Vizuálna analýza a percepcia mestských pamiatok/Visual Analysis and Perception of City Monuments

City monuments attract visitors; especially to places with efficient viewpoints. This paper presents a case study approaches to visibility analysis, visual quality assessment and visitor perceptions of city monuments. The number of city monuments and their visibility from the closest surrounds of Svätý Jur, Pezinok and Modra towns were identified by digital terrain model, 3D landscape model and Observer points in ArcGIS. The conditions for visual quality of eight historical monuments in the city of Bratislava and their visual attractiveness from 15 selected viewpoints were evaluated by GIS GRASS, 3D landscape model and the criteria of distance, impressiveness, size and the number of visible monuments in the second approach. The visual quality of these 15 viewpoints was verified by surveying more than 300 respondents on their views of the monuments from similar locations in the third approach. These second and third approaches enabled assessment of the conformity of visual quality analysis conducted in objective-subjective and subjective ways. Certain similarity to the results was revealed in the most attractive viewpoints ranked by observers remote from the historic town. This provided views of several monuments and a panoramic view of the centre of Bratislava. Finally, the combined approaches used in assessing visual quality analysis in this study establish a comprehensive method of defining and verifying the best locations for effective sightseeing of a city’s monuments