Visual pollution in Prague: how do city residents perceive it and how does it affect them?

This diploma thesis focuses on the perception of visual pollution in Prague, specifically on the role of outdoor advertising in public spaces and its impact on city residents. The aim of the thesis is to find out how Prague residents evaluate environments with varying degrees of visual pollution and what emotions it evokes in them. The research is based on a combined QUAN→qual design, which combines a questionnaire survey of 361 respondents from Prague with semi-structured interviews. The research included photographs taken by the author of twelve locations in Prague with high and low levels of visual pollution. The results suggest that visual pollution is not only perceived by residents as an aesthetic problem, but also as a factor affecting their emotional state and attention. Streets with excessive advertising are more often rated as unpleasant and are more associated with feelings of stress, moodiness, irritability, and anxiety, while environments without advertising and with the presence of greenery are more often rated as pleasant and evoke feelings of calm, well-being, joy, or serenity in respondents. The work also points to the different perceptions of individual advertising formats and emphasizes the importance of placing advertising in the environment and sophisticated graphic design. The...