A Study on visual diversity of Japanese residential streetscapes

Abstract

This study was conducted to find out the available visual diversity in Japanese residential streetscapes. The visual diversity occurs when the visual elements on streetscapes are different to each other. In this study, a field survey as a subjective method and the entropy as an objective method were used as measures of visual diversity. Data were collected from 80 residential streetscapes from four sites in the Saitama Prefecture, Japan. The sequential perspective views of streetscapes were analyzed for eight visual elements: shape of houses, shape of roofs, shape of windows, positions of the main openings of houses, availability of the ornaments on houses, height, color and the appearance of the boundary walls of premises to calculate the entropy. A field survey with multicultural subjects was used to find out the correlation between entropy and the human perception on the visual diversity. According to the results, the residential streetscapes displayed high diversity variations largely due to the shape of the roofs, shape of the windows and the appearance of the boundary walls of the premises. Moreover, the results concluded that the residential streetscapes at the study area are neither visually diverse nor visually uniform in considering the visual diversity aspect.