Ohyoon Kwon (KOR), Master Student of the Delft University of Technology, shows a drawing of Bramante, and explains that this is only a 2D representation of a physical element of the city, whereas it is now possible to show 3D impressions of buildings, even with sound and movement.

A traditional map represents the city can in different layers, but it misses the focus on usage, says Ohyoon. There is no way to represent movement. The project he executed in the Delft University faculty of Urbanism was an attempt to introduce this new layer in a map.  Ohyoon’s work is part of the research project coordinated by Stefan van der Spek, Assistant Professor of Urban Design at the Department of Urbanism, TU Delft.

Ohyoon tracked 291 ‘users’ of Delft’s inner city – an area with 1/200 of the inhabitants of Shanghai, and 1,5 times its density. The 17th century city map of this area shows a condition that hardly has changed in current times.
Ohyoon collected his data from visitors of two parking garages in Delft, the Phoenix garage and the Zuidpoort garage. People park their car in these garages, before starting their trip into the city on foot. Ohyoon went to these garages and asked visitors to take a GPS device with them during their trips, and fill out a questionnaire after returning.

His goal was to check preferences and behaviour – when you compare it to selecting an icecream, it is about preferences (‘I don’t like chocolate’) and behaviour (‘I always take vanilla’). The results of the investigation were presented on GPS maps and enquiry results. One of the most interesting results of the study show that there is a big difference in tracks of people that don’t have much knowledge of the city, and the tracks of people that visit Delft very often. Moreover, one of the graphs shows that people tend to walk further for luxury products than for average groceries. Visitors who visit the city more often tend to have the same morphological map in their tracking behaviour, showing that they are less explorative.

Video below: talk by Ohyoon Kwon at ‘Designing the Hybrid City’

Additional notes by Michiel de Lange

By juxtaposing a 17th century map of Delft and a contemporary map, Ohyoon showed how incredibly little the physical grid of the city has changed over the centuries. This reveals one huge difference between most European and Asian cities: the latter have and still are witnessing rapid and massive transformations in their physical layout. Another interesting remark Ohyoon made is that Delft has a higher population density than Shanghai, despite Shanghai’s high-rise buildings. According to Ohyoon, representations of the city by traditional maps neglect their actual usage. He showed how GPS is employed by the department of Urbanism at the Technical University in Delft to capture movements and user preferences of the urban environment, resulting in a ‘cognitive map’ of the city (much in line with the work of Kevin Lynch discussed elsewhere on this website). This methodology can improve future urban planning.

On a more critical note, this approach appears to be founded on an implicit understanding of a ‘better city’ as an ‘optimized city’ that is as legible and friction-free as possible to its users. Furthermore, it does not in any way make use of user-generated data already ‘out there’, nor gives urban dwellers the tools to act upon their environment. Contrary to the logics of present participatory media and ‘co-design’, this approach firmly upholds the separation between the professionalized planner and the layman urbanite. The implicit perception of urbanism is still one of a read-only city (r—), as opposed to a read/write city (rw-) (¹), let alone a read/write/execute city (rwx), in which people are not only allowed to inscribe their environment with personal experiences but also have the power to act upon their environment and change it [credit to our moderator Emilie Randoe for her suggestion to extend this UNIX analogy].

note 1: The term ‘read/write urbanism’ is mentioned in this discussion between Adam Greenfield and Mark Shepard (PDF, 1.2 MB, p.13). Greenfield, A., & Shepard, M. (2007). Urban Computing and Its Discontents. In T. S. Omar Khan, Mark Shepard (Eds.), Situated Technologies Pamphlet series. Available from http://www.situatedtechnologies.net.