Defining Parameters for Urban-Environmental Quality Assessment

Introduction

In the context of e-Planning and Digital City Science, digital citizen participation, smart monitoring, and urban simulations are some of the multiple resources being implemented along with the mining of information from communication technologies as part of the urban planning processes. This includes the use of data analytics to assess spatial interventions by supporting the explorations and negotiations prior to the place-making process (Konieva, Knecht and Koenig, 2019).

Social simulation solutions utilized for this purpose incorporates the simulation of people as agents making decisions. From this perspective, modeling the decision processes that occur at an individual level –choice modeling– is currently being developed for application in urban research. Choice modeling is based on parametrization, i.e. what parameters individuals consider and the way they assess them when making decisions.

A current matter of dispute in the field of choice modeling research is the standardization of weights when parametrizing cognitive processes, e.g. the question of how to establish if someone would prefer to walk the shortest route or across the closest park. In order to address the economics of that question, the weight of speed versus the weight of the travel cost need to be assessed by exploring key urban environmental quality indicators with a specific focus on human perception and considering the socioeconomic and urban-morphological factors. We hypothesize that a specific set of features of urban space is targeted by people when assessing its quality, especially when it comes to making decisions.

The work presented in this paper aims at setting a direction for future studies on the parameters of choice of action determined by the evaluation of the quality of urban space by citizens.

Post-positivist theory approaches cities defending the human focus from a strong procedural and context-driven perspective. In contrast, the praxis of urban planning processes did not tend to be based on empirical knowledge until the first decade of the 21^st, evidencing a theory-practice gap (Allmendinger 2002). Currently, the methods for place-making are being redeveloped with urbanism being a ‘human and social discourse’ (Chase et al. 1999). Following the modern and postmodern approach to urban systems, the spatial distribution of places and the defining formal characteristics of urban structures play the main role in driving the social performance of spaces (Hillier, 2007). In this context, the spatial relation between places would drive location choice (Svetusk, 2010) and consequently determine urban life.

In contrast to this approach, we claim that the social and behavioral dynamics of people are not only determined and conditioned by the morphological characteristics of places, but also anthropologically based on cognitive and perceptive processes, which are developed socially and influenced by practices and narratives related to the meaning of places and their intangible values. In other words, the spatial configuration of urban space –locations, distances, and available routes– are not the only factors to be considered when making choices on where to go, when to go, how to go, or what to do. Instead, a number of environmental factors not only linked to tangible elements are also taken into account, such as perceived environmental quality e.g. streets being good, safe, comfortable, entertaining, stylish, etc.

This is especially relevant to some approaches to scenario observations to inform decision-making, such as agent-based modeling (ABM) and Digital Twin solutions. They use state-of-the-art technology with the aim of monitoring and predicting ‘what if’ scenarios. With this in view, there is a tendency towards simulating the complexity of cities in order to gain knowledge of their holistic behavior. Thanks to defining relations, systems, and networks, one would be able to predict future tendencies and react to them with actions, policies, and decisions, on such diverse issues as congestion, pollution, gentrification, natural disasters, or traffic rerouting. To achieve such a level of definition of urban systems, it is necessary to define the behavior of individual entities in detail. In this context, social simulation comes as a discipline in the intersection of computational simulation tools, and sociological and psychological studies of human cognition, reaction, and behavioral patterns. Pragmatically speaking, in order to simulate the response of pedestrian flow to a certain event, such as the closure of a sidewalk due to construction works, one needs to define the way people react to certain stimuli when they are walking.