Abstract:
Streets have been providing a theme for many studies, symposiums and planning and design
studios all over the world for last few decades. Literature in the areas of planning, urban design
and architecture reveals that research on perceived environmental qualities and the physical
attributes that cause them are not rare, but wider applications of their finding in urban planning
and design practices is limited due to a variety of reasons. One of the most felt reason is that the
attributes discussed in these works are highly abstract in nature and therefore, demand some
extra efforts for them to be developed into specific units of application. Another reason is the
subjective approaches and speculative methods adopted in most of those studies, for which their
outcomes can be contested under alternative conditions. Hence, there is a need for more
objectively evolved, but adequately tested methods to empirically study the environmental
qualities for design purposes. Previous studies indicated that people experience spatial qualities
in an evaluative manner (eg: Nasar, 1999). On this background, this research aims to initiate an
empirical method to evaluate streets capes based on Alan Jacob’s (1996) seminal work 'Great
Streets’
