constellations

“On the most fundamental level, the purpose of the spatial form of cities is to create an intelligible environment for people, and more specifically for human movement….” (1.)

One of the enjoyable features of design practice is its anticipatory potential, the awareness that the meaning derived from being in a place will in future belong to someone else, already belongs to someone else. Part of the task then is to make somewhere that is intelligible as a foundation for the layers of meaning that will gather over time.

The principle of legibility or intelligibility in urban design was developed by Kevin Lynch, an American urban planner and scholar. In the opening page to his book ‘The Image of the City’ (1960), he says; “nothing is experienced by itself, but always in relation to its surroundings, the sequence of events…,the memory of past experiences.”(2.)

Lynch explored how people perceive and navigate urban environments. Through field research he identified how cities were understood and navigated, identifying how paths, edges, districts, nodes, and landmarks enabled people to form strong mental maps of their surroundings.

This idea of a mental map implies not just how we see but how we think and feel. When moving through places we may rely on the surface appearance of buildings to navigate but we are also bodily situated in the space, in between it and other spaces and in relation to other people.

Diagram of district showing paths, edges, nodes and landmarks

In his recent exploration of the work of Space Syntax, Lars Marcus (1.) explains how (as contemporaries of Venturi and Scott Brown, Alexander and Jacobs) Bill Hillier and Julienne Hanson for Space Syntax set out to prove analytically how spatial experience is relational and how relationships in space are overlapping and constantly changing. They developed digital models of how we interact with space in cities through our bodies and our minds, moving but also sensing (and thinking). They developed a way of evaluating where a space was in the city system. They demonstrated how physical and visual experience differ – for example how a less visually intelligible space might take more effort to move about.

“From an experiential point of view, cities seem to be about both seeing and going. Syntactic analysis confirms this by showing they are structured both to make the physical movement of bodies efficient and to be intelligible to minds.”(3.)

It has been demonstrated that the methods of evaluating legibility established by Lynch from field research and the digital model generated by Space Syntax overlap. Of the five elements paths, edges, districts, nodes, and landmarks – landmarks were the most difficult to locate computationally (4.).

The structuring of legibility can be conceived of as contributing to or generating a constellation of markers or events (nodes or landmarks) linked by paths, framed by district boundaries and edges. Lynch’s diagrams with stared landmarks and paths between them look like constellations. In the way that a pattern of stars is given its figurative image as a mnemonic, the diagram fits loosely. Acknowledging perhaps that on the ground constellations of places also become armatures for our narratives, for our individual, relational and collective stories.

Marcus, Lars (2025) Measures and Meanings of Spatial Capital: Contributions to a Theory of Land, MIT Press
Lynch, Kevin (1960) The image of the City, MIT Press.
Hillier, Bill, (2003) The Architectures of Seeing and Going – Or, are cities shaped by bodies or minds? And is there a syntax of spatial cognition? University College London
Filomena, Gabriele, Verstegen, J & Manley, E., A computational approach to ‘The Image of the City,Cities, Volume 89, June 2019, pages 14-25

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