Can a Large Language Model Assess Urban Design Quality? Evaluating Walkability Metrics Across Expertise Levels

Urban street environments are vital to supporting human activity in public spaces. The emergence of big data, such as street view images (SVIs) combined with multimodal large language models (MLLMs), is transforming how researchers and practitioners investigate, measure, and evaluate semantic and visual elements of urban environments. Considering the low threshold for creating automated evaluative workflows using MLLMs, it is crucial to explore both the risks and opportunities associated with these probabilistic models. In particular, the extent to which the integration of expert knowledge can influence the performance of MLLMs in evaluating the quality of urban design has not been fully explored. This study sets out an initial exploration of how integrating more formal and structured representations of expert urban design knowledge into the input prompts of an MLLM (ChatGPT-4) can enhance the model's capability and reliability in evaluating the walkability of built environments using SVIs. We collect walkability metrics from the existing literature and categorize them using relevant ontologies. We then select a subset of these metrics, focusing on the subthemes of pedestrian safety and attractiveness, and develop prompts for the MLLM accordingly. We analyze the MLLM's ability to evaluate SVI walkability subthemes through prompts with varying levels of clarity and specificity regarding evaluation criteria. Our experiments demonstrate that MLLMs are capable of providing assessments and interpretations based on general knowledge and can support the automation of multimodal image-text evaluations. However, they generally provide more optimistic scores and can make mistakes when interpreting the provided metrics, resulting in incorrect evaluations. By integrating expert knowledge, the MLLM's evaluative performance exhibits higher consistency and concentration.