Sijie Yang

2025

1. 

   Urban Comfort Assessment in the Era of Digital Planning: A Multidimensional, Data-driven, and AI-assisted Framework

   Sijie Yang, Binyu Lei, and Filip Biljecki

   In 19th International Conference on Computational Urban Planning and Urban Management (CUPUM 2025), 2025

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   Ensuring liveability and comfort is one of the fundamental objectives of urban planning. Numerous studies have employed computational methods to assess and quantify factors related to urban comfort such as greenery coverage, thermal comfort, and walkability. However, a clear definition of urban comfort and its comprehensive evaluation framework remain elusive. Our research explores the theoretical interpretations and methodologies for assessing urban comfort within digital planning, emphasising three key dimensions: multidimensional analysis, data support, and AI assistance.

   @inproceedings{yang2025urban,
     title = {Urban Comfort Assessment in the Era of Digital Planning: A Multidimensional, Data-driven, and AI-assisted Framework},
     author = {Yang, Sijie and Lei, Binyu and Biljecki, Filip},
     booktitle = {19th International Conference on Computational Urban Planning and Urban Management (CUPUM 2025)},
     address = {UCL East, London, UK},
     month = jun,
     year = {2025},
   }

2. 

   Thermal Comfort in Sight: Thermal Affordance and its Visual Assessment for Sustainable Streetscape Design

   Sijie Yang, Adrian Chong, Pengyuan Liu, and Filip Biljecki

   Building and Environment, 2025

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   In response to climate change and urban heat island effects, enhancing human thermal comfort in cities is crucial for sustainable urban development. Traditional methods for investigating the urban thermal environment and corresponding human thermal comfort level are often resource intensive, inefficient, and limited in scope. To address these challenges, we (1) introduce a new concept named thermal affordance, which formalizes the integrated inherent capacity of a streetscape to influence human thermal comfort based on its visual and physical features; and (2) an efficient method to evaluate it (visual assessment of thermal affordance — VATA), which combines street view imagery (SVI), online and in-field surveys, and statistical learning algorithms. VATA extracts five categories of image features from SVI data and establishes 19 visual-perceptual indicators for streetscape visual assessment. Using a multi-task neural network and elastic net regression, we model their chained relationship to predict and comprehend thermal affordance for Singapore. VATA predictions are validated with field-investigated OTC data, providing a cost-effective, scalable, and transferable method to assess the thermal comfort potential of urban streetscape. Moreover, we demonstrate its utility by generating a geospatially explicit mapping of thermal affordance, outlining a model update workflow for long-term urban-scale analysis, and implementing a two-stage prediction and inference approach (IF-VPI-VATA) to guide future streetscape improvements. This framework can inform streetscape design to support sustainable, liveable, and resilient urban environments.

   @article{yang2025thermal,
     title = {Thermal Comfort in Sight: Thermal Affordance and its Visual Assessment for Sustainable Streetscape Design},
     author = {Yang, Sijie and Chong, Adrian and Liu, Pengyuan and Biljecki, Filip},
     journal = {Building and Environment},
     year = {2025},
   }

2023

1. 

   The Role of Subjective Perceptions and Objective Measurements of the Urban Environment in Explaining House Prices in Greater London: A Multi-Scale Urban Morphology Analysis

   Sijie Yang, Kimon Krenz, Waishan Qiu, and Wenjing Li

   ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information, 2023

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   House prices have long been closely related to the built environment of cities, yet whether the subjective perception (SP) of these environments has a differing effect on prices at multiple urban scales is unclear. This study sheds light on the impact of people’s SP of the urban environment on house prices in a multi-scale urban morphology analysis. We trained a machine learning (ML) model to predict people’s SP of the urban environment around properties across Greater London with survey response data from an online survey evaluating people’s SP of street view image (SVI) and linked this to house price data. This information was used to construct a hedonic price model (HPM) and to evaluate the association between SP and house price data in a series of linear regression models controlling location information and urban morphological characteristics such as street network centralities at multiple urban scales, quantified using space syntax (SS) methods. The findings show that SP influences house prices, but this influence differs depending on the urban scale of analysis. Particularly, a sense of ’enclosure’ and ’comfort’ are important factors influencing house price variation. This study contributes by introducing SP of the urban environment as a new dimension into the traditional HPM and by exploring the economic impact of SP on the house price market at multiple urban scales.

   @article{yang2023role,
     title = {The Role of Subjective Perceptions and Objective Measurements of the Urban Environment in Explaining House Prices in Greater London: A Multi-Scale Urban Morphology Analysis},
     author = {Yang, Sijie and Krenz, Kimon and Qiu, Waishan and Li, Wenjing},
     journal = {ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information},
     volume = {12},
     number = {6},
     pages = {249},
     year = {2023},
     publisher = {MDPI},
   }

2022

1. 

   Cultural impacts on traditional Chinese garden design: A configurational comparison between traditional Chinese imperial and private gardens using space syntax

   Sijie Yang, and Yufeng Yang

   In Proceedings of the 13th International Space Syntax Symposium, 2022

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   Based on former qualitative studies, traditional Chinese imperial garden (TCIG) and private garden (TCPG) arguably have different cultural backgrounds and spatial properties. However, few studies have analysed configurational differences between TCIG and TCPG quantitatively and linked their different cultural contexts to these differences. This research thus tries to reveal the cultural impacts on the spatial configuration of traditional Chinese gardens by comparing TCIG and TCPG cases quantitatively. The study is processed in two sections: theoretical exploration and comparative case studies. In the first section, we try to link the different cultural backgrounds of TCIG and TCPG with corresponding garden spatial properties and use proper metrics to match these spatial properties. Four dimensions of traditional Chinese garden spatial properties are identified qualitatively based on previous studies: strong and weak programme, wayfinding system, visual relationship and spatial depth. During the process, four corresponding hypotheses about the spatial property differences and predicted results of quantitative studies are proposed. In the second section, four hypotheses may be demonstrated through visibility graph analysis (VGA) in space syntax theory by comparing three samples from each garden type. Our results indicate that TCIG and TCPG differ in all four dimensions, which are further explained by their respective cultural contexts. This research has two main contributions. Firstly, it has demonstrated configurational differences of TCIG and TCPG quantitatively and linked these differences to related cultural backgrounds. Secondly, this study has built a framework to analyse traditional Chinese garden space with space syntax, which can be used in further studies.

   @inproceedings{yang2022cultural,
     title = {Cultural impacts on traditional Chinese garden design: A configurational comparison between traditional Chinese imperial and private gardens using space syntax},
     author = {Yang, Sijie and Yang, Yufeng},
     booktitle = {Proceedings of the 13th International Space Syntax Symposium},
     pages = {414},
     year = {2022},
     organization = {International Space Syntax Symposium},
   }