**5. Conclusions**

The social and experiential significance of urban street edges has long been understood. However, their potential to be engaging and stimulating for pedestrians has recently been impacted by issues such as high street decline and a reduction in the variety of functions they o ffer. These factors have triggered the need to gain greater insight into how contemporary street edges are experienced, building upon the broader consideration that there is currently a limited empirical understanding of the way in which street edges are experientially engaged with from the direct perspective of pedestrians. The current investigation addresses this limitation through the use of mobile eye-tracking along both pedestrianised and non-pedestrianised streets. The study findings demonstrate that people visually engage with street edge ground floors more than their upper floors along both non-pedestrianised

and pedestrianised streets; that visual engagemen<sup>t</sup> is distributed more towards the street edge on the walked side along non-pedestrianised streets; and this contrasts with visual engagemen<sup>t</sup> upon the street edges of pedestrianised streets, which was balanced across the edges on both sides. The current investigation also highlights how everyday activities of pedestrians and differing streets walked both have the potential to impact visual engagemen<sup>t</sup> with the street edge areas examined. As a result, the study advances our empirical understanding of pedestrian street edge experience. With this in mind, the current investigation subsequently examined how such insight could inform the way street edge design intervention is considered and approached. This was pursued in an attempt to highlight how street edge decision-making can align to a greater extent with the way that pedestrians visually engage with these realms. Such alignment is essential in order to ensure that street edges remain socially and experientially engaging aspects of urban environments that can contribute to peoples' day-to-day quality of life long into the future.

**Author Contributions:** This paper is based on the first author's doctoral research conducted at the University of Sheffield under the supervision of the co-authors. All the authors have contributed significantly to the paper.

**Funding:** This research was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), gran<sup>t</sup> number ES/J500215/1.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflicts of interest.
