Theoretical and methodological challenges for cognitive research in the built environment
Hölscher, C., Schinazi, V. R., Thrash, T., & Zacharias, J. (2017). Theoretical and methodological challenges for cognitive research in the built environment. In Cairns. Stephen & D. Tunas (Eds.), Future Cities Laboratory: Indicia 1. Lars Müller Publishers.
One significant feature of urbanisation in the twenty-first century is the increase in large, complex and densely populated city quarters. Airports, shopping precincts, sports venues and cultural facilities increasingly combine with generic function buildings such as hotels, housing, businesses and offices to produce horizontal and vertical nodes in a city. The capacity of such city quarters to bring large numbers of people into proximity produces crowds of unprecedented complexity. The manner in which such crowds ‘behave’ in space by aggregating, disaggregating, flowing or stalling generate new kinds of urban experience that can be thrilling, bewildering, stressful or even threatening. In turn, this creates a set of complex challenges for architectural design and its capacity to understand human behaviour and crowd dynamics.