Cognitive Aspects: How People Perceive, Memorize, Think and Talk About Landmarks - Landmarks: GIScience for Intelligent Services - page 55

Fig. 3.4 China merchants
bank tower, Shenzhen, China:
“The distinctive silhouette
serves as a beacon for the
residents of Honey Lake, Che
Gong Miao, The East Sea
gardens, and Shenzhen's west
side” (CC-BY-SA 3.0 by
Daniel J. Prostak , caption
from Wikimedia)

Visual landmarks Landmarks by their visual peculiarities
Semantic landmarks Landmarks by their distinguishing use or meaning
Structural landmarks

Landmarks by their location in the structure of the

environment

These categories are not exclusive. For example, a landmark can be eye-catching
and culturally important. An object or event that is outstanding in more than
one category should have a stronger total salience, in line with Appleyard's
observations. One may call this amount of salience landmarkness . But if salience
is a quantity, even a quantification of the landmarkness in each category becomes
imaginable now.
Furthermore, the three categories should be applicable to all objects or events
in human environments, natural or urban. Prototypical examples are buildings.
Buildings can stand out by visual properties, by their use, or by their location.
For example, the China Merchants Bank Tower in Shenzhen (Fig. 3.4 ) is standing
out by its height, towering over other buildings in the environment, but also by its
characteristic shape. People in Shenzhen use it as a widely visible landmark.
But have a look at another example (Fig. 3.5 ) . This corner store is most likely not
a global landmark in its environment as Guangzhou has multiple stores of this chain.