The Impact of Residential Densification on Perceptions of Public Space
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Problem, research strategy, and findings City leaders are under pressure to increase urban residential density to provide affordable housing and meet sustainability objectives. Yet despite the advantages of urban densification, communities throughout North America persistently oppose new developments and housing projects in their neighborhoods. The impact of residential densification on the quality of life for existing residents is ambiguous. In this study we focus on measuring the impact of one key aspect of urban densification: the perceived quality of public space. We use an experimental design to increase pedestrians and stationary users in a pedestrianized green street for randomly selected periods over 3 weeks. We collected surveys with and without our pedestrian treatment and find that adding users to a residential street decreased the perceived quality of the space overall. The changes in perceptions were small yet significant and illustrate the real tradeoffs that planners must consider when increasing urban density in cities, especially in lower density residential communities.Takeaway for practice Increasing the number of public users in a residential neighborhood may slightly decrease the perceived quality of the public space. Women’s perceptions differ from those of men, and women are more sensitive to the addition of public users. We illustrate how planners may use public life experiments to anticipate how the public might respond to future changes in the public realm.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".