Towards a New (mapping of The) City: Interactive, Data Rich Modes of Urban Legibility

The modern metropolis is a vast environment replete with physical elements and complex overlays of information. The city historically has been represented as a discrete limited physical object; this allocentric view has become less and less useful as a method of meaningfully orientation and navigation. Today, the city has more than just a physical aspect; it has technologies and flows of information that constantly change our perceptions. While it has always been true that symbolic and religious dimensions have had a place in our understanding of the city, the complex and transitory nature of the contemporary city requires a representation that is interactive rather than static. The Urban Visualization Group’s previous work has shown how to incorporate data and geospatial information in a common interface (Chang, 2007), and has studied the development of urban design theories related to urban visualization chronologically from Aldo Rossi to Kevin Lynch to Bill Hillier (Wessel, 2008). This paper presents specific proposals for new interactive modes of urban legibility based upon four aspects of contemporary urban theories that deal with the problems and opportunities of widespread data and communication: data space, based on the work of Bill Mitchell and Robert Venturi; virtual and physical city, established from the work of Christine Boyer and Bill Mitchell; multi-nodal, derived from the work of Tarik Fathy and Thomas Sieverts; and information flows, founded on the work of Melvin Webber. Each approach is introduced with a conceptual overview, nascent examples and a schematic proposal for a computer based urban visualization. Based on this study, we conclude that two necessary aspects of any urban visualization are interactivity and the combination of data and geospatial information. Interactivity is necessary because of the fluid nature of our experience and the diversity of individual intentions in the contemporary city. The combination of data and geospatial information is necessary because the geometry of the city had become less important as a reliable indicator of meaning. Future initiatives grow from our ongoing work in urban visualization. First, we will extend our work investigating cognition patterns of the image of the city. Our next collaboration will be with cognitive scientists, focusing on cognition not as a verification measure, but as a search for design principles useful in furthering the design of interactive modes. Secondly, we will be continuing to work with computer scientist in the visualization field to understand how these interactive modes can be understood and implemented not as unique semantic structures uncovered individually, but rather connecting to the deeper structure of the data and the geospatial fields.