Design and construction professionals are entrusted to design built environments that can assure public safety. Crime statistics is one indicator that reflects the correlation between built environments and public safety. Acknowledging the perception of pedestrians, specifically their psychological and emotional reactions toward certain public space settings would be another effective parameter to develop a good foundation to create more livable and safer neighborhoods. With these in mind, the analyses in this study have attempted to explore the relationship between street conditions and the perception of pedestrian safety in Auburn Alabama, USA. The research design primarily consists of an online survey that obtained information about (1) respondents’ brief personal characteristics, (2) their walking times, (3) their levels of anxiety regarding certain street settings based on daytime and nighttime photographs (closed-ended questions on a Likert scale from 1 to 5), and (4) their reasoning behind these ratings (open-ended). The results show that proper street lighting is the main contributor to enhancing the feeling of safety on streets followed by the morphologic complexity of streets formed by various business types, outdoor dining, street performers, and other pedestrian activities. Other than physical settings, the study also found that age and gender influenced the level of anxiety among pedestrians.

Planning scholars and practitioners know that planning projects and research are more likely to achieve significant outcomes when the problem is addressed at the most appropriate level of neighborhood. Selecting the right scale of neighborhood, however, is always challenging. To create conceptual framework for the choice of an appropriate neighborhood unit in future studies and projects, this article attempts to reveal a hierarchy of neighborhood and key elements for different levels of neighborhoods. The area, population, boundary characteristics, and key facilities for four levels of neighborhoods—face-blocks, residential neighborhoods, institutional neighborhoods, and community—are defined through the review of the literature on planning theory, guideline, and research on neighborhoods.