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Urban mobility has substantially evolved in several western countries, shifting from interest in road expansion strategies to cater motorized movement to the emphasis on sustainable mobility. This is, however, not the case in several developing countries that still try to accommodate vehicular flows in inner historic cities. This paper aims at providing an assessment framework that helps in evaluating the effect of streetscape development on the walking and cycling environment in historic contexts.

This research follows a two-phase methodology. Phase 1 is the investigation of the literature review including the streetscape design, Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and indicators for the assessment of walking and cycling environment. This phase results in developing a set of indicators for the assessment. Phase 2 is the case study including, methods, steps and results of the assessment based on the output of Phase 1. This phase concludes with a discussion on the challenges and recommendations for the enhancement.

The streetscape development in Afrang was insufficient and negatively affected the walking and cycling environment. It was motorized-oriented, instead of enhancing green mobility. The interventions led to more crowds, safety risks and less pleasant experience. Moreover, the car users' experience was enhanced initially; however, the traffic situation did not persist. A sustainable urban mobility approach is necessary to be implemented with consideration to the global level and the relation to SDGs.

There is a gap in tackling the research problem both within the context of Port Said in particular and Egyptian context in general. Local authorities need a clear structured methodology to follow in the development of the streetscape. The assessment indicators gathered can be the basis for evaluating future plans.

The purpose of this research is to examine the current physical qualities and activities of pedestrian environment from the perspective of the users' needs and perceptions for making user-friendly streets in Dhaka city.

Case study research approach was adapted with a mixed method approach in data collection and analysis to gather information about the interrelationship concerning the variables. The questionnaire survey and direct observation was conducted with the users of the streets to get the actual scenes of the study areas. For the findings, multiple sources of evidence were triangulated and used to analyze which were derived from the convergence of the data.

The findings of this study show that the needs for the factors which make people to use the street are similar with the previous theories derived by different scholars. The results establish that making of user-friendly street from the users' perspective has a significant relationship with the attributes of public spaces in the context of Dhaka. Correlation among the attributes of public spaces concerning sociability, uses and activities, access and linkage and safety, comfort and image showed the issues affecting the pedestrian environment toward a crucial condition in Dhaka city.

Time allocation, inadequacy of secondary data sources and earlier research on this topic in the context of Dhaka city, were the primary limitations to let an in-depth and full exploration of the research.

The study provided a detailed representation of Dhaka's users' perception of the pedestrian environment. This study suggests a new perspective of bettering pedestrian experience in the city center.

The tendency of urban environments to produce anxiety is well documented in a range of theoretical and historical literature, but there is little current work that considers how public spaces might be designed to alleviate anxiety among their users. This paper presents a series of case studies taken from a lighting design project on the Kentish Town Road in north London to show how urban design can create a more psychologically inclusive public realm — one that offers greater psychological comfort — by enhancing the engagement between users of urban spaces and their environment. The argument is presented in the context of broader issues of social inclusion and other current movements in urban design.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between the number of design elements in the context of building facades in urban streetscapes and visual preferences of users to enable a more meaningful citizen participation in the design of local streetscapes.

This paper developed a web application, which manages experiments through programmatically creating scenes and displaying them online to participants using questionnaires. It collects preferences towards the number of design elements in the scenes and determines the statistical relationship between them.

The results offer an empirical description of a semi-convex relationship between the number of elements and preferences. They confirm that participants from a particular area inter-subjectively agree in their visual judgements towards the number of design elements, and justify the employment of a regression model fitted on the preferences of residents to assess design proposal in their area.

The paper offers an empirical description of the relationships between preferences and a wide range of values of the number of design elements and empirically supports that people from one area inter-subjectively agree in their judgements towards a visual aspect of the building facades. The study introduces a new analytical component, known as the vertex, which could alter future methods on the visual evaluation of the built environment.

This essay employs a visual approach to explore some of the ways that spatial practices become markers of a globalising and glocalizing world. Images are offered that reflect some of the symbolic competition created by more and less recent migrants as they lay claim to ‘contested terrains’ by changing what they look like. Although often dismissed as mere “marking” of territory, such ordinary practices by migrants of symbolic home or community building are crucial to understanding global cities. One indicator of their importance is the, often hostile reactions by the dominant society to them. A brief review of some of the most important theoretical perspectives on these interrelated phenomena, such as those of Saskia Sassen, David Harvey, and Manuel Castells, isolates common expectations about the visibility of resulting competing spatial practices in shared multiethnic residential and commercial environments. It is argued that many of the contradictions created by the concentration of global capital can be seen in the neighborhood streetscapes of global cities. From Georg Simmel, through Henri Lefebvre, and Lyn H. Lofland, the visible, and the symbolic, have been central to urban analysis. Therefore, the ubiquitous aspects of what Jackson called ‘vernacular landscapes,’ such as commercial signs and graffiti in Berlin, Frankfurt am Main, London, New York, and Rome are addressed.

The New Zealand city of Christchurch provides a leading example of post-disaster rebuilding in a Central Business District (CBD) area. In its rebuilding programme, the city has given emphasis to the greening of hospitality and traditional retail space through a combination of development of shared pedestrian spaces (with traffic exclusion and calming) and the integration of greening within the streetscape design. This paper aims to assess whether the development of greened pedestrian areas leads to higher retail spending and, thus, retail rental rates.

This study uses pedestrian movement data collected from several CBD locations, as well as spending data on retail and hospitality, to assess relationships between pedestrian movements and spending. This study explores retail spending in greened pedestrian shared spaces, and explores how this differs from retail spending in traditional street areas within the Christchurch CBD.

Spending patterns are location-related, depending on the characteristics of pedestrian space in the selected area. Greened shared pedestrian areas have the highest spending per measured pedestrian for retail and hospitality, whereas traditional street areas have lower spending for retail and hospitality per measured pedestrian, demonstrating the benefits in redeveloped central city areas.

The scope of smart data continues to develop as a research area within urban studies to develop an open and connected city. This research demonstrates the use of innovative technologies for data collection, use and sharing. The results support commercial benefits of greening and pedestrianisation of retail and hospitality areas for CBDs and providing an example for other cities to follow.

Much of the current literature on streetscape design emphasizes a need for well-articulated edge conditions to enhance pedestrian-orientation and the reason appears to lie in evolutionary biology: humans have a psychological preference for wall-hugging due to a well-established trait in other species: thigmotaxis.

This study seeks to explore the relationship between urban facades and affective feelings through an empirical study, which asks: how do people perceive edge conditions in urban environments? Through a study of affect relative to edge conditions, greater insight can be generated as to the human experience in the built environment. We conducted a laboratory experiment with 76 subjects who each viewed 40 images of urban facades and rated each based on their emotional reaction.

Each subject also completed two validated individual trait difference measures. We found that those images depicting thigmotaxic facades were more highly rated than other facades.

High quality edge environment resulted in people feeling more pleasant than low quality edges.

This research examined changes in Dublin’s tertiary city centre shopping streets over a 30‐year period to 2002. An observational study of the occupancy of the city’s tertiary streetscape was undertaken in the summer of 2002 and compared with historical data. Results indicate significant change over the period examined: an increased vacancy rate, a very low survival rate, a considerable incidence of non‐retail specific activities, a decline in traditional retail offerings and the emergence of new categories of retailer. The paper concludes by suggesting a proactive approach is required by present day retailers in the tertiary streets to ensure future survival.

Heritage buildings often stand as a reminder of power structures. In urban streetscapes, they can represent particular values and views of the world such as colonial conquest, hegemonic power relations, or social hierarchies. The changing use of some heritage buildings, however, alongside the changing remit of libraries in Ireland, may offer scope for radical acts of inclusion for diverse populations. One such building is considered here, the Waterford Central City Library, originally a Carnegie library, which is situated at the social and cultural centre of the city. This chapter reflects on the changing use of space in iconic buildings, the changing remit of public libraries in Ireland, and the potential of city centre buildings to be diverse spaces which facilitate inclusive community building.