Research on the Fairness of Streetscape Visual Compensation: Taking Shanghai Low Hierarchical Street as a Case Study

Urban landscape is a social resource with multi-sensory values. However, existing landscape fairness research mainly focuses on the rational allocation and accessibility due to the difficulty in quantifying the fairness in its visual dimension. This paper attempts to measure the visual equity of streetscape through the influence of streetscape compensation on the right-of-way conflict. This study takes the anger caused by street environment users when they encounter right-of-way conflict as a representation, quantifies the compensation effect of streetscape, and establishes the relationship among street view elements, visual equity and right-of-way conflict. Through the methods of questionnaire survey and scenario simulation, the study identifies that streetscape in the study area of Shanghai presents two distinct compensation effects. One type, known as negative compensation streetscape, tends to aggravate users’ anger while the other, referred to as the positive compensation street view, can alleviate the anger of users. Further analysis on the positive compensation streetscapes shows that sky, greenery, openness and coherence of the streetscape have significantly positive effects on alleviating the anger caused by right-of-way conflict. In addition, the results show that the compensation of low hierarchical street streetscape indicate different bias towards users in different areas of Shanghai. Therefore, this paper puts forward urban low hierarchical street classification method from the perspective of streetscape compensation, and suggests that rationally utilizing the “soft” influence of streetscape compensation on users’ psychological perceptions can effectively alleviate the inherent inequality between subjects of right-of-way conflict, and reduce right-of-way conflict, so as to ensure the health and safety of urban street environment.