Validating Urban Design Measures

Abstract

Focusing on the street level experience, Ewing et al. (2005, 2006) developed measurement protocols for nine urban design qualities cited in the literature—imageability, enclosure, human scale, transparency, complexity, coherence, linkage, legibility, and tidiness. The first five were successfully operationalized. This paper builds on earlier research to, for the first time, validate the urban design measures against pedestrian counts on 588 block faces in New York City. An effort is made to distinguish which measures, if any, influence levels of pedestrian activity after controlling for the “D” variables: development density, land use diversity, street network design, destination accessibility, distance to transit, and demographics. The urban design quality of transparency, related to windows overlooking the street, continuous building facades forming a street wall, and active street frontage, proves to have more explanatory power than any other D variable.