City, user's guide: an essay on urban landscape

Abstract

The terms urban and city are frequently taken as similar; but it is exactly in their differences that lay the conceptual strength for the analysis of urban experiences. From the main ideas of some authors (LYNCH) and critics (SASAKI) dedicated to the methodologies of urban reading, we discuss some possibilities of mapping the city not from physical references, but from people’s experiences of the city – where the works by Georg Simmel, Lucrécia Ferrara and Armando Silva are discussed. At this point, we propose three operational concepts: perceived city, where the focus is on the understanding of the city from the representations that their inhabitants make of it; urban tracks, where through minimum indications we rescue the diversity of
urban experiences that are overlapped and still echo in the city; and communicated city, where we verify the interdependence that has in the urban experience and its representations of the constructed urban space and the symbolic signs inserted in the city. To illustrate the conceptual and methodological intention of this essay, we take examples of our works of urban reading in Curitiba, Paraná.