How Built Environment Characteristics Influence Urban Vitality in Historic Districts: The Mediating Role of Pedestrian Perception

Currently, the revitalization and protection of historic districts have become the focus of academic research. However, existing studies have few investigations into how the perception mediated at the pedestrian scale affects spatial behavior choices within historical and cultural districts. This study takes a certain historic district in Shenyang as an example, using multiple perception methods, including visual perception and online perception, as mediators to explore the relationship between spatial characteristics, spatial quality, and urban vitality. First, through the Factor analysis method (FA), the study divides the built environment within the research scope into four spatial characteristics: street scale, historical and cultural, environmental comfort, and functional business characteristics. Second, by applying the mediating and moderating effect model, this study takes visual quality (visual perception) and public preferences (online perception) as perception mediators and analyzes the associative pathways and conditional effects of various spatial characteristics on urban vitality through the mediation process. The study results indicate: (1) Each spatial characteristic has a significant mediating effect on vitality. (2) The effect pathways of spatial characteristics differ substantially across dimensions, and a significant moderating effect exists exclusively in historical and cultural characteristics. (3) Public preference exerts a significant negative moderating effect on the association between historical and cultural characteristics and urban vitality. This study reveals the mechanism of “spatial characteristics–dual perception dimensions–urban vitality” in historic districts and elaborates the associative mechanism between spatial characteristics and historic district vitality under different levels of public preferences.