Man & Place: Understanding Human Perception of Social Interaction in Urban Public Spaces

Abstract

Integrating human perception during the urban design and planning phase has proved crucial in ensuring the success and efficiency of cities. Urban public spaces designed to ensure people have positive perceptions about the place have always attracted many visitors and users for pleasure and social interaction. Therefore, understanding the human perception of social interaction plays a significant role in designing effective interactive urban public spaces. An exploration carried out highlighted shortage of research work and viable tools to effectively investigate the social interaction in urban spaces from the users' perception. This is despite the underlying significance of the users' perception of impacting the overall outlooks of urban public spaces. Worth noting that the integration of both users' and designers' perception into the framework of urban public spaces is fundamental to warranting quality and better outcomes. Accordingly, the study aims to build a tool that helps in understanding the human perception of social interaction in urban public spaces by correlating the actual settings designed and implemented by specialists (Distal Cues) with the users' perceived images (Proximal Cues). The key finding of the study highlighted a significant difference between the designers’ viewpoints and users’ perception of ideal interactive public spaces. Consequently, the influence of the users' perception in the overall construction or development of interactive public spaces cannot be understated.