Understanding the Visual Context of Emergent Urban Space in the Modern City - Evaluation of Shopping Centre Spaces as an Extension of the Urban Fabric from a Visual Field and Inter-visibility Network Perspective

Large-scale shopping centres have developed into an integral element of the urbanity of major cities around the world. They are important extensions of the urban fabric into interior spaces in both vertical and horizontal dimensions, creating a new form of public recreation and leisure spaces for people to enjoy. There is no question that residents and visitors are spending more and more time inside shopping malls in key modern cities, thus, better understanding and improvement of shopping mall environments can play a critical role of enhancing the quality of urban experience. This research aims to apply classic urban analysis principles to examine major shopping malls in Hong Kong to gain a better understanding of shopping mall spaces when evaluated as urban spaces. In particular, the shopping mall spaces will be examined in terms of Kevin Lynch’s five elements ofpaths, edges, districts, nodesandlandmarksfrom a visibility and network graph analysis perspective.Hong Kong often sits atop rankings of highest retail rents in the world with rental rates higher than those of major international cities, such as New York, London, Tokyo and Sydney. The rental premium thus places enormous significance on the planning and development of shopping centres in Hong Kong. Current models of shopping centre planning are based on metric distances, that is, the actual physical separation between tenants and other features. Tenant and rental strategies are formulated with actual distances from the “centre” of the mall or from other visitor magnets, such as, anchor stores, food courts, access points, and so on. Many urban and building studies have concluded that vision is the strongest sense affecting visitors’ perception of space. We argue that the visual field properties of a shopping centre, in addition to its physical properties, play a critical role in determining visitors movement and behaviour, and thus its properties as an integral part of the urban fabric.Specifically, this research focuses on three major aspects of a shopping centre: 1) visual field properties of the circulatory spaces (the characteristics of the entire centre), 2) individual feature visibility (how many spaces a feature is visible from), and 3) feature inter-visibility (the feature distribution in terms of visual linkages instead of physical adjacency) to investigate the characteristics of the five Lynch city / urban elements when applied to shopping malls. Using computational tools derived from visibility graph analysis (VGA), this research will analyse the visual field properties – connectivity, integration, intelligibility, complexity, occlusivity, and so on – of 20 Hong Kong shopping centres of various types and sizes to identify patterns and typologies. Methods adopted from social network analysis (SNA) will be used to construct inter-visibility networks (IVN) to understand the visual distribution of features and landmarks in relation to one another. Finally, on-site survey and observations of actual visitors movements will be conducted at selected shopping centres to verify the findings from the models emerging from the above analysis.The results of this study can be used to improve the urban space qualities of shopping mall designs by optimizing their visibility and network properties. This would be a win-win-win situation: visitors can enjoy better urban spaces, which attracts more visitors to the malls and improves business for retailers, in turn increasing sales-derived rental income for mall operators. The findings of this research will further inform researchers, practitioners, developers and management on the significant impact of the visual field properties of a shopping centre on shopper behaviour, as well as its wider applications to urban studies.