Linking Streetscape Atmosphere with Social Vulnerability and Community Resilience

Social vulnerability and community resilience are essential frameworks for disaster risk management. Environmental perception quality also affects disaster outcomes by shaping social capital and postdisaster psychological recovery. As existing research seldom examines how perception quality is associated with the resilience–vulnerability system, however, practitioners cannot determine whether and how perception quality might interact with resilience-related configurations and social vulnerability. Furthermore, analyzing these associations requires clarification of perception quality, as this concept lacks a distinct ontological position between subjective experience and objective environment, hindering its coherent theoretical linkage with resilience–vulnerability systems. Therefore, we redefine street-view perception quality as streetscape atmosphere, a presubjective cross-scale perceptual background that exists between subject and object, possesses materiality and sociality, and can be quantified using aggregated crowdsourced judgments. Our case study of the Northeastern United States uses a controlled spatial lag model with decomposition analysis. The findings reveal three patterns. First, high social vulnerability is systematically associated with less beautiful and more depressing atmospheres. This pattern signals accumulated disadvantages in streetscape atmosphere that compound structural inequalities. Second, housing and infrastructure resilience aligns with less beautiful and more depressing atmosphere, whereas institutional resilience aligns with less depressing atmosphere. Third, these atmosphere signatures are materially expressed through both the visible composition and the maintained condition of public-space environments. This study is one of the first to clarify the ontology of street-view perception quality and to pioneer the integration of streetscape atmosphere into resilience–vulnerability frameworks. It provides an empirical basis for disaster risk management and policy design.