The Evaluation of Urban Neighbourhoods 1: Perception

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Abstract
Studies of residential location have shown that intraurban migrants usually confine their search for a house to areas which they consider suitable and of which they have strong images. Multidimensional scaling was used to examine neighbourhood perception among a sample of residents in Dublin, Ireland. The social status of the neighbourhoods was the most important characteristic perceived, and this was closely related to objective indices of socioeconomic status. The familiarity and housing style of the areas were also considered. There was a high degree of consensus in the perception of these attributes, and individual differences in the importance attached to them were only tenuously related to the characteristics of the respondents. The use of the perceived attributes for the formation of preferences is examined in a second paper.