Using google street view for street-level urban form analysis, a case study in Cambridge, Massachusetts

Abstract

City streets are a focal point of human activities in urban areas. As an important element of urban form, streets are also a major interface of the social interaction between urban dwellers and urban built environment. Quantifying the urban built environment is thus important for us to understand the potential impact of the urban built environment on urban dwellers. The publicly accessible Google Street View (GSV), which captures the streetscape appearances of cities around the world, provides a very good tool for urban studies at a fine level. In this study, we illustrated using GSV for describing and mapping urban form at street-level in terms of the enclosure of street canyons in Cambridge, Massachusetts. We further mapped and analyzed the influence of street enclosure on solar radiation reaching the street canyons by estimating the sunlight duration in street canyons. Some other potential applications of GSV data were also introduced in this paper. The results of this study would shed new light on future urban studies using the publicly accessible and globally available GSV data. Other researchers may find the method illustrated in this study is directly deployable for different studies related to urban form analysis.