ABSTRACT
Designing pleasant, sustainable cities is a long-term goal of urban design researchers and practitioners alike. Since changes to existing streets and buildings are hard to implement once constructed, evaluations are iteratively needed in the early design stages. However, urban designers may find it challenging to anticipate how future inhabitants perceive and experience built space, since real-world urban environments contain many naturally occurring environmental variables that simultaneously and dynamically impact human cognition, behaviour and emotion. The aim of this chapter is to explore how real and virtual methodologies could be iteratively combined to inform a predictive model for urban perception that could support urban designers in their design decisions. We propose an iterative research workflow that starts by identifying relevant environmental variables from the real world as a basis for informing hypotheses for controlled laboratory testing in a virtual setting. In this context, we point out the challenges and strengths that research in real and virtual environments brings to the field of urban design research. The chapter presents insight from the research lab and outlines the next steps of our work. We end with a general conclusion that interdisciplinary research using multiple methodologies, perspectives and paradigms can help to untangle the components of urban perception and environmental complexity.
