What you lookin' at? Capturing visual engagement with urban street edges towards an understanding of how to make them more experientially engaging.

What you lookin’ at? is a conceptual exploration, building upon existing theory, and subsequent empirical examination of urban street edges. The reason for doing this is to develop a progressive knowledge foundation from which to answer the question - how might we be able to create more experientially engaging urban street edges? This is in an attempt to aid in addressing not only real-world problems that are impacting urban street edges but also theoretical issues stemming from how we think about street edges (knowledge issues) and act when seeking to change them (practice issues). In order to address these issues and answer the overarching question an innovative data collection method was employed – real world mobile eye-tracking – along with progressive analytical techniques developed. These provided new empirical and direct insight into urban street edge engagement, establishing a robust evidence-base for the development of new ideas.

The findings from the current investigation start to focus upon the need to facilitate the territorial appropriation and personalisation of experientially significant ground floor edge spaces, or segments. This is whilst building upon the new empirical understanding that street edges are engaged as socio-spatial realms; multi-scalar assemblages comprising morphological infrastructure and experientially significant territorialised realms; multifaceted entities in their own right, yet experientially entwined with adjacent streets establishing a complex experiential multi-directionality and that engagement with them is influenced by the territorial establishment of affordances within their ground floors.

The ideas developed during the current investigation make a significant and unique contribution to a growing body of progressive urban edge and interface works, which seek to help deliver more experientially rich and socially beneficial urban environments for people to inhabit and use. Overall, the current investigation innovatively establishes a significantly stronger, evidence-based understanding of how to make street edges more experientially engaging for street inhabitants going about their everyday lives.