With outdoor space as a place of multi-dimensional sensorial experiences, we decide whether it is pleasant to linger based on sensory judgments. With the virtual world of the internet, how to invite people to nature and how they interact with it have become an important issue in urban design. This paper explores multidimensional sensory experiences at diverse spatial scales and sensory preferences in order to enhance designers’ knowledge of human perception in urban design, to identify the potential value of sensory experiences, and to create rich urban spaces.
Previous studies have indicated that urban green space has superior benefits for human health on healing and restoration. Inherited with the Post-Garden City legacy that created “the marriage of town and countryside” for health and livability, London has become one of the greenest cities in the world where gardens and parks greatly involved in daily life. The authors conducted an empirical study in central and suburban London to investigate the quality of built environment, user attitude and healing perception by objective assessment and subjective survey. With a special attention to the sensorial dimension of healing perception, this paper aims to reinterpret the transition of healing space in the contemporary context and investigate the key criteria for healing performance promotion. Finally, a framework is conceptualized as an attempt to enhance healing efficacy in urban green space design.
Urban recreational green space, in part because of accelerated urbanization, is becoming more important as part of a healthy urban life and being places of landscape experience. This paper aims to understand how soundscape perception in urban recreational green space can provide insight for design and management. The paper investigates factors that affect soundscape, the relationship between soundscape evaluation and landscape evaluation, and differences in sound preference between professional designers and users. The results show that general users prefer natural and melodies to road traffic noises, but they often perceive road traffic noises first and their perception sensitivity to natural sounds and melody is low; People’s sound preferences are affected by age, and behavior style; Soundscape evaluation is closely associated with landscape evaluation; And, general users’ preference of traffic, human sound, and melody was significantly higher than that of professional designers.
In the urban development process, city sense is the key to a subjective reality and all subjective realities are in a dialectic relation with the society. It focuses on feelings toward the physical environment from a personal level; such feeling could be gained through the memory of their own experiences, which focus on the consciousness over a period of time. However, such sense has been lost due to the urban development process, and the loss of uniqueness has become a common problem that fast changing environments are facing, especially in developed countries. The city sense of such urban development process has two functions: prevent the loss of uniqueness, which was based on history, and generate new identities. The two have both positive and negative aspects, therefore, how to interpret the sense of city becomes more important as the needs to develop the positives and avoid the negatives in urban development. With such perspectives, this paper will concentrate on evaluating the effect that history has to the form of city sense and why it is important in terms of forming a valuable city sense.
With the accelerating process of globalization and urbanization, the space of the city plays an increasingly important role in our daily lives. Although science and technology enable us to better communicate with the whole world, the need for concrete physical experiences in the real world has not diminished. Sustainable Urban Design Program at Faculty of Engineering of Lund University has been dedicated in sustainable urban design for more than 10 years. In this interview, Associate Professor Peter Siöström dissects the impacts of city sense(s) on sustainable urban design, discusses the concepts of identity and city image, analyzes the influences of technology application like big data in urban design, as well as making a prospective outlook to the future of landscape architecture.
What follows New York City’s urbanization process is the rising of conflict and contradictions: towering skyscrapers and dense street grid witness the simultaneous vertical city development and horizontal urban crawl; while the vertical development has resulted in the lack of lateral communication and hierarchical differences; manufactured landscapes substitute for natural scenes, eliminating the urban primitive texture and natural communities, etc. The bold concept “New York Horizon” strives to address these contradictions in an innovative yet utopian point of view, at the same time making characteristics and contradictions of New York more obviously revealed. In the project, traditional towering skyscrapers are concealed while the original site texture reemerges, boundless natural landscape is created by the reflection of glass facade, although with the shield of the skyscrapers. These poetic approaches eventually enabled us to transform New York’s skyline into its new horizon.
New York Restoration Project (NYRP) is developing a master plan to renovate a network of open spaces in Mott Haven and Port Morris in the South Bronx. Through extensive mapping, spatial analysis and data visualization, this project aims to demonstrate measurable health and social outcomes resulting from an improved physical environment at the neighborhood scale.
The Xiamen Old Theatre Cultural Park is a new public space that integrates culture, recreation, and wellness. The cultural park was transformed from the former Lujiang Theatre, a place of memory for many local residents. However, the theatre had fallen into disrepair after years of neglect. The new project enriched the space by drawing on historical experiences of place, as well as the current decay of the structure, combining both time, space, and scale. The new space is a spiritual inheritance of the old site while facilitating interaction among current residents.
The Las Vegas Strip recently received its first-ever park, a spectacular public space. Las Vegas exists in an extremely challenging arid location, exposed to sun, heat, dust storms, and scarcity of water. All design elements mitigate these extremes to create the most enjoyable sensory experience possible. The cutting-edge design of The Park celebrates the context of the Mojave region and reinstates what Las Vegas once was — an oasis in the desert.
Soundfield envisions sound as the lens through which to view the landscape of the Western Ghats. By gaging the intensity and location of specific sounds within the landscape, Soundfield seeks to realign human and wildlife transit within the Western Ghats. Focusing on elephant corridor which is based on ecologies of sound, Soundfield defines divergent areas of elephant and human traverse. By generating types of sounds that attract, or dissuade these distinct groups, Soundfield proposes the infrastructure to mitigate navigation between humans, elephants and other wildlife through the Ghats.
Smells are whimsical creatures. As errant hitchhikers of rides on air currents, they appear to defy being tied to a location, yet our nuanced perception of olfactory knowledge is often linked with place.
My work considers smells as entities and speculates on their patterns of movement and their interactions. Smell is under-represented in the Western world. In order to raise awareness about the value of understanding “smell,” my research seeks strategies by which we can share and explore the everyday odours within both local and exotic urban smellscapes.
This article traces the exploration of global cities through the noses of local inhabitants, and uses map-making as a means of communication; whilst also exploring my personal motivation for undertaking this research.
As a graphic designer, I utilise the design process as a methodology; each new piece of work is an iteration on a previous piece.
Smellscape maps use “ex-formation” as a communication design method to render the seemingly “known” as “unknown” so as to encourage discussion and dispute over the possibility of mapping smells and to encourage experiential learning in situ through personal experience. To sniff is to know.
Smart cities strive to make our lives easier: utilizing big data, our routes get optimized, work steps become more efficient and resources better used. However, what about the emotional potential of a smart city? How could it be triggered and who releases it? Step by step we tried to grasp the immaterial layer of our beloved city. What started out with simple experiments of perspective shifts, soon led us to the question what exactly makes us feel like a part of a bigger system — but stays hidden. What can be sensed yet not seen? How do we measure the intangible? Finding interconnections between different occurrences throughout the city enabled us to measure indicators of emotional patterns. By using simple parameters, our Summer Scouts try to grasp one of the communal feelings sensed by the population of Vienna: the beginning of summer.