Evaluating visual experience in heritage-rich areas: A case study of the Inner Ring Road of West Lake, Hangzhou

Streets constitute dynamic landscape perception essential in heritage-rich area planning. They facilitate immersive user experiences. However, urbanization intensifies infrastructure-heritage conflicts. This necessitates improved street space evaluation, management, and enhancement. This study focuses on an Inner Ring Road of West Lake in Hangzhou, developing an index system that encompasses naturalness, openness, artificiality, and traffic, suitable for the visual assessment of unique heritage areas. We used images crawled from Baidu Street View for semantic segmentation and analyzed the landscape element composition, visual quality, extreme values, and spatial distribution of the West Lake Inner Ring Road. The findings indicate that: (1) West Lake has good landscape quality, but the visibility of the water is very low. (2) West Lake can be divided into the artificial scenic area in the northeast and the natural scenic area in the southwest, but the over-dense plant planting and route planning have led to serious homogeneity of spatial continuity. (3) The existence of closed spaces such as tunnels also prevents people from experiencing it continuously. This study investigates heritage areas as spatial media, quantifying visual experience-space use relationships to provide practical visual landscape assessment, informing future heritage street management and development.