Real and Virtual City

Perception of urban spaces

Silvia Covarino
4th November 2021
Perception Urban Spaces
Cities
Urban spaces are known to form a point of
view about a city in a person's mind.

A complete image of urban space

is resultant of both the activities taking
place at that place and the enclosed
space built from like massing, form
facades and character of buildings.
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Factors-affecting-Visual-Perception_fig2_342977644
Factors affecting Visual Perception https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Factors-affecting-Visual-Perception_fig2_342977644
Visual Perception and its Dimensions,
Components, Indicators. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Factors-affecting-Visual-Perception_fig2_342977644
We're so connected, kind of ever-presently,
with technology now.
People are carrying their phones with them
and looking at the screen so much.
Google Maps is a web mapping platform and consumer
application offered by Google. It offers satellite imagery,
aerial photography, street maps, 360° interactive
panoramic views of streets (Street View), real-time traffic
conditions, and route planning for traveling by foot, car, air
(in beta) and public transportation.
https://www.fastcompany.com/40483528/20-incredibly-useful-things-you-didnt-know-google-maps-could-do
https://www.fastcompany.com/40483528/20-incredibly-useful-things-you-didnt-know-google-maps-could-do
Human civilization has grown and expanded at an amazing
rate – or alarming, depending on who you ask – and you can
watch the last 32 years of it unfold via satellite imagery
thanks to Google’s Timelapse feature.

Originally released in 2013, Timelapse has been updated to add four

more years of data and tons of new imagery data from two new
satellites, offering clearer views with more detail than ever before.
Choose any location in the world to see how it has changed – from cities
to the shrinking ice caps.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5W-zPqrGQWA
Three Decades of Earth Seen From Space | TIME https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2n8XX5NwYyI
http://www.metamorpolis.com/
Metarmorpolis - The rise of a chinese mega city https://vimeo.com/121638926
3D view to see the
"world’s center of
human mass."

https://www.archdaily.com/908832/matt-daniels-maps-world-populations-as-
mountains?fbclid=IwAR3EYAxc7X5GwLsttp7RAbE7xQouVaxClm44scMnysabRRhDQQGNWpgo67Y
http://luminocity3d.org/WorldPopDen/?fbclid=IwAR2lGwy2SYbt2SUDNIfI9J0E6DRy5erptXHOh
mF_wvATBh43StDSvtLXhEA#3/12.00/10.00
http://luminocity3d.org/WorldPopDen/?fbclid=IwAR2lGwy2SYbt2SUDNIfI9J0E6DRy5erptXHOh
mF_wvATBh43StDSvtLXhEA#3/12.00/10.00
https://www.instagram.com/p/Bq77P4thbHF/?utm_source=ig_share_sheet&igshid=b4amp91ncuv7&fbclid=IwAR
14KSz6SxvrRMp1Ye0SrtGNnzVy19vgShwVZrmae40tMFV7bgi9dP-NClo
https://transportforcairo.com/work/transit-map/
Cairo Flow https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_EbvK4I268
https://brilliantmaps.com/tourists-vs-locals/
https://www.timeout.com/chicago/blog/where-chicago-residents-and-tourists-take-photos
Tourists Vs Locals: 20 Cities Based On
Where People Take Photos
May 27, 2015
Five years ago, a photographer named Eric Fischer embarked on a project called
"Locals and Tourists" that had him mapping the photo habits of Chicago residents
and tourists.
The results are above. While not necessarily mind-blowing, but they do look nice.
The red dots in the map above represent photos shot by tourists, blue dots are
those taken by Chicago natives. Yellow dots represent photos taken by people
who's status as tourists couldn't be determined.

As expected, the Loop is consumed by a fair amount of tourists. Navy Pier is

entirely swarmed. Even so, the most noticeable color on this map is blue. Many
cities in the Locals and Tourists project didn't come anywhere near as close to
Chicago in terms of spread. Houston, the nation's next-largest city, is a
comparative dead zone (see below).
Perhaps the best takeaway is that people really love spending time in Chicago.
https://labs.mapbox.com/labs/twitter-gnip/locals/#12/30.0614/31.2425
Cairo https://labs.mapbox.com/labs/twitter-gnip/locals/#12/30.0614/31.2425
https://labs.mapbox.com/labs/twitter-gnip/locals/#12/30.0614/31.2425
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-02-05/mapping-where-people-run
Inspired by a 2011 project that mapped popular
running routes in a few European cities,
Nathan Yau at FlowingData has done the same
for 22 major cities, including 18 in the U.S.

To make these maps, Lau simply grabbed public data from the
exercise-tracking app RunKeeper. While these visualizations are
not representative of all runners in a city, they do offer useful
information on urban spaces. For one, we see that people really do
love running near water and in parks.
See Where People Run and Bike in New York City With This Beautiful Interactive Map

https://viewing.nyc/media/c59029b956e7a3aa814a8817f6575929/
http://io.morphocode.com/urban-layers/
 Reading the City?
(Understanding the City!)
https://www.use-it.travel/home
https://www.use-it.travel/home
https://www.use-it.travel/home
In this book, Lynch argues that people in urban situations orient
themselves by means of mental maps.

He compares three American cities Boston, Jersey City, and Los

Angeles and looks at how people orient themselves in these cities.
A central notion in this book is that of legibility (also called imageability and visibility).
Legibility means the extend to which the cityscape can be ‘read’. People who move through the city engage in
way-finding. They need to be able to recognize and organize urban elements into a coherent pattern.

“In the process of way-finding, the strategic link is the environmental image, the generalized mental picture of the exterior
physical world that is held by an individual. This image is the product both of immediate sensation and of the memory of past
experience, and it is used to interpret information and to guide action”

Lynch proposes that these mental maps consist of five elements:

(1) paths: routes along which people move throughout the city;
(2) edges: boundaries and breaks in continuity; (3)districts: areas characterized by common characteristics;
(4) nodes: strategic focus points for orientation like squares and junctions;
(5) landmarks: external points of orientation, usually a easily identifyable physical object in the urban landscape. Of
these five elements, paths are especially important according Lynch, since these organize urban mobility.
Elements of Urban Form https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C36QIjB4Ljk
Elements of Urban Form https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C36QIjB4Ljk
A clear mental map of the urban environment is needed to counter the always looming fear of disorientation.

A legible mental map gives people an important sense of emotional security, it is the framework for communication and
conceptual organization, and heightens the depth and intensity of everyday human experience.
The city itself is thus a powerful symbol of a complex society,
argues Lynch. An environmental image has three components:

identity (the recognition of urban elements as separate entities),

structure (the relation of urban elements to other objects and to the
observer), and meaning (its practical and emotional value to the
observer).

It is important that these urban elements are not hermetically

designed into precise and final detail but present an open-
ended order.

Urban inhabitants should be able to actively form their own

stories and create new activities.
Lynch presents his work as an agenda for urban designers.

They should design the city in such a way that it gives room for
three related ‘movements': mapping, learning, shaping.
1. people should be able to acquire a clear mental map of their urban
environment.
2. people should be able to learn how to navigate in this environment
by training. Third, people must be able to operate and act upon their
environment.
Lynch’ work has been influential to many. Theorist of
postmodernity Fredric Jameson (1991) for
instance refers to Lynch when he argues that the
cognitive map is a means to cope with societies
complexities by bridging ‘objective’ and abstract
representations of space, and subjective existential
experiences of ‘lived space’.

Lynch can also be seen as a precursor to the influential

thesis by Henri Lefrebvre from 1974 that space is not
just ‘out there’ as a mathematical entity or a
priori category but always socially produced. Lynch’
work has many implications for urban design and raises
various questions about the present role of mobile and
locative media technologies in the urban context.
In addition, Lynch’ emphasis on clear legibility of the urban environment
poses some critical questions about the current tendency to saturate the
urban landscape with information.
What happens to the overall legibility of the city when every building,
object, and place wants to communicate and announce its existence to
us by yelling “I Am Here, Look At Me!”? To what extend
will mobile and locative devices come to act as filters for coping with the
torrent of information, or actually become part of the problem itself?

Another issue brought up by Lynch’ work is the eternal

question of (the end of) serendipity, so often discussed in
relation to mobile media and location-based services.

Are locative services undermining the potential for exploration and

unexpected encounters with new places and people, when our
movements are guided and goal-oriented?
Lynch himself feels that disorientation is the cause of fear and anxiety,
and already claims that “ to become completely lost is perhaps a
rather rare experience for most people in the modern city”.
Yet under controlled circumstances he acknowledges that “there is some
value in mystification, labyrinth, or surprise in the environment” .
Of course it could be countered that
media did not play such a big role in the
urban context at the time of writing of this
book (1960) but this misses the point that
cities from their inception have been
inscribed by signs and media, as
Malcolm McCullough so
clearly demonstrated in his keynote
speech at The Mobile City 2008.
Lynch work also introduces a question that is especially
relevant nowadays.

Is our capacity for orientation

and way-
finding something we learn (and thus
can unlearn as well when we externalize this
to our GPS navigation devices, or is it innate to people
as well as other animals?

Lynch takes a clear stance when he says “it now seems

unlikely that there is any mystic “instinct” of way-finding”,
but that seems to be countered by recent biological
evidence about for instance bird migrations.
As an artificial world, the city should be so in the best sense: made by art,
shaped for human purposes. (Kevin Lynch)
One such question is the extend to which our way-finding shifts
from orienting ourselves to mostly ‘objective’ urban
elements to become increasingly subjective
by means of locative media technologies. We
are far more able than ever before to “write” the city with our
own subjective experiences and share these with other people
through mobile media.

Lynch is talking about elements of the city that are publicly

visible to all people.
Lynch primarily emphasizes
the role of the visual sense.
He says how people find
their way in the city by
relying on vision.
Other faculties such as hearing and even smelling
are lacking in his work. Some later authors have
stressed the role of sound in experiencing the city. A
related omission in Lynch’ analysis of the urban
experience is the role of media in general and text in
particular. This is odd since Lynch so prominently
uses the term legibility in his work.
An early modern writer such as Walter Benjamin for
instance already looks at the relation between print
media and the city, and emphasizes that the modern
city is increasingly being
dominated by “script-images”.
“Script – having found, in the book, a refuge in which it
can lead an autonomous existence – is pitilessly dragged
out into the street by advertisements and subjected to the
brutal heteronomies of economic chaos”, he says in an
essay called “Attested Auditor of Books”.
https://www.facebook.com/Documentaries2000/photos/a.376280759684833/662704417709131
https://touf2011.wordpress.com/2011/12/21/perception-of-urban-space-a-schizoanalysis/
https://touf2011.wordpress.com/2011/12/21/perception-of-urban-space-a-schizoanalysis/
https://iphonephotographyschool.com/urban-design/
https://www.stephenwiltshire.co.uk/
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsJbApZ5GF0
Stephen Wiltshire draws NYC for UBS
URBAN DIARY !!!!!!!

Tokyo City Notebook

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqYSiOkUdkE
Milan City By Drone | Milano The Changing City | 4K UHD drone footage https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fL_-mC7DHs8
Milan City By Drone | Milano The Changing City | 4K UHD drone footage https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fL_-mC7DHs8
https://www.pinterest.it/pin/808677676813616896/
Desaturated tones of blue and red-orange.
1.#e1eaf3
2.#1c373e
3.#8e584e
4.#b47b68
5.#7b989e

https://www.bouldencreatives.com/6-city-inspired-color-schemes/
Warm city light tones.
1.#eab394
2.#f6e3d2
3.#b09b98
4.#272729
5.#4e3634

https://www.bouldencreatives.com/6-city-inspired-color-schemes/
https://www.archdaily.com/897401/create-color-palettes-from-your-smartphone-pics-with-these-4-free-apps
https://www.cca.qc.ca/en/events/34422/sense-of-the-city-an-alternative-approach-to-urbanism
Use me in your City!

Bring me always with you!