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Talks and Poster Presentations (without Proceedings-Entry):

A. Psenner:
"Perception in/of Urban Public Space";
Talk: EURA Konferenz: *City Images and Urban Regeneration*, Bauhaus Universität in Weimar, Deutschland (invited); 2002-10-11 - 2002-10-12.



English abstract:
The paper describes an interdisciplinary approach and the findings of a research project on the perception of laymen of a special urban open space in Vienna.

The image of a city is - also - defined throgh the public spaces of its streets and its open places. They play an important role in the social life of men, they are the freely accessible areas where people can meet in their everyday life.
But what do we know about the real effects of such architectural space? How is it perceived by those who use and enlive it? And can this perception be explored scientificly?

The chosen urban space is the Praterstrasse, a two kilometre long street with high traffic, but that on the other side also has Boulevard-features. The history of the street and its district is rather diversified with a high impact on its architecture. The first stage of the research was an in-depth analysis of documents in the fields of city history, art, literature and urban design. This was followed by a qualitative fieldwork study in which a range of people, such as architectural laymen, residents, street-users, tourists, etc. participated. They were personally confronted with the street and its architecture, and were asked to experience it along a special standardised route and to produce a series of photographs of this visual material. Accompanying open interviews and participant observation complemented the research.
First, architectural analytic methodologies (cartography following differing criteria) where used to analyse the visual material, so that the following qualitative sampling procedure is related back to the initial classificatory analysis of the relevant visual material.

The objective of this work is a systematic consideration of different aspects of the act of perceiving urban open space through a combined approach: by interweaving visual and architectural research methodologies and qualitative research design. The paper introduces the main research questions of the study; it discusses conceptual and methodological considerations and describes the realization of the fieldwork, the resulting cartographic analysis and the connected qualitative sampling strategy. Finaly it gives a overview of the analysis of the material.

Keywords:
combining visual research, qualitative and analytic architectural methods photography and cartographic plan-analysis open, narrative interview visual perception architecture and laymen

Created from the Publication Database of the Vienna University of Technology.