When to stop? A visual impact assessment framework for incremental urban and community expansion in rural heritage landscapes
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Incremental urban and community expansion in rural heritage landscapes often produces cumulative visual impacts, yet planning rarely specifies a clear endpoint for acceptable change. This paper proposes an integrated Visual Impact Assessment (VIA) framework, aligned with SDG 11, that determines “when to stop” by linking GIS-based evaluation with perception-based evidence from both experts and the public. The framework combines point cloud-enhanced GIS spatial and visibility analysis, multi-temporal Street View Imagery (SVI) and Key Observation Point (KOP) assessments, 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) rendering, and virtual-reality (VR) eye- and head-tracking, with linear mixed-effects models (LMMs) to generate stage-comparable contrasts. Applied to the Middenbeemster expansion (in Beemster Polder, the Netherlands), multi-stage comparisons from past phases to future proposals (M-1/M-2/M-3) confirm gradual visual impacts and show how they accumulate to affect perception. Aligning visual-spatial change with perception-based evidence places the acceptable range between the trimmed Present-phase and M-1 (both acceptable only in part and subject to controls), while M-2 and M-3 exceed the thresholds. The framework yields transparent, reproducible thresholds that are directly usable for planning and heritage management and points to practical mitigation strategies, including morphological continuity, targeted vegetation, and construction-phase controls. More broadly, it advances VIA from descriptive appraisal to a predictive, threshold-based instrument transferable to heritage-sensitive rural-urban fringes where change is incremental and cumulative.
Source: Sustainable Cities and Society
Institution: Delft University of Technology
Language: English
Subfield: Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law
Field: Environmental Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $4,870
OpenAlex ID: W7148314304