarding the mental health of city inhabitants. For example, contemplative landscapes, through a series of neuroscience experiments, were shown to trigger improved mood and restoration of attention. While the Contemplative Landscape Model (CLM) for scoring landscape views was applied to single images, its suitability was never tested for walking paths and areas with a diversity of viewpoints. This study aims to fill this gap using the high-density downtown of Singapore, also known as a “City in a Garden” for its advanced urban greening strategies, as a case study. In this study, 68 360° photos were taken along four popular walking paths every 20 m. A photo set of 204 items was created by extracting three view angles from each photo. Each of them was independently scored by three experts and average CLM scores for each view and path were obtained. The results were then fed into an open-source Quantum Geographic Information System (QGIS) for visualization. Cohen’s kappa agreement between experts’ scores was computed. The outcomes were mapped to facilitate the identification of the most contemplative viewpoints and paths. Moreover, specific contemplative landscape patterns have been distinguished and assessed allowing the recommendation of design strategies to improve the quality of viewpoints and paths. The inter-rater agreement reached substantial to perfect values. CLM is a reliable and suitable tool that enables the fine-grained assessment and improvement of the visual quality of the urban living environments with consideration of the mental health and well-being of urbanites. It can be used at a larger scale owing to 360° photos taken from the pedestrian’s point of view. Utilizing spatially explicit maps in QGIS platforms enables a wider range of visualizations and allows for spatial patterns to be revealed that otherwise would have remained hidden. Our findings demonstrate the usefulness of our semi-automated method. Furthermore, given the high inter-rater agreement observed, we suggest that there is potential in developing fully automated methods.

The Associations of Built Environment with Older People Recreational Walking and Physical Activity in a Chinese Small-Scale City of Yiwu

“…Except the perceived evaluation of aesthetics, aesthetics could be also evaluated by objective method like contemplative landscape model (CLM) as previous study suggested. CLM is useful for distinguishing and assessing landscape patterns and providing suggestions for urban greening strategy [ 57 ]. Therefore, how to build a pleasing aesthetics environment to increase older people’s RA and RPA is a vital consideration for policy decision makers in China, especially for the small-scale city as the results suggested in this study.…”

The Impact of the Ring Roads on the Location Pattern of Shops in Town and City Centres. A Space Syntax Approach

“…Bridges and tunnels are solved through the unlink lines function in the space syntax software. There are current developments going on for making three dimensional spatial analyses methods [34]. The purpose is to apply these methods on urban centres where movement flows takes place on several levels.…”

Chaos in Motion: Measuring Visual Pollution with Tangential View Landscape Metrics

“…The Area, Dmax, and SL metrics were all found to be directionally sensitive indicators, which demonstrated how the pedestrian perception of a cityscape may vary with their direction of movement. These findings are valuable as directional approaches to landscape research that address the human visual field of view are gaining traction in favor of generalized 360-degree analysis [87].…”