Urban experience and design contemporary perspectives on improving the public realm

摘要

This volume brings together papers by professionals and scholars who are interested in using advances in the neurosciences to improve architecture and urban design. Their common credo is that our relationship to the built and natural environment today is mediated by cerebral structures and cognitive processes moulded during the long evolution from hominid to homo sapiens. In that process, we were programmed to rely primarily on the visual sense, to scan our environment principally for other humans and for threats to our survival and to use the human face and the human body as templates for the recognition and evaluation of objects in our surroundings. Good architectural and urban form is that which responds well to innate and subconscious cognitive processes, and triggers pleasure and calm by making us feel safe and at home in the wider world. What good design is can therefore be understood using biometric tools from the cognitive and medical sciences to track unconscious physical and emotional responses to stimuli. For instance, tracking eye movements can tell us what parts of our environment we find most interesting and rewarding.