Informing Design Review: Discussion of the Findings of a Visual Preference Study in New Zealand.

The appearance of the built environment plays an important role in people's physical, financial and psychological wellbeing. In light of this, it is important to ensure that transformation of urban streets and public spaces through individual projects can satisfy the aesthetic needs of those who regularly use them. Within projects, outcomes are regularly controlled by a steering group working on behalf of the project sponsor and other internal stakeholders. To ensure that the needs of those outside the project group are also met, some local authorities in New Zealand review project design at the planning approval stage. This process invites experts, who in some cases informed by design guides, to evaluate the architectural design. This paper addresses the question of whether the ways places are changing align with public expectations. A mixed methods approach was used to elicit people's preferences for building and streetscape characteristics, where stimuli were first presented as photographic representations and secondly as real streetscapes in two New Zealand cities. The findings identify the streetscape design characteristics that were best liked by people as well as those that were disliked. Of particular interest was a comparison between the preferences expressed by lay members of the public with those of design and planning professionals. The paper concludes with a brief discussion about the obstacles that may be limiting the achievement of well-liked streetscapes in the New Zealand context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]