Urban waterfronts can have important affects on children’s environmental experiences. Attributes of urban waterfronts can elicit strong feelings about the significance of those sites. By looking at this section of cities from children’s point of view, it becomes possible to derive children’s essential evaluative and behavioral responses and salient visual attributes. This can thereby help identify the design features for a planning practice of urban waterfronts where children are a consideration. This study aims to explore children’s emotional and behavioral responses to urban waterfront scenes and visual attributes consonant with those responses, and examine multiple relationships between them.
Ninety 9 to 11 years-old children of different school, ethnic, and gender backgrounds participated in the study. They saw representative color images of urban waterfronts, ranked based on their preference, and responded to two sets of questions for the most liked, the second most liked, and the least liked scenes. I applied the first set of questions from an anthropological method, the Heuristic Elicitation Methodology (HEM). HEM suggests developing the constructs from the subjects’ responses in their own language and give equal emphasis to qualitative and quantitative methods. This set included open-ended questions.
They revealed the frequency of mentions of evaluative and behavioral responses and salient visual attributes in children’s own language. The second set included structured questions to which children answered with a “yes” or “no.” I included these questions to test the applicability of visual attributes and evaluative appraisals found relevant to people’s environmental experiences in previous investigations. The data analysis included five issues: 1) relationships between derived attributes and appraisals; 2) relationships between selected attributes and appraisals; 3) children’s perception; 4) relationships between attributes and behaviors; and 5) group comparisons. I applied content analysis to derive the meaningful structures of evaluative appraisals, behavioral patterns, and visual attributes, and I used various multivariate analyses to reveal underlying dimensions of perception and understand the relationships between appraisals, behaviors, and attributes.
The analyses revealed the following results: 1) ‘people’, ‘visual form’, and ‘nature’ explain preference, and ‘compatible land-use’, ‘dilapidated nature’, and ‘crowding’ explain dislike for the scenes; 2) Children’s ‘aesthetic value’ positively relates to the attributes ‘naturalness, order, and information’, and children’s ‘fear’ positively relates to ‘enclosure’; 3) Children perceive urban waterfront scenes in two dimensions including man-made/naturalness and compatible land-use/disorder; 4) Behaviors and attributes involve five relationships between: a) water-related and nature and man-made, b) interaction with nature, c) physical and openness, d) social interaction and people, and e) exploratory and man-made; 5) Few differences exist among the subgroups.