Measuring Surrounding Space to Assess the Pedestrian Visual Aperture Angle in the Urban Fabric: Toward a Kurtosis-Based Isovist Indicator

Abstract

Partial isovist fields are useful methods to analyze the urban morphology taking into account the visual perception of the pedestrian. However, as previous studies involve a constant visual aperture angle all along the pathway, this chapter presents an adaptative method of aperture angular variation according to urban morphology properties. Aperture angle increasing, nearby a square or at roads junction, or decreasing within a canyon street should improve the microbehavior visual perception in our simulations. By showing that traditional isovist’s shape indicators are not well adapted to achieve urban environmental properties, the aim of this chapter is to present this new methodology based on a statistics standardized moment called kurtosis. Our results show that this method could be used to define a surrounding space typology, one step more toward the modeling of visual dynamics.