11th EAEA Envisioning Architecture: Design, Evaluation, Communication Conference in 2013

Track 2 | Experiential Simulation | The sensory perception of the built environment

The effects of acoustic environment on pedestrians’ anxiety on a night street

ABSTRACT

In urban areas people tend to stay out later at night, making it more important than ever to keep public spaces free from crime. Since many people, particularly women, often overestimate the risk of actually falling victim to crime, measures moreover need to be taken to make places feel safe in order to prevent limiting nighttime activity. As a step toward designing public spaces to feel safe and comfortable at night, the present study employs an audio-visual simulation laboratory to examine how acoustic conditions affect pedestrians’ sense of anxiety while walking along a night street.
For the study, virtual night streets were created inside an audio-visual simulation laboratory through images projected on a front screen and sounds transmitted over headphones. The 36 subjects were asked to imagine they were walking on the street to visit a friend’s house late at night. Three settings (a small local shopping street, a street along a city park, and a street in a residential neighborhood) were combined with 13 types of sound (such as footsteps, conversation, an automobile, a streetcar, police car sirens, and silence) for a total of 35 experimental situations. The subjects rated their degree of anxiety on a 7-grade scale from “very anxious” to “very much at ease”; the reasons for their responses were queried in a later interview.
Major findings were as follows. 1) The sound of a man’s footsteps from behind aroused the most anxiety. A woman’s footsteps, on the other hand, were rated positively particularly by female subjects, suggesting that the presence of other female pedestrians was a source of reassurance. 2) In another, even clearer illustration of the effect of natural surveillance, the sound of female conversation was also shown to make pedestrians feel safer. Male conversation aroused concern in some subjects, however. 3) Environmental sounds such as that of an unseen running train made some subjects feel more secure than total silence because the association with nearby human activity reduced their sense of isolation.
In all, the results illustrate that pedestrians on a night street associate acoustic information with various possible scenarios that may arouse or assuage anxiety. One useful way to provide assurance is to give indications of other, non-threatening pedestrians present along the same path.

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AUTHORS

Ryuzo Ohno

Department of Built Environment, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Yokohama, Japan

Ryuzo Ohno is professor of the Department of Built Environment at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, where he teaches behavioral aspects of urban and architectural design. He received his Master of Architecture from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and Doctor of Engineering from the Tokyo Institute of Technology. His research interests include description and analysis of ambient visual information, field investigation of behavioral factors for mitigating the effects of natural disasters, and development of simulation systems for investigating human-environment relations in such activities as appreciating a Japanese garden, navigating city streets, and guarding against crime in multifamily housing sites.

Tokuko Matsuda

Sekisuihouse Co. Ltd, Yamagata, Japan

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