The Image of the City Out of the Underlying Scaling of City Artifacts or Locations

TL;DR

This paper proposes that the imageability of a city arises from the scaling properties of its artifacts, where a few vital elements dominate the city's image, and social media data can quantify this phenomenon.

Contribution

It introduces a scaling-based theory explaining city imageability and suggests using social media data to quantitatively analyze cognitive maps of cities.

Findings

City artifacts follow a heavy-tailed distribution.

Vital city elements form the core of city image.

Social media data enables quantitative analysis of city images.

Abstract

Two fundamental issues surrounding research on the image of the city respectively focus on the city's external and internal representations. The external representation in the context of this paper refers to the city itself, external to human minds, while the internal representation concerns how the city is represented in human minds internally. This paper deals with the first issue, i.e., what trait the city has that make it imageable? We develop an argument that the image of the city arises from the underlying scaling of city artifacts or locations. This scaling refers to the fact that, in an imageable city (a city that can easily be imaged in human minds), small city artifacts are far more common than large ones; or alternatively low dense locations are far more common than high dense locations. The sizes of city artifacts in a rank-size plot exhibit a heavy tailed distribution consisting of the head, which is composed of a minority of unique artifacts (vital and very important), and the tail, which is composed of redundant other artifacts (trivial and less important). Eventually, those extremely unique and vital artifacts in the top head, i.e., what Lynch called city elements, make up the image of the city. We argue that the ever-increasing amount of geographic information on cities, in particular obtained from social media such as Flickr and Twitter, can turn research on the image of the city, or cognitive mapping in general, into a quantitative manner. The scaling property might be formulated as a law of geography. Keywords: Scaling of geographic space, face of the city, cognitive maps, power law, and heavy tailed distributions.