My street is better than your street: Towards data-driven urban planning with visual perception

Understanding people's preferences and needs is crucial for decision making in urban planning. However, studies have yet to analyze and quantify the influence of demographic factors and perception differences between countries. In this work, we explore the introduction of demographic questions, specifically age groups and the Big Five personality traits, in visual urban perception field experiments to assess the difference perception score in six dimensions - safe, lively, boring, depressing, wealthy, and beautiful - within demographic subgroups and between two countries. We found significant (p-value < 0.05) differences in perception scores in all six dimensions at the country level (conscientious and neurotic groups in Singapore and the US) and at the population level (age groups over both countries). This preliminary results set the stage to bigger and broader experiments.