Quantifying Memories: Mapping Urban Perception

This paper discusses the relationship between the spatial structure of the built environment and people’s memory of the city as derived from their perceptual knowledge. We explore how spatial comprehension is influenced by the spatial layout pattern in urban settings and individuals’ daily activities. In doing so, we seek to determine whether better spatial knowledge is a function of the legibility of the city and of temporal factors, particularly the amount of time spent in a place. For this purpose, we created a web-based visual survey in the form of a geo-guessing game. The participants were asked to guess the locations of random street views within a familiar neighborhood by placing a pin on a map. This system enabled us to measure how well they remember different urban images on the basis of two indicators of spatial familiarity: location identification and visual recognition. Thus, the resulting datasets are quantitatively different from those collected manually by traditional techniques. By analyzing the combination of the quantitative and qualitative datasets, our proposed methodology can clarify previously unknown aspects of the cognitive role in exploring the built environment and on hidden patterns embedded in the relationship between the city’s spatial elements and people’s mental maps.