Included in this section are four papers on urban aesthetics, including appraisals of central-business-district scenes (Nasar), residential scenes (Talbot; Nasar), and the commercial strip (Nasar). Because this section does not include a paper on the relevant scales and dimensions for assessing the quality of urban scenes, I have included in this introduction a brief description of my inquiry into this question.

First, a list of seventy-three adjectives referring to environmental affect from Craik's (1966) Landscape Adjective Checklist (see Editor's Introduction to “Natural and Rural Scenes”) and from Kasmar's (1970) lexicon were compiled. Fifty lay respondents and twenty graduate students in planning, architecture, and landscape architecture were asked to select from the list the adjectives that they considered to be most relevant to the assessment of urban scenes. For this task, the order of adjectives was varied for each respondent. The most frequently selected scales are shown in Table II.1. Subsequent analysis revealed that ratings of urban scenes loaded on three factors. As was found by Russell, there was a pleasantness (like–dislike, beautiful–ugly, interesting–boring, inviting–repelling, and attractive–unattractive) and an arousal (tense or excited vs. relaxed or calm) dimension. The third factor that emerged, safety, is not unlike Russell's relaxing variable (a mix of pleasantness and low arousal). Thus studies of urban affect might do well to assess pleasantness, arousal, excitement, and safety through scales such as appeal, active, exciting, and safe.