City center
I’ve always been curious about the location where people (citizens or visitors) place the center of a city. You can define it as an area but also at specific points.
You have different ways to explore this question:
- Asking people what is the point they would refer to as the center of a city. This kind of enquiry is common in environmental psychology and may help to uncover how individuals have specific representations (psychologists would call them mental models). Depending on the sampling (visitors/tourists, job type…) the answer may be different: should it be the CBD? the geometrical center? Should it be the Schelling Point?
- Observing how city centers are represented in technological artifacts such as maps or guidebooks. For example, looking for cities in digital mapping systems such as Google Maps and observe where they put the red dots that correspond to the city. In this case, it will reflects a specific norm chosen by the Googleplex engineers. I’d be curious to know the underlying rationale behind this positioning.
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Why do I blog this? thinking about urban notions and their representations. I find intriguing to define what is a city center and how human beings think about this concept.
October 28th, 2009 at 3:22 pm
I think most of the “city centers” are related to the history on how the city have grown up. So, usually, the center is the oldest part. Depending on the urbanistic development (and the century that have grown up) you get so many different city centers.
October 28th, 2009 at 3:51 pm
In Paris, the reference point of the whole French geodesic system (in front of the Notre dame Cathedral) is a common consensual position. Maybe this ancient system also provides a good reference in other cities, which would explain its resurgence in modern mapping applications.
I like the idea of probing mental models through the simple device of asking where the center is.
November 4th, 2009 at 11:57 am
A curious example is the Tokyo city center, the historical in fact not the Google Maps one.
Barthes wrote in L’Empire des signes that Tokyo center is void. The city was built around the Imperial palace where it has nothing related to a city (no street, no building, just a castle and a huge garden).