Grey Relational Analysis (GRA) as an Effective Method of Research into Social Preferences in Urban Space Planning

The appearance of urban space is most often determined by planners, urbanists, and officials who fail to consider social preferences in the planning process. According to recent scientific research, spatial design should take into account people’s preferences with regard to its shape, as it is they who are the target audience. Moreover, legal regulations in many countries require the public’s inclusion into the space planning process. This paper outlines the legal status of the issue of social participation in spatial planning and provides an overview of the methods and techniques applied in the research into preferences. The aim of the article is to determine the strength of the relationship between the features adopted for the study using the grey system theory and to investigate the model’s behaviour for varied input data. It also presents the results of a study into the effect of geospatial features on the perception of the sense of security within urban space. The features were extracted using a heuristic method for solving research problems (i.e., brainstorming) and the survey was conducted by the point-scoring method. The survey results were processed by the grey system method according to the grey system theory (GST) of the grey relational analysis (GRA) type to yield a sequence of the strength of dependence between the analysed features. The study was conducted five times, with the order of entering the survey results being changed. The conducted analyses indicated that a change in the order of data from particular surveys applied for calculations resulted in the order of the epsilon coefficients in the significance sequences being changed. The analysis process was modified in order to obtain a stable significance sequence irrespective of the order of entering survey results in the analysis process. The analysis results in the form of a geospatial feature significance sequence provide information as to which of them have the greatest impact on the phenomenon under consideration. The research method can be applied to solve practical problems related to social participation.