Since the beginning of Japan's post-war boom her major cities, notably Tokyo, have developed with remarkable speed but relatively little pre-planning and control. So the consequent economic benefits have been accompanied by a level of visual disorder. Public and governmental opinion has therefore recently begun seeking development-control guidelines for improving the visual quality of the urban scene. Some Japanese researchers, building partly on the work of their us colleagues, have responded by trying to identify the most aesthetically significant aspects of the urban visual landscape. This thesis contributes to this search a particularly quantitative approach. It begins with a review of urban-design aesthetic theory concentrating on more recent "psychometric" investigation. It then describes and discusses the main method of the thesis: representation of urban scenes through video stills, computergenerated images, or photographs and the exposure to these representation of groups of sample subjects, and statistical analysis of the subjects' questionnaires responses. Special attention is paid to the reliability with which the aesthetic qualities of a given urban configuration can be generalised from 2-d "perspective" views of it, and to the relationship in subject responses between physical elements like buildings and trees and abstract characteristics like "openness", "enclosure", "age", or "expectant space". These procedures are applied to questionnaires completed by Japanese subjects regarding representations of various Tokyo street scenes, and by largely British subjects regarding contrasting "old" and "new" landscapes in the Hampstead and Milton Keynes areas. Initial investigations suggest that the elements of predominant subjective significance include the proportion of visible sky, the abundance of foliage. This thesis ends by suggesting aesthetic guidelines drawn from these results, considering spatial elements and roles of foliage, and discussing aesthetic assessment for development-control purposes.

The initial goal of this effort is to develop a discussion on urban design process and thinking that acknowledges the needs of places with meaning in the design of the urban waterfront. The thesis addresses the fact that the problematic of the coastal formulation is intricate, comprising not only aspects related to the spatial organization and design of its domain but also shared properties originated by the presence and movement of the perceiving subject in the area. In this framework, the research attempts to provide an understanding of the main relationships that the subject cultivates inside the coastal space and to offer a broader spatial reading of its narrative function. On the hypothesis that this function is susceptible of interpretation, the thesis develops an interest in examining the effects of the psychospatial nature of meaning on the design and experience of the urban edge, for to interpret a narrative spatial construct is to specify its meaning. To explore the issue of waterfront places that speak of the subject, the research conceives the coastal space as a field of mediated parameters that pertain to three crucial operational premises: the symbolic function of the urban space near the water, the meaning behind the coastal form, and the engagement of the perceiving subject in the conscious or reflexive appropriation of the waterfront setting. These premises, traced as psychophysiological spaces, determine the intermediary, the integrative, and the expressive discourses for the development of places with meaning near the water. Through them, the thesis attempts a reading of the coastal domain based upon the material interpretation of the meanings and messages associated with the immediate experience of the onset of water‐born notions, concepts, and images. Writing about the dialectics between the psychospatial inquiry and the spatial experience of the edge, this thesis suggests that, contrary to the established preconception, the psychology of human‐edge relations submits the perceiving subject to the conception of the coastal form and shape. / QC 20110907