I am interested in how people construct the idea of the city.
In particular I am focusing on the construction of the mental map and the related cognitive tasks.
What is the psychological perception of space and how people build it? How the elements that Lynch sketched play a role into this construction?
What’s the relationship between the urban planning activity and the mental map of the city?
Is that the relation between the 2dimensional map and the actual 3dimensional world?

Is it possible to define a constructivist framework around this concept? City mnemonics???

AlphaWorld is a nice implementation of a virtual world where the 2dimensional map come into help while supporting a 3dimensional movement/walking. It would be interesting to explore the connections between the map and the city and to interview the users to analyse their map analysis skills. How do they relate their position to their place? do they define landmarks? Do they perceive the limits of the map?

On another point of view it would be very interesting to compare the urban plan of AlphaWorld with the urban plan of a similar actual city. Are there differences?

ActiveWorlds

Jacobs presents a compendium of best examples of streets all around the world. Their structure is analysed in terms of building heights, tree spacing, relative widths of streets, etc.

Paperback: 344 pages ; Dimensions (in inches): 0.89 x 12.00 x 10.07
Publisher: MIT Press; Reprint edition (August 4, 1995)
ISBN: 0262600234

Reading Strohecker, Towards a developmental image of the city, i realised that the comprehension of the city can be constructed through cognitive tasks and steps using a finite numbers of elements that Lynch, in the image of the city, identifies with nodes, paths, districts, edges, and landmarks.

The urbanistic key idea I have identified so far can be so summarised:
1. The elements of the city
2. Relation between the aspect of the city and the land market
3. Relation between the aspect of the city and the physical place where the city grows
4. The city as a series of obstacles that people have to deal with while moving through the city
5. The government as planner and incubator of decisions

Is it possible to design a game where the learners have to deal with city elements in a WayMaker style and do so in the physical place to justify the mobility?

What are the activities the urban planner has to do to deal with the key ideas identified above?

We have built a system that acquires semantics for spatial terms in a simple 2D world. Users can select objects and describe them relative to a landmark (here marked by a pear). For example, someone might pick the apple circled here and say “a little above”. The system uses spoken input processed through our speech recognition system.
Ôøº
On the visual side, we measure a set of language independent features that includes not only the obvious distance and angle measurements, but additional values indicating, for example, the shape of the landmark.Ôøº

ÔøºLearning Spatial Semantics

by Kevin Lynch

p.4
… il semble aujurd’hui improbable que le fait de truver son chemin soit du à un quelconque “intinct” magique. Il s’agit plutot d’une utilisasion et d’une organisasion logique des indicasions sensorielles fournies par l’environment exteérieur. Cette organisasion est fondamentale pour l’efficacité et la survivance meme de toute vie sans entraves.

My idea is that of a learning system to explore the city using a mobile recording different parameters.
In my vision, the user can walk into the city with a group of friend. All of them have a mobile with special functions which allows them to track their position and defines landmarks that is reported in the virtual map of the city. In addition, they can define sections of the map just joining the landmarks of the map. I hope to stimulate, through this system, the comprehension of the city and the ability to “read” the map and build upon existing structures and sites.
For this reason I think that the advices of a professional urban planner can have a great value on the definition of the project. the following are some of the questions I need to answer in order to proceed into next step of development:
1. What are the parameters a urban planner have to consider while planning the city?
2. What kind of information you can gather while walking into the physical city you cannot get from the map (*important*)?
3. What are the key idea a urban planning student has to grasp in order to achieve the goal of the course?
4. What is the elaboration a urban planner does on the layout of the city in order to test hypothesis?
5. What is the common process for proposing a city expansion or redesign that a urban planner does to formulate hypothesis and to test them before formulating the final conclusions?

Kevin Lynch
L’image de la CitÈ

p.4
… il semble aujurd’hui improbable que le fait de truver son chemin soit du ‡ un quelconque “intinct” magique. Il s’agit plutot d’une utilisasion et d’une organisasion logique des indicasions sensorielles fournies par l’environment exteÈrieur. Cette organisasion est fondamentale pour l’efficacitÈ et la survivance meme de toute vie sans entraves.

Meeting with Golay and Merminod

1. We need to improve the educational aspect of the project because there are no possibilities for the professional market.

2. It is important to design the system so that the location information is sent as part of the message and not provided by the telecom company. This is for the privacy issues.

3. We need to recast the idea to give more space to the activities done in the field rather than on the virtual. This will justify the real time purpose and the mobility at once.

–> Simulation
People using the system are simulating, are representing reality making a model, but at the same time, they are augmenting the reality through personal cognitive processes.

I need to find a mechanism – activity which allows people to collaborate while collecting data? What are the other activity you can do in the place rather than collecting data – counting cars – taking pictures – walking – observing the structure of the city.

Meeting with Pierre:

There are three reasons for justify the mobility:
1. Physical experience while walking into the city which brings an added experience to the learning.
2. Finding special information on the site which cannot be simulated or incorporated in by any means. these information are not present on the maps of the city because too specialise to be part of a previous study.
3. Reporting virtual information from the virtual world into the physical world. For example, exploring the lost city is just one of these examples because it allows to follow a street that doesn’t exist any more with the physical experience of bumping into buildings.

One of the possible solutions is to use the specific information recorded from the physical position to solve something in the virtual and the obtained outcome to be the pointer to another physical position (next move).

Launched in June of 2002, urbanSimulation.com fills the void for an independent source of information specifically addressing urban simulation technology.

Most resources on the web today, has some sort of affiliation with a particular vendor, therefore a need arose for a truly independent place for researching information and discussing topics concerning urban simulation.

There is more than one way to simulate urbanism. With that in mind urbanSimulation.com is open to and welcomes a wide range of methodologies and approaches for simulating the built environment.

urbanSimulation target specifically all the resources related to the graphical display of simulated cities, GIS, historical studies, etc.