Chat on Imageability

More from my chat with Rob Annable:

Rob: A few weeks ago [in an urban regeneration project he’s working with] I had people drawing where they felt the boundary and centre of their neighbourhood is.

Me: Did they agree?

Rob: Mostly, but some interesting deviations here and there. I really must revisit Lynch’s Image of the City.

Me: It’s a great book.

Me: A couple of years ago there was a Swedish doctoral thesis following up on his work. In the 60s and 70s, there was a program here to build a million housing units, so they devised a design that they replicated everywhere, and each place has a number of identical apartment blocks, laid out in a grid.

Me: Anyway, the thesis applied imageability to these places, where every building looks like the next, and they are lined up in grids. So there are very few distinguishing features. Imageability is poor. (That’s how I understood the little I read and heard about it, anyway.)

Rob: Whenever I step onto the run down housing estate for a new regeneration project they always have one thing in similar – terrible imageability/legibility.

Me: I see. I feel there must be a balance between the grid and irregular plans. Too rectilinear, and the imageability goes down (if we disregard from other hints in the surroundings). Too curvilinear, and it goes down as well, as you can’t as easily recall how the streets relate to each other. [See this old post.]

Rob: You’re absolutely right.

Me: See [this map on Flickr], for instance. Those streets are even stranger in reality.