Aesthetic Design Thinking Model for
Urban Environments: A Survey Base on a Review of the Literature (2016) Hourakhsh Ahmad Nia et al.
The paper announces a systematic review of 140 qualitative studies related to the aesthetic value of the urban environment that have been published since the 1970s and consequently an analysis model of how human perception can be affected by built and non-built environmental factors of the urban spatial configuration. The survey of literature reveals different approaches to the aesthetic design of the environment: objective aesthetic (physical aesthetic), subjective aesthetic (psychological aesthetic), expert aesthetic, public preferences, rationalistic view, and romanticist view.
However, when talking about the perception of the built environment it appears that to get a clearer aesthetic response, some level of knowledge about architectural design and history, composition, and urban planning (building style, house style, streetscape, city image, urban environment etc) is significant. Pages 202-204 provide an extensive list of indicators that can influence urban aesthetics articulated by researchers in the past 50 years (Figure 8 and Figure 9 organise them) and the findings revealed that the organisational factors of a built environment (static properties: similarity, density, enclosure, scale, floor organization, proportion, solids and voids, order, symmetry, emphasis, defined edges, maintenance and upkeep – dynamic urban environment; configuration of elements; aesthetic properties; aesthetic cognition; aesthetic appreciation: harmony, balance, orientation, continuity, time series, robustness, permeability, diversity of variety, curvature, proximity, richness, complexity, good configuration) are the main source of aesthetic judgment because of their arousal potential.
The authors also propose a model for the study of aesthetic cognition of urban space configurations with four main stages:
1. a study of the objective elements of urban spaces,
2. a study of the organisational factors of elements leading to arousal potential,
3. a study of the subjective characteristics derived from the environmental configuration
4. a study of the human aesthetic response to the environment
Ioana Mădălina Moldovan
Universitatea Tehnică din Cluj-Napoca
Nia, Hourakhsh Ahmad and Atún, Resmiye Alpar “Aesthetic Design Thinking Model for
Urban Environments: A Survey Base on a Review of the Literature.” Urban Design
International 21, no 3 (2016): 195-212
https://doi.org/10.1057/udi.2015.25