Aesthetic assessment of a man-made landscape: the Pécs urban area, Hungary

Abstract

Subjectivity is a major problem in the assessment of landscape visual qualities, especially in built up areas. This paper field-tests a quantitative method for visual quality assessment which is based on social survey results, used to define a weighted visual quality scale, which is then calculated and cumulated for each pixel covering land deemed visible from a particular lookout point and converted into map format through a GIS system. This case study of the visual quality in the neighbourhoods of the city of Pécs suggested a north to south decline in the visual quality the the urban landscape. However, different modes of calculation produce widely different results and the approach awaits both refinement and ground-truthing.