Work

Evaluating visual experience in heritage-rich areas: A case study of the Inner Ring Road of West Lake, Hangzhou

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: Streets constitute dynamic landscape perception essential in heritage-rich area planning. They facilitate immersive user experiences. However, urbanization intensifies infrastructure-heritage conflicts. This necessitates improved street space evaluation, management, and enhancement. This study focuses on an Inner Ring Road of West Lake in Hangzhou, developing an index system that encompasses naturalness, openness, artificiality, and traffic, suitable for the visual assessment of unique heritage areas. We used images crawled from Baidu Street View for semantic segmentation and analyzed the landscape element composition, visual quality, extreme values, and spatial distribution of the West Lake Inner Ring Road. The findings indicate that: (1) West Lake has good landscape quality, but the visibility of the water is very low. (2) West Lake can be divided into the artificial scenic area in the northeast and the natural scenic area in the southwest, but the over-dense plant planting and route planning have led to serious homogeneity of spatial continuity. (3) The existence of closed spaces such as tunnels also prevents people from experiencing it continuously. This study investigates heritage areas as spatial media, quantifying visual experience-space use relationships to provide practical visual landscape assessment, informing future heritage street management and development.

Source: Frontiers of Architectural Research

DOI: 10.1016/j.foar.2025.06.011

Authors: Yan Huang, Zhixiang Fan, Chongxiao Wang, Ran Yan, Yilu Shi, You Li

Institutions: Tsinghua University, Nanjing Forestry University

Language: English

Topic: Urban Design and Spatial Analysis

Subfield: Building and Construction

Field: Engineering

Domain: Physical Sciences

SDG: Sustainable cities and communities

Open Access status: gold

Estimated APC paid: $1,500