Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
districts facilitate or afford
movement
of people. The second group is formed by
elements that inhibit movement, namely edges and landmarks. These elements
either increase the integration of the environment and contribute to its cohesion
and homogeneity, for example, paths connecting parts of the city, nodes connecting
paths, and districts formed by perceiving groups of nodes, paths and landmarks as
regions of homogeneous character. Or they increase its heterogeneity by fragmen-
tation and differentiation, for example, edges separating or delineating districts, and
landmarks representing islands of distinction in a city.
Thus Lynch's classification, despite its impact on our understanding on mental
spatial representations, seems to be focused to the context of wayfinding and
and replaced some of Lynch's elements by elements of more private nature. He
introduces
thresholds
and
props
. Thresholds are the locations where paths cross
boundaries, such as the entrance to the train station, or the stairs up to the
library, where juveniles or street artists find niches. Props are elements of 'urban
detail', small and easily overlooked but perhaps producing a private experience for
some, such as public artworks, signs, trees, street furniture, or doorknobs. Such
observations clearly support the expectation that elements are context-dependent,
and vary over scales of granularity.
Another extension of Lynch's elements is also relevant for our exploration. In
Lynch's classification, a railway embankment is an edge, since pedestrians and
motorists have to travel detours to find crossings. But switching the context, and
considering public transport users instead, a train line becomes a path. This means
that Lynch's elements, when applied to objects in the city, depend on a person's
perspective. This perspective relates the person's mobility characteristics with the
A special affordance in this regard is accessibility, since already Lynch had
distinguished between accessible elements (path, node, districts) and inaccessible
elements (edges and landmarks). Following logical deduction one additional ele-
(node), one-dimensional (path), and two-dimensional (district), while his inac-
cessible elements are zero-dimensional (landmarks as reference points) and one-
dimensional (edges). There must exist a two-dimensional inaccessible element, a
restricted district
, such as barracks, waste land or gaps that are inaccessible for
(civilian) pedestrians, motorists, or other mobility modes. The reason why neither
Lynch nor anybody else has postulated it before is probably founded in the sketches
themselves. Restricted areas do not get sketched. They are the blank spaces on
sketches. However, keeping in mind that sketches are drawn for a purpose, if the
person switches their perspective the blank spaces in one context can become visible
in another context.
Thus, Lynch's elements reflect the sketching person. They represent the relevant
objects of a mental spatial representation for wayfinding and orientation assuming
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