ANALYZING WORLD EVOLUTION AND ITS EFFECTS ON URBAN DESIGNING

Our society's modalities of communication and hence our cities have been rapidly changed due to emergence of several revolutions most lately the digital one. In fact, recently with emergence of the fluid, responsive, kinetic, data-driven worlds of infoscape and its combination with urban landscape, urban designing faces a radical reshuffling of a number of its principal underpinnings. It seems that once again we as urban designers in order to catch up with the current world's situation need to evolve or in better words to re-ontologize concepts of urban designing for twenty-first century. Therefore; in this paper for better understanding of the main characteristics of current changes we try to identify the effects of new actors on urban structures trough analysis of different evolution phases of our cities. To do so we make a diagram called "Evolutionary Trend" trough which we can trace world's evolution history to help us know where we are and what may happen in coming decades. This "evolutionary trend" can be used as a guideline for urban designers to help them navigate better in future.Evolutionary Trend, Urban Evolution, Infospherization, Softerial Era, Digital revolution

New Era, New Criteria for City Imaging

Despite many dramatic changes in last fifty years, urban designers still try to measure "city imaging" with same criteria as was described by Kevin Lynch in his landmark volumes. However, city imaging increasingly is supplemented by exposure to recent progresses in communication infrastructures. It seems that once again we need to re-ontologize concepts of city imaging for twenty-first century as his ideas were theoretically created when digital evolution was not such widely affected our world. This paper aims to identify effects of these new digital actors on city imaging. Consequently, we propose that with emergence of Softerial Era and infospherization of almost everything, another kind of landmarks have been evolved (linkmarks) which are highly referenced to a self and relative to his destination and necessities in real-time. We believe they can improve not only our “sense of place” but also “sense of time” as an inevitable necessity in our current life.Kevin Lynch, City Imaging, Infospherization, Landmark, Sense of time.