City's quality of life based on livingscape approach (urban blight, soundscape, light-scape, thermic-scape, subjective replies of users) to improve an urban historical place

Quality of life in a city is often related to urban environment and infrastructures. Subjective and attitudinal perceptions are the most reliable tools to identify individual goals and orientations. Individual perceptions are most valuable if the subjective evaluations are linked to objective measurements of living conditions. "Urban quality" is the basic idea of this work. It consists of analyzing and correlating three different aspects: one aimed at investigating urban architectural blight through 5 points scales; one related to psychometric tools, that measure the perception of environmental quality; one concerned with objective investigation of environmental quality through the measurement of acoustic, visual, thermal and IAQ parameters. The data were collected in an historical district in Turin, during summer 2010. Along the main 13 key-spaces of the district a survey map was planned to obtain subjective and objective data every 30 m. The urban blight's survey was based on a 46-questions form filled by some experts. The environmental perception was delineated by the analysis of 240 questionnaires, submitted to the users of the area while the measurements were carried out. In this work only a part of the overall study is presented. Thirteen factors were singled out from the factorial analysis on urban blight questions. Some of the urban blight factor scores are correlated with the sound environment scores and partially with the thermal environment and the air quality scores. For both the sound and light environment a general correlation between the calmness and the vibrancy has shown, even if a differentiation among key-spaces and period of the day is detected and represented on urban maps.