Aesthetical cognitive perceptions of urban street form. Pedestrian preferences towards straight or curvy route shapes

摘要

Human perception of space is not purely metric. Route angularity and complexity-minimizing paths suggest that pedestrians, consciously or not, tend to reduce the number and the angle of turns when selecting routes. Decisions involving route selection are different when the main criterion is not the orientation but the aesthetics of urban forms. This paper indicates that 80% of a stratified random sample of 102 people stated to prefer, ceteris paribus and for continuous/legible routes, to walk throughout curvy paths instead of straight and felt the former as shorter too, to generically walk through a route, and to reach a destination.