IN-PERSON: Livable Cities – New York

Abstract

This paper introduces ‘walkability’ as a rule of thumb for how to gauge the cognitive affordances of a city, offering a framework whereby a city’s architecture, green space, and level of access frame unique individual paths within a cohesive urban trajectory. This builds upon the work of J.J. Gibson and Lucius Burckhardt, understanding cognition as an interaction of ‘affordances’ — an agent’s cumulative sensing of the world, and the interaction their environment allows them — and expanding ‘the walk’ to include any individual means of accessing a city at speeds below 10mph (i.e., in wheelchairs). While many of a landscape’s affordances are shared, each person has affordances unique to them and their experience, because each person encounters the landscape through unique physical, mental & emotional trajectories of development; each starts at a different place. A city’s walkability is its cumulative affordance at these nested levels: Walkability enhances its citizens’ environmental perception, or limits it. It is a means of access, but it is also the degree to which each position is allowed to be part of a communal ballet of ecological activity and to have their paths recognised. It shows people where they can go, where they are welcome, and what the world affords them. Burckhardt’s ‘walking science’ was a critical reflection on such themes in urban development. He believed the planning and politics that go into the creation of cityscapes must connect to the physical needs of those living in them. This paper goes farther and frames walkability as a matter of cognitive affordance, showing that urban planning sets parameters for mental and emotional health, and for connection to others. It asserts that urban experience is also an experience of personal, communal, and ecological cognitive health and uses recent studies to show why physical paths are always mental and ethical. Walkability is introduced as one way to measure urban livability from nested perspectives.