A study of consensus for visual impact assessment of urban streetscape

Visual Impact Assessment (VIA) is one of the important assessments in creating positive visual quality in an urban streetscape setting. Reliability of the VIA results has always been a fundamental issue as the assessment deals with both the objective and subjective assessments carried out by the experts and lay public. This has resulted a 'gap' between both groups as they use different assessment approaches and visualization tools. Due to the rapid change of information communication technology (ICT) and computer graphic visualization, there is a possibility where visual perception between both groups has changed. Apart from this, there is also a possibility where visual perception between experts and lay public may have a distinguishing equivalence especially on the visual perception 'decision'. This research starts with a critical review on VIA approaches based on theories and existing research implementation of VIA. It then continues with surveys of the visual perception between the experts and lay public on the landscape aspects of the urban streetscape and visualization tools used in VIA.