Walk Safe Project: Perceived Urban Safety related to Soundscape, Lightscape and Urban Decay

Starting from Lynch works [1], urban perceptive aspects are studied to improve the human-space interaction, mediated by visual, auditory and sensory receptors. Particularly in this historical period, safety and its perception are rarely the same: this depends on mental processes with various implications. Walk Safe Project aims to analyze the perception of urban safety in relation to soundscape, lightscape and urban decay, with the purpose to develop an evaluation protocol based on objective and subjective investigations. Walk Safe protocol was applied to four critical areas of the City of Turin (Italy). Subjective data, gathered by a 6 minutes-long survey, was obtained by 124 subjects from October to December 2018, during the night hours. Acoustic measurements were performed using the calibrated binaural recording system Siemens SCADAS XS and the values of A-weighted equivalent sound pressure level and some psychoacoustic metrics were extracted. Simultaneously HDR photos were taken in the observer direction and converted into luminance images, in order to document the lightscape. All the data were subsequently processed together through statistical analysis and perceived safety parameters were extracted. The results show that individual characteristic like gender, instruction level and frequency of use of the space have a fundamental role on perceived safety. Furthermore, the social presence and the environmental quality are strongly implicated, such as the buildings market value. Safety perception is negatively related to the pleasantness of technological sounds and positively related to the pleasantness of anthropic sound. Sharpness Aures and Tonality are the objective parameters that significantly relate with the pleasantness of anthropic soundscape. Perceived safety is also positively correlated to visual interest and visual lightness and to the architectural and urban quality aspects. [1] Lynch, K. The Image of the City; MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, USA, 1960.