Livingscape approach to improve urban historical places

This work presents a study on "urban quality" as an important support to urban planning and management which was carried out through the livingscape approach (urban blight, soundscape, light-scape, thermal-scape, questionnaires) within the historic district „San Salvario‟ in Turin. To account for the multidimensional character of the urban quality in towns, an integrated analysis of three aspects was addressed, involving: 1) psychometric tools to measure the perception of environmental quality; 2) different aspects related to the urban blight (both in architectural and environmental terms); 3) objective investigation of environmental quality through the measurement of acoustic, visual, thermal and IAQ physical parameters. In particular, the paper focuses on the correlations among environmental perception subjective data and urban blight factors. Subjective and objective data were collected in-the-field during summer 2010 and winter 2011 every 30 m along 13 key-spaces of the district. The urban blight‟s survey was filled by some experts, while the environmental perception was delineated through the analysis of 496 questionnaires (240 in summer and 256 in winter), submitted to the users of the area during the measurements. An overview of the procedure and of some results which were found is presented.