Network and psychological effects inurban movement
2005
Correlations are regularly found in space syntax studies between
graph-based configurational measures of street networks, represented as
lines, and observed movement patterns. This suggests that topological
and geometric complexity are critically involved in how people navigate
urban grids. This has caused difficulties with orthodox urban
modelling, since it has always been assumed that insofar as spatial
factors play a role in navigation, it will be on the basis of metric
distance. In spite of much experimental evidence from cognitive science
that geometric and topological factors are involved in navigation, and
that metric distance is unlikely to be the best criterion for
navigational choices, the matter has not been convincingly resolved
since no method has existed for extracting cognitive information from
aggregate flows. Within the space syntax literature it has also
remained unclear how far the correlations that are found with syntactic
variables at the level of aggregate flows are due to cognitive factors
operating at the level of individual movers, or they are simply
mathematically probable network effects, that is emergent statistical
effects from the structure of line networks, independent of the
psychology of navigational choices. Here we suggest how both problems
can be resolved, by showing three things: first, how cognitive
inferences can be made from aggregate urban flow data and distinguished
from network effects; second by showing that urban movement, both
vehicular and pedestrian, are shaped far more by the geometrical and
topological properties of the grid than by its metric properties; and
third by demonstrating that the influence of these factors on movement
is a cognitive, not network, effect.
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