8/4/2017

The Perceptual
Dimension
Based on material by Carmona, Heath, Oc, and Tiesdell (2003 and 2010)

The perceptual dimension

 Awareness and appreciation of environmental
perception
 Perception and experience of ‘place’
 ‘Sense of Place’ and ‘lived-in experiences’
 Two parts
 Environmental perception
 Construction of place

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Environmental Perception
 Perceive – be stimulated by sight, sound, smell or
touch that offer clues about the world around us
 Gathering, organizing and making sense of
information about the environment
A more complex processing and understanding of
stimuli
 Sensation vs. Perception
 Blurry/overlap

Environmental Perception
 Valuable senses in interpreting the environment:
 Vision – the dominant sense; orientation in space; complex
 Hearing – all-surrounding, no boundaries; emotionally rich
 Smell – information poor but emotionally richer than hearing
 Touch – more from feet (walking) and buttocks (sitting) than hands
 These sensory stimuli are perceived and appreciated as an
interconnected whole (cumulative effect)
 Vision is dominant, but urban environment is not only perceived
visually
 Non-visual dimensions are underdeveloped and underexploited

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Environmental Perception
 An environment’s ‘soundscape’ can be orchestrated
 Focus on positive sounds: birdsong, children’s voices, crunching of
leaves, waterfalls, fountains
 Positive sounds can make negative sounds like traffic
 Four dimensions of perception that work simultaneously
 Cognitive – make sense of the environment
 Affective – involves feelings
 Interpretative – encompasses meaning or associations from
environment
 Evaluative – values and preferences; determined ‘good’ or ‘bad’

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Kevin Lynch’s 5 elements

(The Image of the City)
 Paths – channels of movement
 Edges – boundaries, transition
 Districts – visually homogenous in texture
and/or land use
 Nodes – places of intense activity
 Landmarks – visually distinctive points of
reference; often together with nodes

The Image of the City

 None of Lynch’s elements exists in isolation; all
combine to provide the overall image

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Meaning and Symbolism

 All urban environments contain symbols, meanings, and
values
 Semiology – the study of ‘signs’ and their meaning
 Different types of sign
 Iconic sign – a portrait represents the person
 Indexical sign – smoke indicates fire (material
relationship)
 Symbolic sign – classical columns represent grandeur
(constructed through social and cultural systems)

Meaning and Symbolism

 Layering of meaning
 First layer – denotation (a porch as shelter)
 Second layer – connotation (a porch with a symbolic function)
 The second layer can be more important than the first layer
(e.g. throne)
 Meanings in the environment are produced and interpreted
 There may be a difference between the intended message
and the received message: the ‘gap’
 The gap is related to the ‘death of the author’
 The environment may mean differently to different people

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Meaning and Symbolism

 Three ways of expressing a building’s meaning:
 The ‘Las Vegas’ way – a big sign in front a little building
 The ‘Decorated Shed’ – efficient building, façade covered
with signs (most pre-20th century buildings)
 The ‘duck’ – building form expresses its function (most
buildings in 20th century and beyond)

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Construction of Place
 Sense of Place
 The ‘genius loci’
 People experience something beyond the physical and sensory
properties of a place
 People are attached to the spirit of the place
 Often persists despite changes in a city
 It is easy to think of a successful place and experience it, but…
 It is difficult to determine why it is successful
 It is uncertain if that success can be replicated elsewhere
 People transform a ‘space’ into a ‘place’

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Sense of Place
 Successful places typically have an ‘urban buzz’
 Jane Jacobs (1961) calls it an “intricate ballet in which
individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive
parts which miraculously reinforce one another and
compose an orderly whole.”
 Successful public spaces are characterized by the
presence of people, in an often self-reinforcing process
 Itmust be a ‘transaction base’ (Montgomery, 1998), with
economic, social, and cultural transactions
 People have to use the space

Indicators of Vitality
 According to Montgomery (1998):
 Variety of land uses, enabling self-improvement
 Local businesses and shops
 Night-time activity (e.g. varying opening hours)
 Street markets
 Various meeting places (cinemas, wine bars, pubs,
restaurants, diners) of varying kinds, prices, and quality
 Space for ‘people-watching’
 Variety of building types, styles, and designs
 Active street life and street frontage

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Placelessness
 “There’s no there there.”
 Placelessness signifies absence or loss of meaning
 The three processes that contributed to placelessness:
 Globalization (but can also be used to make places)
 Mass culture (destroys local culture)
 Loss of attachment to property (people don’t feel they belong)
 ‘Invented’ places – a result of standardization
 Superficiality
 Other-directedness
 Lacking authenticity

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