Periodic Reporting for period 2 - PADUA (Perception–action based design for urban accessibility: principles for inclusive design grounded in an understanding of first-person control of locomotion in the urban setting)
Période du rapport: 2018-09-01 au 2019-08-31
The project sought to apply an ecological understanding of human visual perception to the improvement of traffic infrastructure in cities. We know that actors control their movement with reference to identifiable structures in their surroundings. For instance, a person crossing the road must continually monitor their own movement with reference to the other side of the road (where they are heading), and, simultaneously, with reference to moving and potentially moving vehicles in the roadway. An accessible city is one where the demands of such movements do not exceed the capacity of the actor's body. An accessible city is also one in which the freedom to move about is universal, that is, its spaces are useable for everyone, and not only for the average person. The project sought to develop design principles that can guide designers to construct urban spaces that respect that the need for human-scaled movement. This is important for society because existing road infrastructure presents vulnerable users (pedestrians, cyclists) of the space with an unacceptable level of danger. Redesigning urban space so that it is usable for human-powered locomotion promises: a reduction in injuries and fatalities from collisions involving vehicles; a greater uptake of human-powered modes, and a concomitant reduction in vehicle emissions pollution; and improved health outcomes as a result of people being able to walk and cycle around more easily.
Work carried out in the outgoing phase of the project focused on the theoretical underpinnings of ecological psychology, which is the psychological framework from which the project seeks to derive its recommendations for accessible city design. The publications included in this report lay the groundwork for adapting the ecological approach for application to urban accessibility. The main theoretical obstacle to this application has been the fact that the ecological approach has been developed principally from a description of the environment of the entire human species, but has paid little attention to the relation between the environment of the species and the local environment of a given individual actor. This is a problem in city design, because if cities are designed for the average human user, this is likely to render the spaces difficult to use for many people. What is needed is an approach to city design that is attentive to the needs of all users. The project's publications set up the possibility to pursue such an approach by introducing a distinction between two senses of environment: the habitat (of the species), and the umwelt (of the individual).
In the second phase of the project the ecological approach is combined with a syntactic analysis of space, as developed at UCL (the project's host institution). We analysed road intersections in terms of the structured demands they make on an actor's attentional resources as they move through the space. The project has produced recommendations for designing usable urban spaces and which are relevant for making cities more suitable for a future less dependent on private automobiles.