Recommendations for Future Research

influenced pedestrians’ physical comfort, satisfaction, and affects. A further step could have been made to link the time of pedestrian responses to the quality of the environmental conditions at that time. It is also worthy to note that the study did not benefit from investigating the potential impacts of air quality by monitoring the environmental factor within each urban environment as the instrument requires warming up to run efficiently. The study built on the premise of a five-hour investigation period could not permit this.

Expanding onto the methodologies carried out during the field work research, the location and set-up of the author in each case study led to seeing activities, behaviours, and urban aspects from different perspectives. While this was mainly due to the urban morphology, as what is seen for instance in the urban layout of Montcalm East compared to the Blavatnik building, this led to deriving results which are limited in terms of urban dimension. It is probable that urban and pedestrian observation would have varied in relevance to the set-up location. Additionally, the study design of observing both pedestrians and activities carried out within the surrounding environment whilst conducting pedestrian questionnaires all between the period of 10:00 to 15:00 might have led to deriving results which are inconsistent with all performed urban and pedestrian activities and led to results that are partially unfair when compared with relevance to each case study. This limits the rigour of basing results off differences and commonalties.

When it comes to descriptively formulating the essence of the urban environment through Hillnhütter’s (2021) environment matrix and the façade design of each building through the façade design configuration system, it was noted that certain areas of the assessment criteria included vague descriptions and hence implementing conditional scoring and categorical placements partially depended on the assessor’s subjective point of view. This limits the reliability of an objective assessment and implies that these methods are liable to vary if conducted against the same building and urban environment, by different assessors.

Finally, cities are undoubtfully different from one another and within this, they represent a certain identity to its people. This study was conducted within the city of London, and given the city’s urban fabric, individuals approached might have responded with a preconceived conception of building norms. The results hence might vary depending on the city context and therefore are limited to a certain extent.

5.3 RECOMMENDATIONS FOR FUTURE RESEARCH

The conducted study recommends and expands onto various areas of future research. One of which, is that the façade design configuration system established in support of the study’s aims and objectives proposes a descriptive measure of buildings that expands beyond digital pattern recognition to encompass more essentially the characteristics of a building and its façade design. The façade design configuration system is liable to further development – more specifically that addressing a building’s use of materials and colours, but the concept of accounts its visual exterior into a simple ID nevertheless permits it to be used as a tool to better account facets of the exterior fabric and their consequent influence on pedestrians by compiling it with other forms of supporting research such as questionnaires, autonomic measures, or head movement and step frequencies observations. This provides an area of future research that would better inform practice and industry of potential advantages and disadvantages of architectural design on the wider population. This could also be directed into other directions such as investigating people’s preference of building designs or informing design proportionalities and features in relation to one another.