Towards managing visual impacts on public spaces: a quantitative approach to studying visual complexity and enclosure using visual bowl and fractal dimension

Diverging opinions on the visual impact of high-rise developments on public spaces and the lack of measurements to justify these impacts drive our inquiry for this paper. To address this, we propose a workflow by 1) conceptualising and modelling a visual bowl's volume, 2) quantifying sky and height-width ratio, sightline distance and, 3) estimating the fractal dimension of geometry using a voxelization process and box-counting method. Using this workflow, we report a negative correlation between enclosure and visual complexity indicators when assessing the visual impacts of future high- rise developments in Central Melbourne. The computation of a volumetric visual bowl and its fractal dimension potentially offer a new approach to study these impacts.