The influence of physical setting on the behaviour of shopping pedestrians in the central business district of Nairobi

Abstract

This thesis is principally concerned with how the physical setting influences human behaviour. So far there is no evidence that proves any direct causality between the environment and overt human behaviour. Nevertheless, it has been established and observed that the physical environment can, to some extent, be supportive or act as catalyst to certain behaviour. Although urban spaces are modelled to meet the utilitarian and aesthetic needs of the users, it has never been possible to prior anticipate the behaviours these spaces will elicit, support or inhibit. This inability to forecast how space affects the users results in some urban spaces being preferred and thronged with people, whilst others are abhorred and deserted. This research endeavoured to investigate how the street characteristics influenced shopping pedestrians' route-choice behaviour in the Central Business District of Nairobi. This is justifiable because the ability to predict people's attitude to particular environments would be a step forward to augment planning professionals' capacity to evolve design solutions with desirable affective quality of space. This research used semantic differential (SD) scales to obtain verbal judgements of the physical characteristics of the preferred revealed routes, and feelings about them from shopping pedestrians in the Central Business District of Nairobi. The shopping pedestrians were also requested to provide preference ratings for fifty-four photographs of shopping streets. In addition, they plotted their itineraries and provided preference ratings of different regions of the CBD. The study, by applying exploratory factor analytic theory, established that street spatial scale and complexity are factors in shopping pedestrians' route-choice behaviour. These two factors represent the arousal potential whose interactions with the users cause certain levels of arousal. The study confirms a hypothesis that shopping pedestrians spontaneously follow routes that are commensurate with their desired level of arousal. The research concludes that the complexity and spatial scale determines shopping pedestrians' route-choice behaviour. It suggests, amongst other conclusions, the need to develop quantitative and objective methods for measuring complexity and use of confirmatory factor analytic theory to test the role of social complexity in shopping pedestrian route-choice behaviour.