Assessing the urban design qualities of the urban street: A case study of Sylhet, Bangladesh

Shortage supply of space for urban infrastructure including street and pedestrian aspects remains a great challenge in the context of Bangladesh due to the rapid growth of urbanization. Here, overcrowded cities can hardly manage space for walking, the safest mood of public mobility. In Sylhet, a city in north-eastern Bangladesh, widening the vehicular street and decorating pedestrian pathways is the common tendency of street development by the local authority where the quality of urban streets is rarely investigated. In most research, walking preferences are measured via a quantitative method by addressing street comfort, traffic, and size rather than the urban design qualities of the street, i.e. a qualitative approach. Hence, the project aims to identify the user preferences for walking in the Zindabazar area, a commercial street of Sylhet considering the urban designs qualities like enclosure, legibility, human scale, transparency, complexity, coherence, linkage, and imageability. Therefore, this research applied a questionnaire survey, conducted to analyse the relation between walking preferences and urban design qualities of the commercial street. After collecting Likert scale data, Linear and multiple regression models were used to analyse it. Regression analysis was conducted to identify the relation between urban design qualities and user preferences for walking on the proposed street. The research identified that walking preferences of user are not significantly associated with all the factors of urban design qualities except legibility, transparency, and human scale. The research will help identify the poor and significant urban qualities of the street(s) which need to be modified to improve user preferences.