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Leisure walking represents a vital yet underexplored dimension of urban tourism, particularly within historical and cultural districts that define the identity and everyday experience of tourism cities. This study explores how tourists perceive leisure walkability in such environments and examines the key streetscape features that shape these perceptions. Focusing on Xi’an’s Ancient City Wall area – a representative historical and cultural core of a tourism city – this study integrates street-view imagery (SVI), Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) text modelling, Random Forest regression, and SHAP interpretation to link tourists’ bottom-up perceptual narratives with top-down quantified environmental indicators. Tourists’ leisure-walking perceptions are structured around four core dimensions – Safety, Comfort, Aesthetics, and Explorability. Streetscape features exert greater influence than individual attributes, with sidewalk ratio driving Safety (28.5%), greenness shaping Comfort (27.1%), and colour diversity influencing Aesthetics and Explorability (45.5%, 32.3%). The relationships are nonlinear and interactive: the effect of one cue often depends on the level of another, revealing both synergistic and inhibitory configurations among streetscape features. This study adapts the Hierarchy of Walking Needs to tourism-city street contexts by proposing a tourist-centred, four-dimensional leisure-walking perception framework that distinguishes foundational needs (Safety and Comfort) from higher-order experiential pathways (Aesthetics and Explorability). It operationalises streetscape affordance cues from street-view imagery and demonstrates how specific cues and cue configurations translate into distinct perceptual outcomes. The framework is transferable for diagnosing and designing walkable, experience-rich tourism streets and supports sustainable destination governance aligned with SDG 11.
Cheng et al. (Fri,) studied this question.