Urban spatial perception in Newcastle

The perception and experience of place is an important dimension of urban design. People perceive their environment through sight, sound, smell, and touch (Bell et al 1990: 27). Perception involves gathering, organizing, and making sense of information about the environment.

Very different from the bustle of London or Shenzhen, Newcastle combines the richness of the city with the tranquillity of the landscape. Everything is familiar for those who live here, whether it’s the cafes down the street or the restaurants that meet, it all carries a sense of intimacy, but you have to ask if they ever get bored? The answer is, never. It’s a city for walking, and Newcastle city centre is a perfect 15-minute walking circle to live in, and you can get to quite a lot of places on foot. At the same time, Newcastle is well connected by the metro, train, and airports. There are always more people waiting at bus stops, coach stations, and train stations, and a significant proportion of people travel by public transport.

Lynch aimed to identify those aspects of the environment that left a strong image in the observer’s mind. He derived 5 key physical elements – paths, edges, districts, nodes, and landmarks. None of Lynch’s element types exists in isolation, they combine to provide the overall image.

TABLE 1 Lynch’s Five Elements

These are the passages through which the observer moves through streets, pavements, transport routes, canals, etc. Lynch points out that in people’s images, paths are often the dominant element, while other elements are arranged and associated along them. If the main paths lack character or tend to be confused with each other, the whole image will be less clear. Paths can be an important feature of an urban image for reasons such as: regularity of use, concentration of particular uses, spatial character, façade character, proximity to particular features of the city, visual prominence and dominance, or because of the position of the path in the overall path structure.

The legibility of the city, Bacon (1992: 20), for example, how it enables one to compose a coherent image of the environment. The ordered environment can be used as a broad frame of reference. The image of a city, consisting of different parts combined into a whole, gives rise to what is called “imaginability” and “strong impressions”.

References

[1] Bacon, E (1992) Design of Cities, Thames & Hudson, London (first published in 1967)

[2] Bell, P A; Fisher, J D; Baum, A & Greene, T C (1990) Environmental Psychology (third

edition) Holt, Rinehart & Winston, Inc., London

[3] Carmona, M., 2021. Public Places Urban Spaces. Milton: Taylor & Francis Group.

[4] Herzog, T., Kaplan, S. and Kaplan, R., 1982. The prediction of preference for unfamiliar urban places. Population and Environment, 5(1), pp.43-59.

[5] Lowenthal, D., 1967. Environmental perception and behavior. Chicago: University of Chicago, Dept. of Geography.

[6] Kevin Lynch., 2014. Image of the city. Boston: Birkhauser.