It's not you, it's me -- Global urban visual perception varies across demographics and personalities
Journal:
arXiv
Published Date:
May 19, 2025
Abstract
Understanding people's preferences and needs is crucial for urban planning
decisions, yet current approaches often combine them from multi-cultural and
multi-city populations, obscuring important demographic differences and risking
amplifying biases. We conducted a large-scale urban visual perception survey of
streetscapes worldwide using street view imagery, examining how demographics --
including gender, age, income, education, race and ethnicity, and, for the
first time, personality traits -- shape perceptions among 1,000 participants,
with balanced demographics, from five countries and 45 nationalities. This
dataset, introduced as Street Perception Evaluation Considering Socioeconomics
(SPECS), exhibits statistically significant differences in perception scores in
six traditionally used indicators (safe, lively, wealthy, beautiful, boring,
and depressing) and four new ones we propose (live nearby, walk, cycle, green)
among demographics and personalities. We revealed that location-based
sentiments are carried over in people's preferences when comparing urban
streetscapes with other cities. Further, we compared the perception scores
based on where participants and streetscapes are from. We found that an
off-the-shelf machine learning model trained on an existing global perception
dataset tends to overestimate positive indicators and underestimate negative
ones compared to human responses, suggesting that targeted intervention should
consider locals' perception. Our study aspires to rectify the myopic treatment
of street perception, which rarely considers demographics or personality
traits.
