Document Type : Research Paper
Author
NJP consulting engineers
Abstract
Legibility is one of the most important characteristics of good urban environments which improves the communication between people and place by helping them to perceive and recognize their environment more deeply and precisely. Unfortunately, achieving legibility in today’s urban environments has become very hard due to the increase in incoherent developments and partial renovation projects. Moreover, in practice, the concept of legibility has often decreased to some simple solutions to facilitate urban orienteering. However, a comprehensive meaningful concept which includes different parallel aspects and components should be considered. Contrary to the customary one- dimentional solutions, legibility- based urban regeneration would be an appropriate approach which enables the urban regeneration action to play a really effective role in enriching people’s perception and awareness of the environment as well asproviding them with a joyful and memorable experience. The most effective factor which can enhance legibility at different scales of the urban environment is a strong and plain organized structure which turns individual parts and elements into a coherent whole through creation of a comprehensible order. Therefore, it improves legibility by increasing distinction and clarity of both objective and cognitive image of the environment. On this basis, the purpose of this study is to identify principles and strategies which increase legibility in old urban textures by regenerating its main structure, which means revitalizing and retrofitting both its physical and nonphysical aspects. For this purpose, it is necessary to present a thoughtful and comprehensive explanation of legibility and its physical, functional and sensory- semantic components, and also, to specify its meaningful relation with the concept of the main structure, the role and the position of each component in urban main structure and in regeneration plans. Thus, providing effective guidelines for main structure regeneration with the purpose of increasing legibility becomes possible. These guidelines, contrary to the superficial and partial approaches to regeneration, are able to provide a comprehensive holistic framework to deal efficiently with various individual problems of the urban environments and lead to its actual revival, improvement and enrichment through adopting all valuable physical aspects along with their non-physical contents. Thus, a comprehensive in depth study of the concept of “legibility”, in order to identify all its different components and effective factors, can be very helpful. In this paper, legibility- based urban design principals are proposed in three groups based on the three identified components of the concept of legibility, which are the physical copmonents, functional components and sensory- semantic components. Therefore, these principals can support physical unity and coherence of the built environment, its functional vitality and activeness, and the sensory- semantic hoard enrichment of the human environment. In fact, the main focus of these principals is on complete alignment and convergence among the environment’s physical appearence, its function aspect and its sensory- semantic content. This also can provide best compatibility and favourability between people and environment by improving the environment’s identity, unity and comprehensibility. Thus, it promotes people- environment relations and communications significantly.
Keywords
- Legibility
- physical component
- functional component
- sensory- semantic component
- urban main structure
- Regeneration
Main Subjects
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