Civic Meaning: The Role of Place, Typology and Design Values in Urbanism

What is civic meaning? How might such meaning be expressed and conveyed through urban design? Are some urban design strategics better than others in conveying civic meaning? These are the questions I was asked to address as part of the University of North Carolina's spring 1999 symposium on "Traditional Urbanism Reconsidered." I approach these questions from the perspective of an academic researcher who has been investigating the topic of 'environmental meaning' for more than two decades, through empirical studies and theoretical analyses. Environmental meaning, as I and other researchers have framed it, highlights the importance and complexity of the processes by which people apprehend and construct meaning in their physical environments, from small to large scale, including both built and natural environments. Within this larger framework, the notion of civic meaning raises the question of how the urban or town scale environment might convey a sense of citizenship, civic engagement, and community cohesion. Given the theme of the symposium, the implicit question being posed is whether traditional urbanism and/or New Urbanism are likely to be more successful than Modernist and typical suburban developments in engendering civic meaning. This of course is a complex question, one that defies a simple answer. None of the urban design strategies - traditional, Modernist, suburban, or New Urbanist - is by any means monolithic. The range of examples is endless, the quality of execution completely variable. Nevertheless, it is vitally important to address the question because the quality of our experiences in neighborhoods and cities depends on it. In this article, I begin from the premise that 'civic meaning' is a critical, but often missing, ingredient in our lives as citizens in our communities. Achieving authentic civic meaning requires that it be embedded in our social practices - especially the processes enacted for making and sustaining communities, in the actual physical form of our communities, and even in our fundamental values. As a prelude to the discussion of the extent to which various forms of urban design (e.g. typical suburban development or New Urbanist) are capable of engendering civic meaning, three underlying principles will be examined: 1) the model of place experience, 2) the notion of typology as means by which people interpret physical form, and 3) the concept of the designer-as-cultivator, based on an understanding of organizational and environmental values

Psychological aspects of contextual compatibility in architecture: A study of environmental meaning.

The intent of this study is to investigate contextual compatibility in architecture from a psychological perspective. More specifically, the study examines contextual compatibility as an aspect of environmental meaning. Within the framework of this research, the term contextual compatibility is defined as the degree of fit between a new infill building and the immediately adjacent buildings within an urban or campus setting. As such, contextual compatibility is clearly a very specific and narrowly defined phenomenon: yet it nevertheless represents one of the most publicly debated and architecturaly significant manifestations of environmental meaning. For example, the emergence of increasing numbers of design review commissions, the often vociferous public debates on the appropriateness of particular design proposals, and the increasing willingness of architects to employ non-Modernist vocabularies all suggest the importance of contextual compatibility in people's experience of architecture. Because this study represents one of the first empirical investigations of contextual compatibility at the architectural scale, the research is focused on three of the most fundamental aspects of the topics: 1) what meaning does contextual compatibility have for people? 2) what kind of contextual design strategies are most consistently preferred? and 3) what types of physical features are most commonly seen as contributing to or detracting from contextual compatibility? In addition, a further goal of the research is to offer an account of the psychological processes that are implicit in these questions. These questions are considered in the light of three major sets of literatures 1) general discussions of environmental cognition and meaning in the psychological literature, 2) specific substantive research studies on contextual compatibility, primarily drawn from the environmental psychology literature, and 3) critical and theoretical analyses of design strategies for contextual fit, drawn from the architectural literature. (Abstract shortened by ProQuest.)

Contextual Compatibility In Architecture: An Investigation Of Non-designers' Conceptualizations

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