In this post some tips on urban wayfinding planning!
As an architect, Kevin Lynch (1960) in his book ‘Image in the City’ was one of the first to acknowledge and write about cues from the environment.
Lynch pointed out that we often navigate and wayfind through urban environments using natural phenomena as well as man-made structures, as prompts.
Navigating a city such as New York or London or a smaller city such as Bruges (Belgium) or Cardiff (Wales) can be achieved with a variety of techniques that do not use directional signage or a map of the area.
Cues from the environment as I will explain, are essential and valuable tools that provide us with cognitive ways to navigate to our chosen destination in an urban environment.
Table of Contents
Using Landmarks for Urban Planning
Landmarks, whether they are man-made or natural, can act as one of the best forms of guidance when trying to navigate oneself, or when attempting to give good directions to others, in an urban area.
When I say good directions by the way, by this I mean effective directions and this needs in many instances to accommodate the multitude of languages that one can come across.
The ability to give or receive directions whilst overcoming language barriers is a significant part of wayfinding and navigation and one which brings in a definite sociocultural element to this field of study.
Urban centres often facilitate visitors who use a variety of languages and who are used to using a variety of techniques for wayfinding and this socio-cultural element needs to be factored into any wayfinding design.
This use of landmarks involves what we know as a ‘survey view’. We can, in other words, survey the scene and pick out certain observable places and points from a distance.
These landmarks will often be viewable from many different parts of the city or urban area and can act as excellent guidance points.
When giving directions to someone with whom you do not share a common language, they can often be used as points to point to as places to aim for.
Landmarks can sometimes mean navigating a longer route but an easier-to-follow a route and herein can lie the benefit of sometimes giving survey routes when giving directions.
Landmarks can act as a very easy way to highlight the direction needed (if an appropriate landmark exists in the given situation) but this way of giving directions is not always the best option.
One of the problems with following landmarks is that they may not always be visible during the corporeal activity of moving towards the target.
In between sightings of the landmark, as you walk between buildings, you might find that you (or the person involved) lose too much wasted time and this can sometimes make this form of wayfinding less effective than what is desirable.
There is no reason though why landmarks cannot be used in partnership with other techniques such as cardinal directions.
Vertical Cues
The use of vertical clues can be invaluable in navigating urban areas, particularly in cities that are hilly. Finding the centre of some cities can sometimes be achieved using only vertical clues from the environment.
One such city is Porto, Portugal, which is a city which if nothing else, will keep you fit with its steep inclines. Catania, Sicily, similarly offers vertical cues if you are driving from any of the numerous villages on the Etna, into the city.
Catania is based close to sea level and by always driving downhill continuously, you have a very good chance of hitting the centre of Catania or thereabouts.
The use of vertical cues in urban areas (or which surround urban areas) is a surprisingly good use of environmental cues and one many of us use without consciously appreciating it.
In essence, this very simplistic and yet highly effective form of wayfinding is one that can and is used in many urban areas.
Natural and Man-Made Contours
Natural contours whether they are man-made, purely natural or a combination of the two, can act as another extremely useful navigational tool.
A river such as the Thames River in the City of London, or the Liffey (Dublin) and the Seine (Paris) run through the heart of their respective cities and act as contours of the landscape.
The locations of these rivers act as wayfinding cues for understanding our general position within the local urban area.
The rivers, although not aerial views, can also act as landmarks i.e. focal points to aim for, in addition to sometimes being attractions in their own right.
Telling someone to keep walking directly towards a river and then turning left or right at the river can provide such an easy way to guide people to their chosen destination.
Rivers also offer us an aerial view of the surrounding area, because of the open space which the river and its banks often provides.
Rivers are not the only natural features that provide contours.
Coastal paths (in coastal cities such as Cape Town, Sydney and Barcelona), roads and definite divisions of land because of social-economic factors are a few more examples of the way in which the shape of the environment can guide us in urban areas.
Let us take the social-economic example. Imagine walking through a major city such as London and then finding that you come across very expensive and exclusive properties and shops.
You might then realise, without even seeing signage, that you have come across Mayfair or Kensington in London or 5th Avenue in NYC.
You might have been in the general area but have got disorientated and these cues on seeing these shop fronts and properties now re-guide you. They help you to re-acclimatise to the environment.
A lot of cities also have a link road surrounding the centre of many urban areas and this can act as another cue to one’s location.
You may not know which side of the city or city centre you are on, but such a road can give you quite a clear idea of your location in respect of distance to the centre.
Parks are another interesting example of highly visible cues which can act as especially useful wayfinding prompts.
Central Park in Manhattan, NYC, with its very central location in the middle of the island, is used by many as a navigation tool.
The park can be used as a location for guiding people to other nearby locations or you might choose to use the park as a tool for crossing and bisecting to reach other points.
On using the park to cross or bisect, you can then use the open view from the park to sight landmarks and other noticeable prompts to guide yourself closer still to your chosen location. St James Park in London, England, is another great example.
Urban Centres & Urban Wayfinding
Urban areas have features that one will not find in rural and suburban areas and these features offer further cues for wayfinding and navigating.
Walking around a city such as NYC, London, Barcelona or Paris, even if you do not use the underground (subway) trains, the street-level station signage acts as a form of urban wayfinding cues.
The signs can sometimes become cues for wayfinding at street level rather than their intended meaning i.e. for highlighting the underground station.
The signage, in other words, is used differently from its original intended purpose.
They are used not for using the subway or underground system, but as geographical indicators.
People, Transport Hubs and Guides
The movement of people in one sense also becomes a cue of the environment in that as one observes the urban environment, such as a city centre, you cannot normally receive valuable visual cues.
A great example of this is when there is a major sporting event in a city.
You can get off of a train at Wembley train or subway station in London and even though the stadium is a mile or so away, the navigational skills you use are nothing more than ‘people following’.
Mass movement and psychology are certainly not new areas of study and these forms of navigation are often highly effective.
Transport hubs can also be extremely useful guidance mechanisms.
Much like the way in which certain species of sea-birds in the Pacific islands are known to fly out to sea in the daytime and back to land for nightfall (Gladwin, 1974) and how this can enable islanders who are lost to navigate back to land by following the birds at sundown, is in some ways parallel to the way in which we can follow coaches and buses which seem to cluster.
In Victoria, London for example, you can navigate to the main coach station by analysing the movement of a large number of coaches who are moving to and from the main coach hub.
In the same area of London, by observing people movements, you can normally also quite easily find Victoria train station.
In other words, by using what I would term ‘clustered movement patterns’ we can navigate quite effectively in some environments.
People and clustered transportation movement patterns, in other words, become the cues.
References
- Gladwin, 1974. East is a Big Bird: Navigation and Logic on Puluwat Atoll, New edition. ed. Harvard University Press.
- Lynch, K., 1960. The image of the city. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.
