Planning legibility

[Tim Lund]

I was walking back last night to London Bridge Station, from a meeting at City Hall, when my companion commented on how the architects had somehow got it right



Source here

Sharing a similar sense of humour, we both laughed when I mentioned the concept of legibility, which I'd come across recently as an important Town Planning consideration, in a 196 page Housing Density Study prepared for the GLA by Maccreanor Lavington Architects, Emily Greeves Architects and Graham Harrington Planning Advice

7.64 London Plan Policy 7.1 (Building London’s Neighbourhoods and Communities) calls for development to have a good relationship with surrounding land and improve people’s access to social and community infrastructure, enable people to live healthy, active lives, maximise the opportunity for community diversity, inclusion and cohesion; and contribute to people’s sense of place, safety and security. It goes on to make clear that places should be designed to meet the needs of the community at all stages of people’s lives, and should meet the principles of lifetime neighbourhoods. Finally, it calls for development to help reinforce or enhance the character, legibility, permeability and accessibility of the neighbourhood. London Plan Policy 7.4 (Local Character) makes clear that development should have regard to the form, function, and structure of an area, place or street and the scale, mass and orientation of surrounding buildings.

But in fact we were both appreciating exactly this legibility, at least as I understood it from having googled 'legibility planning concept' and found this visual explanation

A Big Little Idea Called Legibility



although interestingly that blogger didn't seem to like legibility

The Authoritarian High-Modernist Recipe for Failure

Scott calls the thinking style behind the failure mode “authoritarian high modernism,” but as we’ll see, the failure mode is not limited to the brief intellectual reign of high modernism (roughly, the first half of the twentieth century).

Here is the recipe:

• Look at a complex and confusing reality, such as the social dynamics of an old city
• Fail to understand all the subtleties of how the complex reality works
• Attribute that failure to the irrationality of what you are looking at, rather than your own limitations
• Come up with an idealized blank-slate vision of what that reality ought to look like
• Argue that the relative simplicity and platonic orderliness of the vision represents rationality
• Use authoritarian power to impose that vision, by demolishing the old reality if necessary
• Watch your rational Utopia fail horribly

The big mistake in this pattern of failure is projecting your subjective lack of comprehension onto the object you are looking at, as “irrationality.” We make this mistake because we are tempted by a desire for legibility.

Let's not worry for the time being about whether it's a good or bad thing, but just recognise it matters, and that when laughing at other people's jargon, sometimes the laugh is on us.