The effect of spatial configuration on sense of safety through street legibility

Abstract

The paper investigates the effect of spatial configuration in creating pedestrian sense of safety in neighbourhood commercial streets in Malaysia. To this end, space syntax analysis was applied to measure the syntactical variables. Forty streets were chosen based on their integration measures in the global analysis. The questionnaires were distributed to collect data about legibility variables affecting pedestrian sense of safety. The impact of legibility factors on pedestrian sense of safety is examined by adopting confirmatory factor analysis. Then the Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient was computed to measure the relationship between syntactical variables and legibility factors. The findings show that the legibility is strongly correlated with two syntactical variables, local integration and street connectivity. In fact, the local integration and connectivity have positive correlation with two items of legibility such as easy navigation, clarity. Thus, spatial configuration affects on legibility and consequently pedestrian sense of safety.