Making the City Observable, No. 80
About this book
This publication is a catalogue of various means of urban communication that the author hopes to see evolve and spread in the development of materials about the city and in the articulation of physical aspects of the city itself. The inner connection of the seemingly miscellaneous items manifested here is made immediately apparent to the reader.This special issue of the journal Design Quarterly is a catalogue of projects, ideas, books, guides, maps, advertisements, curricula, teaching aids, place signs, route symbols, models, graphs, and other items that make it easier to understand and to "imagine" the environment. A catalogue is meant to give provocative hints of ideas and items available. This catalogue attempts, through the juxtaposition of some 80 projects (all of them pictured), to outline a syllabus for urban communication. "Making the city observable," Wurman observes, "means making the plethora of public information public."Information and communication are components of learning, and giving the city visibility implies allowing the city to become an environment for learning. The city can be made observable by developing a school curriculum about our man-made environment, or by designing a clear subway map, or by writing the propositions on a ballot so that nonlawyers can understand them, or by any number of other possibilities illustrated in this volume.The following partial list of items is meant only to indicate the range of the catalogue—Peltier's birds-eye view of Paris; Wurman's 60 comparative city models; Eames' film on urban communications; Fetter's computer graphics; the AIA Guide to New York City; Michelin's Green Guides; Pan Am's taped tours; Halprin's RSVP Cycles; Lynch's Image of the City; Wyman's Mexico City metro graphics; the London underground map; Psychology Today's city survey; maps for the blind; Philadelphia's school without walls; Kahn's movement notation; and displays from the Laboratory of Computer Graphics and Spatial Analysis.