Individuality of Streets

In initial times, the street was an extended version of our house. It acted as a social interactive space and provided a platform to host many versatile activities. Nowadays, with an exponential increase in city traffic, it is transforming into a heavy traffic vehicular corridor with countless pollution trails. This phenomenon is engulfing every city, fiddling with the Individuality of Cities and creating a common culture of vehicular corridors.

There have been numerous studies taken up on streets. The basic idea of them either revolves around the pedestrianisation of streets or provides a grade separation for unrestricted flow of pedestrian movement. I wonder why we always tend to look upon the basic question — what forms the identity of the street?

The importance of a socially-active street is not for the citizens but it also important to have a healthy and sustainable city. Streets can be viewed as corridors of movement for public and goods, or, alternatively the street can be viewed as a public space where people can work, rest and socialise. The importance of a street as a public open space is one of the most critical characteristic within the public realm in cities (Gehl, 1987).

Imageability

Imageability was coined by Kevin lynch in his infamous book — Image of city. It is an incredibly valuable book to understand how people absorb, inhabit and perceive urban spaces. It’s not just physical environment that builds an urban space, but a string of representative mental images. Whenever we visit a place, we experience the space and build an image in the back of our mind. Lynch touched various aspects of this phenomenon and named it imageability.

“Imageability is that quality in a physical object which gives it a high probability of evoking a strong image in any given observer. It is that shape, colour, or arrangement which facilitates the making of vividly identified, powerfully structured, highly useful mental images of the environment. It might also be called legibility, or perhaps visibility in a heightened sense, where objects are not only able to be seen, but are presented sharply and intensely to the senses.” (Lynch, 1960)

(Lynch, 1960) also states that following are the Basic five elements people use to construct a mental image ,

• Paths: routes along which people move throughout the city
• Edges: boundaries and breaks in continuity
• Districts: areas that are characterized by common characteristics
• Nodes: strategic focus points for orientation like squares and junctions
• Landmarks: external points of orientation, usually an easily identifiable physical object in the urban landscape. Of these five elements, paths are especially important according to Lynch, since these organize urban mobility.

As per (Meeta Tandon, Vanda Sehgal, 2017) Imageability of a place can be measured using physical elements. Imageability score can be calculated using recording values during visual survey. Multipliers are used to stabilize the values. Imageability score is collective sum of multiplication product of recorded values and multipliers.

Physical elements used to calculate imageability score are:

• Number of courtyards, plazas, and parks (both sides)
• Number of major landscape features (both sides)
• Proportion historic building frontage (both sides)
• Number of buildings with identifiers (both sides)
• Number of buildings with non-rectangular shapes (both sides)
• Presence of outdoor dining (your side)
• Number of people (your side)
• Noise level (both sides)

Originally published at http://placeparadigm.wordpress.com on July 30, 2021.