Directional Conditioning in the City

The city is a large space, with many different functions and programs and environments. Navigating your way through a city can therefore be a pretty daunting task. No you say? That is because you are probably considerably familiar with your local city so that finding direction and purpose throughout the city becomes an effortless process. This is indeed the case for me. I enjoy the comfort and confidence to go where I like, when I like and the sound knowledge I have of my city (Sydney) allows a broader theoretical city, increasing my potential destinations and thoroughfares. This means that a city can only be as big as an individual's knowledge. How can a person decide on a destination that they never knew existed? Therefore, providing direction and purpose for aliens (and I mean people who are new to the space, not the inter-stellar kind!) in a city should be of extreme importance, especially for future cities, considering that cities are constantly growing in size. As cities get larger, it will become increasingly difficult for a person to navigate through the spaces of the city in a random manner. Currently, navigation through our cities is controlled by the tourism industry. This means a person is being told how to experience an urban landscape from a political and marketing perspective. This particular problem should be addressed for future cities. Who better to help a tourist experience a city than the creative minds that helped create it? Also, with a strong founded knowledge of urban experiences and social interactions as a result of these, architects and planners are in the best position to help a tourist experience the urban fabric granting the city its culture.

This observation came about as I stood in the middle of the city deciding on a destination to which I can digitally track. Digitally tracking was the easy part, however deciding on an un-purposed destination and than deciding on the direction was extremely difficult. How can we, as city designers, determine the direction of the people? How can we have ignored such a great potential and extremely powerful factor in the design of cities? Eventually I decided to follow the strongest directional influence in my scope of vision...the Monorail. Those of you who don’t know the monorail, it’s a bullet looking train which runs along a single track about twelve meters above the city floor. It looks very interesting and exciting and has potential to be a great means of transportation. However, it is a greatly wasted potential. It runs in a small and uneventful circle around a small portion of the city, only attracting a small portion of tourists. This means that my journey following the monorail was relatively uneventful and unexciting. However it wasn’t the destination that attracted me to follow the monorail, but rather the definitive and obvious single track which runs unobstructed through the city.

The initial purpose of the exercise was to determine the quality of digital devices in tracking an individual throughout the city and than determining resulting social repercussions. However, I feel a more important lesson has evolved from that, in that future cities have great potential to physically direct people to desired destinations and experiences which are true representations of the city culture.