Mapping Place Qualities
Understanding how to capture and represent the qualities of place for walking research and systems.
Understanding how to capture and represent the qualities of place for walking research and systems.
Mapping place qualities involves going beyond the geometry of spatial networks to capture the lived experience of walking environments. While spatial measures such as distance or connectivity remain important, they do not explain why one route feels pleasant, safe, or stressful compared to another. Place qualities seek to describe these experiential dimensions, making them visible and actionable for walking research, planning, and system design.
The challenge lies in translating subjective experiences into representations that can be compared, modelled, and integrated with geospatial data. This requires drawing on multiple data sources, from open mapping and sensor data to community input and user feedback, in order to construct multi-dimensional portraits of walking environments.
Qualities of place can be grouped into a number of recurring dimensions relevant to walking. Safety encompasses both traffic safety and social security, influenced by factors such as lighting, surveillance, and pedestrian crossings. Well-being relates to environmental comfort, including air quality, noise levels, shade, and opportunities for rest. Effort reflects the physical exertion required, shaped by gradients, surfaces, and crowding. Exploration captures novelty, variety, and opportunities for discovery, while Pleasure relates to aesthetic and emotional responses, often tied to greenery, heritage, and scenic views. Together, these dimensions form a holistic framework that aligns with how walkers themselves describe their experiences.
Representing qualities requires careful attention to scale. At the street level, qualities may vary dramatically between adjacent blocks or even along a single segment. At the neighbourhood or city level, they reveal broader patterns of accessibility and inequality. Methods such as gridding, network segmentation, or clustering allow for systematic analysis while preserving local variation.
Mapping place qualities draws on a diverse range of data. OpenStreetMap and local authority datasets can provide details on pavements, crossings, lighting, and amenities. Environmental sensors and remote sensing add indicators of air quality, noise, vegetation, and surface types. Socio-digital traces, such as route reviews or photographs, contribute subjective accounts that enrich objective measures. Most importantly, participatory methods such as surveys, interviews, or think-aloud walks capture lived perspectives, ensuring that the resulting maps reflect actual experience rather than abstract proxies alone.
These heterogeneous sources are integrated through feature engineering, normalisation, and weighting schemes. Attributes can be combined into thematic indices, such as a safety index or a greenery score, or retained separately to allow multi-criteria evaluation. While composite scores can aid communication, transparency is essential to avoid concealing the complexity and trade-offs inherent in place qualities.
Validating mapped qualities requires comparison with ground-truth data and direct user studies. Field audits, structured walk-alongs, and community workshops provide opportunities to check whether mapped qualities align with lived perceptions. Such processes also reveal the limits of transferability: a measure of safety in one cultural or urban context may not carry the same meaning elsewhere. Reporting uncertainty, data gaps, and temporal limitations is therefore vital.
At the same time, ethical and governance considerations must guide practice. Place qualities often draw on personal or community data, requiring sensitivity to privacy and representation. Care must also be taken not to reduce complex social experiences to oversimplified metrics, but instead to use mapping as a means of supporting more inclusive, participatory, and context-aware walking environments.