The Legibility and Permeability of Cities: Examining the Role of Spatial Data and Metrics

Abstract

It has been long recognised that the underlying spatial structure plays an important role when navigating in urban environments. However, the modelling of the forms and properties that emerge from the city is still a difficult issue to address. The objective of the research developed in this paper is to study and represent two important qualities of urban environments as identified by Lynch and Bentley in their respective seminal works, that is, legibility and permeability. Our objective is to identify and implement a series of metrics applied to the layout of a given city that reflects these concepts of legibility, and then to evaluate to which degree these measures are correlated to different human perceptions of the city, particularly differences between humans who have or have not had an experience of a given urban environment. The whole approach is applied to the context of a neighbourhood of the city of Tehran in Iran. The findings show that permeability match relatively well with residents' evaluations while legibility rather complies with newcomers' evaluations.

Visual Evaluation of Urban Streetscape Design Supported by Multisource Data and Deep Learning

“…In addition, certain specific visual attributes of the landscape are also considered important, such as openness, consistency, colour contrast within space, vividness, and a sense of nature [11]. In terms of living and architecture, elements such as traditional architectural style, family house style, architectural details, and the overall living environment were most often preferred by occupants [12][13][14][15]. With regard to the subjective characteristics of respondents, industry studies have demonstrated that factors that contribute significantly to and influence people's visual aesthetic preferences for landscapes include occupation, education level, and gender [13].…”

Imageability and Legibility: Cognitive Analysis and Visibility Assessment in Galle Heritage City

“…Contemporary discourse on the visual experience of the city identified that the role of landmarks in wayfinding is an important topic and several scholars investigate the visibility, legibility and visual salience of landmarks (Klippel & Winter, 2005;Omer & Goldblatt, 2007;Kalin & Yilmaz, 2012;Silavi et al, 2017). Some of the methodologies that are used for the visual analysis are fractal dimension (Hagerhall et al 2004); View shed approach (Sander & Manson, 2007); streetscape analysis (Meetiyagoda & Munasinghe, 2016); serial vision analysis (Kalin & Yilmaz, 2012) and so on.…”

Crosscutting environmental risk with design: A multi-site, multi-city socioecological approach for Iowa’s diversifying small towns

“…To validate this checklist, Cross and Küller “compared the experts’ scores (r = .71) for each area to the satisfaction residents had regarding outdoor environment” ( ibid ., p. 79). The 62-item checklist ( Table 1 ) has been used by others to study both objective measures of the built environment—explicitly measurable features like visibility of trash or water—and subjective measures—implicitly understood by trained professionals like legibility [ 40 ].…”