Does the Visibility of Greenery Increase Perceived Safety in Urban Areas? Evidence from the Place Pulse 1.0 Dataset

Urban green space provides a series of esthetic, environmental and psychological benefits to urban residents. However, the relationship between the visibility of green vegetation and perceived safety is still in debate. This research investigated whether green vegetation could help to increase the perceived safety based on a crowdsourced dataset: the Place Pulse 1.0 dataset. Place Pulse 1.0 dataset, which was generated from a large number of votes by online participants, includes geo-tagged Google Street View images and the corresponding perceived safety score for each image. In this study, we conducted statistical analyses to analyze the relationship between perceived safety and green vegetation characteristics, which were extracted from Google Street View images. Results show that the visibility of green vegetation plays an important role in increasing perceived safety in urban areas. For different land use types, the relationship between vegetation structures and perceived safety varies. In residential, urban public/institutional, commercial and open land areas, the visibility of vegetation higher than 2.5 m has significant positive correlations with perceived safety, but there exists no significant correlation between perceived safety and the percentage of green vegetation in transportation and industrial areas. The visibility of vegetation below 2.5 m has no significant relationship with the perceived safety in almost all land use types, except for multifamily residential land and urban public/institutional land. In general, this study provided insight for the relationship between green vegetation characteristics and the perception of environment, as well as valuable reference data for developing urban greening programs. OPEN ACCESS ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf. 2015, 4 1167