Perceptual Orientation and Spatial Navigation in Dense Urban Environments

Abstract

This paper poses the problem of perceptual orientation and spatial navigation in dense urban environments and proposes a scenario and methodology of urbanization in analogy to natural ecologies in which land formation, streams and rivers, flora and fauna come together according to rules of interdependency that build up a complex variegated order. Despite their complexity, such natural environments are eminently legible and navigable. The vision of a perceptually tractable complex urban order contrasts with the urban disarticulation that has resulted from the urbanization processes of the last 40 years, since the demise of modernism and modernist urban planning.