Urban Design Dimensions: 3.Perceptual Dimension

·        environmental perception.

·        construction of place in terms of place identity, sense of place and placelessness.

·        place differentiation and place-theming.

Perceptual dimension of urban design can be studied three main parts-

vision; hearing; smell; and touch.

The four most valuable senses in interpreting and sensing the environments are

1. Iconic Signs

2. Indexical Signs

3. Symbolic Signs

Different types of sign are usually identified

1. Las Vegas Way

2. Decorated Shed

3. Duck

Three ways of expressing a building’s function or meaning have been identified (Robert Venturi):

1. activity

2. place

3. form

4. image

key components to create a sense of place

personalisation

– the putting of a distinctive stamp on one’s environment. Although generally designed and built by someone else, individuals adapt and modify the given environment – re-arranging furniture or changing decoration, external planting in a garden, or front door colour.

placefulness

The quality of being a distinctive and meaningful place – which, in the absence of a more elegant term, could be called

placefulness

is a continuous quality, with real places existing on a continuum from placeful (i.e. a strong sense of place) to placeless (i.e. a lack of place distinctiveness).

Placelessness

tends to signify absence or loss of meaning.

1.globablisation

2.mass culture

3.loss of attachment to territory

Various factors that contribute to the contemporary sense of placelessness are:

Imagineering

manufacturing place identities – involves deliberate use of symbols/themes (often drawn from existing places) to enhance place distinctiveness. At a larger scale, this is termed place marketing, which attempts to change place identity by presenting carefully selected place images to identified local and non-local audiences.

Place-theming

involves a deliberate shaping and packaging of place and place images around a particular theme. Depending on the extent of the existing source material, place-theming can involve reinventing or inventing places.

1. Superficiality

2. The commodification of place

3. Simulacrum and the real

Criticisms of Place-Theming and Invented Places:

Authenticity:

1.   Sense of place may be______ and ‘genuine’ or, equally, ‘inauthentic’, ‘contrived’ or ‘artificial’. Development that copies or draws explicit reference from historical precedent as ‘false’ and lacking authenticity.

Social Dimension

defined as the relationship between space and society.

Constituted through space
Constrained by space

Mediated by space

Dear & Wolch (1989) argued that social relations can be:

Constituted through space

 where site characteristics influence settlement form.

Constrained by space

·        where the physical environment facilitated or obstructs human activity.

Mediated by space

where the friction-of-distance facilitates orinhibits, the development of various practices.

1. physical

2. social dimension

2 dimensions of public realm

1. ownership

2. access

3. use

The relative ‘publicness’ of space can be considered in terms of three qualities:

Ownership

whether the spaces is publicly or privately owned.

Access

·        whether the public has access to the place.

Use

·        whether the space is actively used and shared by different individuals and groups.

public realm

can be considered to be the sites and settings of formal and informal public life.

1. formal

2. informal

Public life can be broadly grouped into two interrelated types

External public space 

·        – those pieces of land lying between private landholdings (e.g. public squares, streets, highways, parks, parking lots, stretches of coastline, forest, lakes and rivers.). These are all spaces that are accessible and available to all.

Internal public space 

·        various public institutions (libraries, museums, town halls, etc.) plus most public transport facilities (train stations, bus stations, airports, etc.)

quasi- ‘public’ space 

·        although legally private, some public spaces – university campuses, sports ground, restaurant, cinemas, theatres, nightclubs, shopping malls – also form part of the public realm but includes privatised external public spaces.

External public space 

Internal public space 

quasi- ‘public’ space

. The concept of physical public realm extends to all the space accessible to and used by the public, including:

1. Dispositional

2. SItuational

represent two main approaches to crime prevention.

dispositional approach

approach involves removing or lessening an individual’s motivation to commit acts,, through education and moral guidance. The main thrust of the situational approach is that once an offender has made the initial decision to offend (i.e. has become motivated) then the techniques make the commission of that crime in that particular place more difficult.

1.Image

2. Displacement

Opportunity reduction approaches are criticised on two main grounds

Image:

1.   Use of opportunity reduction techniques has often raised concerns about the image presented and the ambience of the resulting environment e.g. resulted in the emergence of highly defensive urbanisms.

Displacement:

By restricting opportunities for crime in one location simply redistributes it.

·        Temporal displacement – the crime is moved from one time to another.

·        Target displacement – the crime is moved from one target to another.

·        Tactical displacement – one method of crime is substituted for another.

·        Crime type displacement – one kind of crime is substituted for another.

1.   . Displacement takes different forms:

·        Primary (formal) social controls – 

·        Secondary (informal) social controls – 

different types or levels of social control:

Excluding conducts Exclusion through design Excluding people

Exclusion can be considered in terms of the following:

EQUITABLE ENVIRONMENT

If urban design is about making better places for people, then the ‘people’ referred to are all the potential users of the built environment – old/young, rich/poor, male/female, those able-bodied and those with disabilities, the ethnic majority and ethnic minorities.

Equitable Flexible Simple and intuitive

The US-based Centre for Universal Design defined the principles of universal design as follows:

Familiarity Legibility Distinctiveness Accessibility Comfort  Safety

Burton & Mitchell (2006) demonstrated a range of design features and helping to deliver six design attributes:

rather than alleviated

The Cultural difference should be celebrated rather than