Scenic urban view management policies shape how people visually engage with the built environment, yet expert-led frameworks often overlook everyday public viewing practices. In London, the View Management Framework (LVMF) protects historic skylines t...
Scenic urban view management policies shape how people visually engage with the built environment, yet expert-led frameworks often overlook everyday public viewing practices. In London, the View Management Framework (LVMF) protects historic skylines through designated viewpoints, viewing corridors, and height controls, privileging heritage preservation while assuming stable and shared scenic preferences. This study introduces an integrated analytical framework to evaluate the spatial and temporal alignment between expert-designated and user-generated scenic practices from 2000 to 2024. Expert viewpoints and viewing objects defined by the LVMF are compared with a 25-year corpus of geotagged photographs from Geograph using Ripley’s Cross-K function and grid-based local density cluster analysis.
Results reveal that expert–user alignment is episodic rather than persistent, showing a pronounced but short-lived peak during the LVMF’s formalization period (2011–2013). Alignment is strongest at long-distance viewing ranges (250–500 m) around major landmarks such as St Paul’s Cathedral and Tower Bridge, where expert priorities converge with public photographic behavior. By contrast, short-distance scenes—including street art, bridges, markets, and events—rarely overlap with expert designations, indicating systematic divergence in scenic preference. These findings demonstrate the temporal fragility and scale dependence of expert–user scenic alignment and underscore the need for adaptive, data-informed view management policies that integrate panoramic visibility with everyday, human-scale experiences.