Abstract

Problem, research strategy, and findings:

City leaders are under pressure to increase urban residential density to provide affordable housing and meet sustainability objectives. Yet despite the advantages of urban densification, communities throughout North America persistently oppose new developments and housing projects in their neighborhoods. The impact of residential densification on the quality of life for existing residents is ambiguous. In this study we focus on measuring the impact of one key aspect of urban densification: the perceived quality of public space. We use an experimental design to increase pedestrians and stationary users in a pedestrianized green street for randomly selected periods over 3 weeks. We collected surveys with and without our pedestrian treatment and find that adding users to a residential street decreased the perceived quality of the space overall. The changes in perceptions were small yet significant and illustrate the real tradeoffs that planners must consider when increasing urban density in cities, especially in lower density residential communities.

Takeaway for practice:

Increasing the number of public users in a residential neighborhood may slightly decrease the perceived quality of the public space. Women’s perceptions differ from those of men, and women are more sensitive to the addition of public users. We illustrate how planners may use public life experiments to anticipate how the public might respond to future changes in the public realm.

中文翻译：

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住宅密集化对公共空间感知的影响

摘要

问题，研究策略和发现：

城市领导者承受着增加城市居民密度以提供经济适用房和实现可持续发展目标的压力。尽管城市致密化有很多优势，但北美各地的社区始终反对社区附近的新发展和住房项目。住宅密集化对现有居民生活质量的影响是模棱两可的。在这项研究中，我们专注于衡量城市致密化一个关键方面的影响：感知到的公共空间质量。我们采用实验设计，在3周的随机选择时间内，增加了行人专用绿色街道上的行人和固定用户。我们收集了有或没有行人待遇的调查，发现将用户添加到住宅街道会降低整体空间的感知质量。

外卖练习：

住宅区中公共用户数量的增加可能会稍微降低公共空间的感知质量。妇女的看法与男子不同，妇女对增加公共用户更为敏感。我们说明了规划者如何利用公共生活实验来预测公众如何应对公共领域的未来变化。