Measuring Visual Attractiveness of Urban Commercial Street Using Wearable Cameras: A Case Study of Gubei Gold Street in Shanghai

Abstract

Being a significant part of urban public spaces, streets are crucial to the organization of urban space. With the sustained progress of the construction of human spiritual civilization, streets with certain display attributes such as urban commercial streets have increasingly gained importance in displaying the city's history and cultural heritage. As an important indicator, visual appeal plays an indispensable role in promoting the vitality of streets. However, due to limitations by the existing evaluation tools, there is no consensus in the academic community on measuring the visual appeal of streets. With the constant development of science and technology, scholars have begun to explore the possibility of applying emerging technologies and equipment in the field of built environment research. New technologies make studies more scientifically sound, objective, and efficient than traditional methods. This study mostly adopts the collective perspective or studies the physical space of the built environment, and the research based on the individual perspective is relatively limited. The emergence of wearable cameras provides more margin in monitoring spatial behavior from a personal perspective. This paper takes Gubei Gold Street as the research area to explore the possibility of applying wearable cameras in the measurement of street space visual quality. The study set up 6 research groups consisting of two people each. All of them used wearable cameras to record information. They then performed image recognition on 11 pieces of video information and 1,174 pictures collected by researchers through manual recognition in a single day. Based on the results of manual identification, the study analyzes the characteristics of individual behavior, physical space elements of streets, and crowd perception characteristics. The study found that street furniture, shops, crowd vitality, and greening level are the visual elements intricately linked to the visual appeal of commercial streets and put forward four design principles: flexible furniture layout, reasonable greening level, conforming to business models and adhering to the cultural connotation. This series of efforts proves that it is feasible to study the attractiveness of commercial streets from the perspective of visual perception. Data collection using wearable cameras provides a novel research idea for the built environment from an individual perspective, preserving the site to the greatest extent possible. At the same time as spatiotemporal information, real-time monitoring of the investigators’ behavior circumvents the issues regarding discontinuous data collection and single dimensions in previous studies. It is a research method with great potential.