Cognitive maps: discovering the intangible Historic Urban Landscape

Ref.: 228
Key theme: 03 Visual integrity of historic urban landscapes
Date of reception: 30/10/2008

AUTHORS (*Main author)

LASK, Tomke * (Belgium) - University of Liverpool

ABSTRACT

This paper is about a method that gives urban designers, city authorities and institutions like UNESCO and the WHC a tool to access the perception that local public space users have of the cityscape, including particular parts of the city considered by decision makers as Historic Urban Landscapes (HUL). HUL is currently defined as the result of the interaction between the natural and built environment. However, it is the particular engagement of the local everyday users towards this urban landscape that gives it its cultural significance. Any intervention in urban landscape affects therefore cultural life and meaning. Cognitive maps visualise people's representation of the cityscape and use of the urban space. The systematic application of this tool permits assessing and monitoring changes in perception and of engagement with urban space and indicates this the impact of urban design.

Cognitive maps became a broadly used method in urban design through Kevin Lynch's work in the 1960ies and 1970ies. Lynch, trained not only as an architect, but also in psychology and anthropology, stood in a post-war tradition that still believed in the determinist power of urban planners and architects to define the aesthetics and to construct better cities. However Lynch's main contribution to urban design is the idea that it is necessary to integrate social, subjective and psychological aspects into urban planning to create a city whose structural elements are easily understandable. He calls this quality in a city its legibility. The specific legibility of a city determines its identity and HUL is certainly part of this. An urban environment that is informed by the concept of imagibility contributes to the sustainability of the city's quality of life.

The case study of Liverpool is an application of Kevin Lynch's theory. The aim here is to establish the boundaries, junctions and landmarks of cultural space and to find out how these fit or not into the official definition of cultural space given by the city council. Cognitive maps become the tool to pin down the areas in the city that are considered as cultural space by Liverpudlians of different age, class and profession, regardless of any official acknowledgment for this space. It is a bottom up reconstruction that has no previous definition of what culture is in order to set up the concept and construction of culture from the ,,native's point of view".

The paper is therefore about urban landscape as it is lived and incorporated by people in opposition to the very concrete dimension in architecture, urban design and heritage. The paper refers to the intangible dimension of urban landscape in a similar way that intangible heritage is addressed. The city is seen here as a living organism of which HUL is only one part and an elite definition. Cognitive maps reveal the inhabitant rhetoric and their semiotics of historic urban landscape. The case study of Liverpool illustrates this view of HUL. This paper is an offer to approach questions of HUL in an interdisciplinary way.

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