Urban complexity and space cognition: Modelling ontologies from spatial design tasks

Abstract

In order to face the challenges of a tumultuous social, economic, environmental complexity, urban systems have undertaken new forms of readjustments and transformations able to shock consolidated planning and design approaches. The role of agents’ spatial cognition (perception, representation) has proved to be critical toward effective decision-making support in a complex environment (Chen and Lee 2003; Freksa et al. 2005).

In particular, looking at the design of urban spaces, a greater comprehension of spatial primitive elements (spatial forms, relations, memories...) becomes essential to allow effective spatial aggregations. Additionally, it is important to understand the role played by agents’ association ability and creativity in those cognitive processes. In fact, there is increasing interest in the conceptualization of primitives, dynamics, mutual relations and associations in the processes embedded in urban transformations (Amedeo et al. 2008).

Hence, an essential importance is assumed by ontologies and ontological organizations of data. In fact, they represent complex relational/conceptual articulations and may help keeping the sense of space in complex and non-reductive way. Also, that spatial sense can be preserved through IT based platforms, able to manage manifold computational implications of such useful complexity (Bhatt et al. 2011; Falquet et al. 2011).

In order to investigate on such issues, some experimental sessions have been set up with some planning students and planners. The paper carries out an analysis of spatial primitives of the urban contexts emerging from their design tasks. The outcomes are then formalized in spatial ontologies and discussed, toward drawing out possible urban decision-support models.