Developing Alternative Methods for Urban Imageability Research

Abstract

This paper discusses the devising of an alternative data collection technique for a research project that investigated the urban imageability of the World Heritage City of Kandy in Sri Lanka. Kevin Lynch argues that people form mental images of environments based on environments’ noticeable features, spatial relationships of those features, and the meanings attributed to the environment and its features. The overall capacity of the environment, derived by these attributes, in evoking strong mental schemata of it is called the imageability of the place. Any research on city image and imageability should derive data on these attributes of identity, structure, and meaning of the place imageability. The usual methods followed, such as mapping, verbal direction-giving, map construction, distance/direction judgment, picture recognition, and simulation techniques, are primarily focused on eliciting the visuo-spatial schema and are analyzed appropriately with quantitative methods. However, these methods have severe limitations in different cultural settings. Moreover, these conventional quantitative methods have limitations with regard to eliciting knowledge of environmental meanings. Since environmental meanings are too numerous and people’s interpretation of them is context-dependent – subjective, cultural, and changeable over time - the type of data required to be rich in detail, embedded in the context, and describe the participants’ subjective and cultural biases in meaning construction. This required using qualitative approaches as adopted in research in the fields of anthropology, social studies, and human geography in order to elicit meanings. The current study, therefore, followed an ethnographic design primarily involving interviewing along with a modified version of the free listing survey technique adopted from cognitive anthropological research into cultural domain analysis in order to derive both visuo-spatial information and environmental meanings. The free listing survey proved to be very valuable for the study. It is an easy task to perform by anyone; it elicits more information on people’s image of an environment than other popularly-used elicitation techniques, such as sketch mapping and map-making exercises; and it is also useful in devising measures to evaluate the saliency of imageability of city features that cannot be achieved through most of the usual methods. With the free list method, it was easy to define the consensual city image, its core/periphery, and its structure. I found that the combined form of free list survey and semi-structured interview method is an effective alternative to widely-used mapping techniques in urban imageability research.