Towards a Landscape Potential. a Method Based on a Systematic Characterization of the Surrounding Urban Fabric through the Visual Dynamics of Pedestrians

The pedestrian mobility is a way to understand how a person might experience the void in between the buildings (this void defines a space portion as a shape) and therefore the urban fabric itself. The present paper aims to characterize landscape potentialities through pedestrian perception. Our proposal consists in building a set of sort of sensory Digital Elevation Models in which the third dimension is computed based on a measure of the surrounding open spaces using isovists. More precisely, we present three different DEMs: a first one corresponds to the isovist area in each point, the second one corresponds to its drift value (a frequently used indicator in isovist fields) and the third one corresponds to its kurtosis value. At last we combine all these DEMs with different pedestrian pathways so as to obtain corresponding sensory fingerprints.