Public Perception of Historic Urban Environments: A Systematic Literature Review and Conceptual Framework

Historic urban environments embody rich historical information and cultural memory, and public perception is closely associated with the physical characteristics, historical value, and cultural meanings of historic buildings and architectural heritage. To address the fragmentation in existing research, this study conducted a systematic review of the literature retrieved from ScienceDirect, Scopus, and Web of Science. A total of 50 peer-reviewed articles were included and synthesized through thematic coding across four dimensions: environmental characteristics, perceptual processing mechanisms, individual differences, and perceptual outcomes. The reviewed studies indicate that public perception is associated with physical space, cultural meaning, and social experience. Historic buildings, architectural features, spatial morphology, streetscapes, and other built-environment elements constitute important physical bases of perception, while sensory perception, cognitive construction, and emotional responses contribute to environmental understanding and evaluation. Age, identity, residential experience, cultural background, and regional context are associated with perceptual differences and may further relate to place identity, heritage value, well-being, conservation support, participation, and revisit intentions. Based on these findings, this study proposes an integrated conceptual framework linking perceptual sources, processes, differences, and outcomes, with potential implications for heritage conservation, adaptive reuse, historic-area regeneration, people-centered management, and future big-data- and AI-assisted perception research.