Evaluating the Visual Quality of Urban Landscape Using PCA Method (Case Study: Mashhad)

Visual quality and beauty are important and major components of man-made environment, particularly in urban areas. The visual quality evaluation and landscape structural indices are essential necessities in management of visual quality and beauty of urban areas. The fundamental studies of landscape beauty components are not after evaluating the beauty or loftiness, but they seek to identify beauty preferences and the most important criteria. The purpose of this study was to determine the most important criteria in landscape visual quality evaluation of Ayatollah Shirazi and Ahmadabad in Mashhad. The data obtained from the questionnaires were analyzed at 5 stages using Principal Components Analysis method in SPSS® softwareVersion 16 for Windows and finally the most important criteria were identified. The analysis demonstrated that among 20 mental criteria utilized in this study, six variables including passageways width, the density and compactness of vegetation (green), tree components of the the vegetation, bushes and shrubs components of the vegetation, green spaces, the layout of plants and the existence of flowers in green space paths were the principal components and had the highest importance. As the principal components, these can be used as representative of other components. The analysis enables the researchers to analyze the data faster, more accurately and and examine the visual quality using reduced data volume.