Urban Design Dimensions:

3.Perceptual Dimension
By Arnav Saikia
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September 28, 201515885

WHAT IS PERCEPTUAL DIMENSION OF URBAN

DESIGN?
Awareness and appreciation of environmental perception and, in particular, the
perception and experience of ‘place’ is an essential dimension of urban design.
Perceptual dimension of urban design can be studied three main parts-

 environmental perception.
 construction of place in terms of place identity, sense of place and
placelessness.
 place differentiation and place-theming.

ENVIRONMENTAL PERCEPTION:
We affect the environment and are affected by it. We must perceive – that is,
be stimulated by sight, sound, smell or tactile information, which offer clues
about the world around us. Perception involves gathering, organising and
making sense of information about the environment.

The four most valuable senses in interpreting and sensing the environments are
vision; hearing; smell; and touch.

 Vision – The dominant sense, vision provides more information than

the other senses combined. Visual perception is also a highly complex
phenomenon and relies on space, distance, colour, shape, textural and
contrast gradients, etc
  Hearing – While visual space is sectoral – our arc of vision involves
only what lies before us – ‘acoustic’ space is all-surrounding, has no
obvious boundaries, and, in contrast to vision, emphasizes space
rather than objects in space. While hearing is information-poor, it is
emotionally rich – screams, music, thunder arouse us; the flow of
water or the wind in the leaves soothes us.
 Smell – The human sense of smell is not well-developed. While even
more information-poor than sound, smell is emotionally richer than
sound.
 Touch – Much of our experience of texture comes through our feet and
through our buttocks when we sit down rather than through our hands.

Place Images:

To make sense of their surroundings, people reduce ‘reality’ to a few selective

impressions – that is, they produce place images. Such images are partial (not
covering the whole place); simplified (omitting much information); idiosyncratic
(each individual’s place image is unique); and distorted (based on subjective,
rather than real, distance and direction)

Beyond the Image of the City:

Environmental Preference Network
There are different ways different groups in different place structure their city
images. Some cities are more legible to its inhabitants than others. While some
cities were highly legible they were legible in different ways. For example,
Amsterdam is more legible than Rotterdam; Milan and Rome both are highly
legible but in different ways.

Kaplan & Kaplan (1982: 82–7) suggest ‘coherence’, ‘legibility’, ‘complexity’ and
‘mystery’ as informational qualities of environments that contribute to people’s
preferences for particular physical environments. For an immediate appreciation
of environments, understanding is supported by environmental coherence (to
make sense) and complexity (to encourage involvement). In the longer term,
legibility and mystery encourage further exploration

Environmental Meaning and Symbolism:

All urban environments – or ‘landscapes’ – are repositories of symbols,

meanings and values. Different types of sign are usually identified:

 Iconic signs – have a direct similarity with the object

 Resembles the things they represent
  (e.g. a painting,handicap wheelchair).
 Indexical signs – have a material relationship with the object (e.g.
smoke signifying fire).
 Symbolic signs – have a more arbitrary relationship with the object and
are essentially constructed through social and cultural systems (e.g.
classical columns representing grandeur) (from Lane 2000: 111)

Symbolism and Architectural Modernism:

Symbols and Architecture

Modernist buildings were to carry no associations beyond their own ‘magnificent
declaration of modernity’. Intended to be capable of reproduction anywhere,
their universally applicable ‘modern style’ transcended national and local
cultures.

Three ways of expressing a building’s function or meaning have been identified

(Robert Venturi):

 The ‘Las Vegas way’ – placing a ‘big sign’ in front of a ‘little building’.
 The ‘decorated shed’ – designing a simple building form and then
covering the facade with signs.
 The ‘duck’ – making the building’s overall form visually express or
symbolise its function (a deliberate strategy in attempts at iconic sign)
THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF PLACE:
The sense of place is often a notion suggesting people experience something
beyond the physical or sensory properties of places and feel an attachment to a
spirit of the place.( genius loci) Many places have retained their identities
through significant social, cultural and technological changes – and, hence,
though subject to constant change, some essence of their place identity is
maintained.

Sense of Place:

It is often argued that people need a ‘sense of belonging’ to a specific territory

or with a group of people, who, in turn, may or may not occupy a specific
territory.

Sense of a Place

Territoriality and Personalisation:

Individual identity is associated with ‘personalisation’ – the putting of a

distinctive stamp on one’s environment. Although generally designed and built
by someone else, individuals adapt and modify the given environment – re-
arranging furniture or changing decoration, external planting in a garden, or
front door colour.

The Dimensions of Place:

Personal or group engagement with space gives it meaning as a ‘place’, at least

to the extent of being different from other places.

Placelessness:

Placelessness in Row Housing

The quality of being a distinctive and meaningful place – which, in the absence
of a more elegant term, could be called ‘placefulness’ – is a continuous quality,
with real places existing on a continuum from placeful (i.e. a strong sense of
place) to placeless (i.e. a lack of place distinctiveness).

Placelessness tends to signify absence or loss of meaning. Various factors that

contribute to the contemporary sense of placelessness are:

1. Globalisation: The world is increasingly interconnected, with

centralised decision-making exploiting efficiencies and economies of
scale and standardisation. Globalisation leads to an erosion of place
meaning.
2. Mass Culture: With globalisation has come ‘mass’ culture, emerging
from processes of mass production, mass marketing and mass
 consumption, which homogenise and standardise cultures and places,
transcending, crowding-out, even destroying local cultures.

 Loss of (attachment to) territory: Placelessness is also a reaction to

the loss, or absence, of environments that people ‘care’ about because
they do not feel that they belong and no longer care for their
environment.

PLACE DIFFERENTIATION:

place differentiation
A response to the standardisation of place and placelessness is the deliberate
creation (or invention) of place distinctiveness and differentiation through
design. Place marketing and city branding have thus been seen as important
dimensions of city development.

Urban design is often complicit in this, with iconic buildings and the serial
repetition of exemplary urban design projects.

Place Marketing:
Imagineering – manufacturing place identities – involves deliberate use of
symbols/themes (often drawn from existing places) to enhance place
distinctiveness. At a larger scale, this is termed place marketing, which
attempts to change place identity by presenting carefully selected place images
to identified local and non-local audiences.

Icons and Iconicity:

Iconic Structures
Most architectural icons are landmarks in the sense of being physically
distinctive and identifiable within an urban landscape. Distinctive buildings
symbolise their city and thus the lure of new iconic buildings is to create similar
distinctiveness quickly.

Iconic Buildings and Civic Boosterism:

Iconic buildings are typically intended to signify a city’s cultural significance, its
economic dynamism, the quality of life possible there and other desirable
attributes.
Place Theming:

Villagio Mall, Doha, Qatar- Place Theming

Place-theming involves a deliberate shaping and packaging of place and place
images around a particular theme. Depending on the extent of the existing
source material, place-theming can involve reinventing or inventing places.

Invented Places

Theming acknowledges the significance of place and place values. Theme parks
are perhaps the epitome of invented places. Invented places and place-theming
provide opportunities for urban design and place-making issues.

Chowki Dhani- Place Theming

Criticisms of Place-Theming and Invented Places:

1. Superficiality: It is a superficial attention that undermines and even

destroys, rather than reinforces, the real place identity.
2. The commodification of place: By seeking to sell or market the
place, place-theming actions, and place-marketing images, necessarily
commodity, and distort, the place, by making its exchange value its
primary quality.

 Simulacrum and the real: There are situations when the public is
unable to distinguish between what is real and what is not.

1. Authenticity: Sense of place may be ‘authentic’ and ‘genuine’ or,

equally, ‘inauthentic’, ‘contrived’ or ‘artificial’. Development that copies
or draws explicit reference from historical precedent as ‘false’ and
lacking authenticity.

CONCLUSION:
The value of the perceptual dimension of urban design is the emphasis placed
on people and how they perceive, value and both draw meaning from and add
meaning to the urban environment. Places that are ‘real’ to people invite,
require and reward involvement – both intellectual and emotional – and provide
a sense of psychological connectedness. Urban designers thus need to learn
how to make better people places by observing existing places and through
dialogue with their users and stakeholders.
 This is a Summary of the Dimensions of Urban Design from the Book
“PUBLIC PLACES- URBAN SPACES“ by Matthew Carmona, Tim Heath, Taner
Oc and Steven Tiesdell, Architectural Press