Social legibility, the cognitive map and urban behaviour

This study clarifies the concept of legibility by introducing its social dimension. Social legibility is a complement to the spatial and behavioural legibility already developed in literature. This investigation used field experimentation to operationalize a variable of social legibility which is based on continuum of cultural distance between individual and surroundings. Consequently, subjects were sampled on the cultural origin of city-dwellers (African vs European), maintaining constant the culturally marked site (Paris, as European city), in order to analyse the influence of propositional representation on spatial representation and urban behaviour. Results show that: (1) the characters of environmental meanings (physical, social, functional, use and landmarks characters) depend on cultural origin: Africans refer more to the utilization than the other attributes, whereas Europeans use physical attributes as often as the utilization; (2) spatial products of Paris are more accurate when physical codes are meaningful. However, when physical codes are not legible, urban practices allow us to elaborate meanings. In conclusion, the social legibility seems to determine the qualitative band between the adaptive and the exploratory stage. It seems important to elaborate a tool collecting the structure of the environmental meanings to diagnose individual and social problems that occur in cities, with the prospect to reduce them. (C) 1998 Academic Press.