Legible Cities

http://upm.academia.edu/sourenaziaei/Papers/641508/Legible_cities_The_role_of_visual_clues_and_pathway_configuration_in_legibility_of

This class this past week we have been discussing the structure of a city and its role in cinema. That a city is a problem of organized complexity, neither a simple relationship between ratios and statistics nor a completely random system but something based on more complicated relationships. In answering what problem a city represents we delved into the components of the problem, first noting that cities can be read and therefore have legibility. The elements of cleanliness and architectural design, population and liveliness allow those living in a city to find their way in it and know what areas to avoid or seek out. The legibility is made of many parts, the paths used for travel, the districts that define the structure of the city and edges that mark boundaries between them, the nodes that form around path crossings and social hangout spots, and the landmarks that guide people on the paths through nodes. We finished the week discussing how the city environment is perceived both in media, such as movies, and by people that are unused to it. How a city is thought of as a scary and uninviting place by those that live in the country and vice versa.

                In this article it discusses how city legibility can be measured and improved depending on how regular or irregular of the paths and landmarks of a city are. In specific the article focus on a study conducted between three cities. In order of decreasing regularity they are: Saltaire, Sheffield, and Runcorn. It was found that local Englishmen could navigate and remember the cities with the most amount of regularity the best. The resulting map cross reference between all study participants was known as the group image. The group image was most accurate and contained the most information in Saltaire, due to its high amount of regularity. The study went on use group density of movement, pathway configuration and the location of significant spatial elements to track the social aspects of the city and related them to the maps of the study participants. Unsurprisingly it found that city elements that were highly used regular showed up far more regularly in the group image. These elements were calculated as intelligible, it was found that Saltaire was the most intelligible while Runcorn was the lowest. It was further found that physical visibility is not linked to the importance of spatial element in group images.