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XXIX CONFERENZA ITALIANA DI SCIENZE REGIONALI

THE PERCEPTION OF SPACE IN MULTI-AGENT PLANNING: EXPERT VS. NON-EXPERT REPORTS1

Dino BORRI, Domenico Camarda, Nicola SCHINGARO, Rossella STUFANO MELONE

Politecnico di Bari, via Orabona 4, 70125, Bari

ABSTRACT

The preservation of the environment is today a dynamic process of multi-agent knowledge building. In this process, the perception and the complex representation of the environment and the evolution of environment-based socialization are intriguing aspects increasingly explored over the last decades. With the aim of supporting urban revitalization decisionmaking, the present study investigates on such issues. In particular, space-based cognitions perceived by residents in poor neighbourhoods in Bari, Italy, are examined and discussed in their changing aspects over time. Also, some expert-based considerations are drawn out from the viewpoints of famous architects who had some role in the transformation of Bari over years. In this expert-based context, in particular, either direct interviews or interviews taken from architecture magazines are analysed. In both investigation cases the dynamics of critical characters are investigated, through interviews carried out in different neighbourhoods, focusing on the evolution of key environment-based features of each agent. Analyses are developed rather qualitatively than quantitatively, due to the exploratory approach of the study. The rules of processes are investigated, trying to put out some suggestion for subsequent logical and/or mathematical formalizations, with the aim of better understanding agents’ perceptions of urban environments over space and time.

1 This paper is the result of a work carried out jointly by the whole group of authors. Nonetheless, chapters 1,

4, 5 have been written by D.Camarda, chapter 2 by D. Borri, chapter 3.1 by N.Schingaro, chapter 3.2 by R.Stufano.

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1 INTRODUCTION

Nowadays, the preservation of the environment is increasingly oriented to the raising and fostering of its knowledge as a common good. Basically, a general perspective of entirety in preservation is nowadays coexisting with a particular perspective of multiplicity, in that diversities and inter-connections characterize the environment, as often highlighted (Goudie, 2000). Consequently, the knowledge of the environment is itself multiple and complex. This occurrence is due to the fact that diverse agents act on the environment, and therefore they cannot but contribute with diverse and manifold perspectives to the general knowledge base. In this contexts, it is possible to draw out an important consideration, i.e., that all different contribution do participate in building the knowledge of the environment (Glasbergen, 1998). It is not limitative to underline that this is clearly a dynamic process of multi-agent knowledge building. In this process, critical factors are manifold, ranging from democracy to equity, from interaction to accessibility, to multiplicity, to the absence of hierarchy in interacting agents. Yet, a number of other factors are today increasingly important to improve the quality of the knowledge base. They can be related to the propensity to listening and interacting, to building up of memories, associations, creative abilities (Bloom et al., 1999; Ferber, 1999). The perception and the complex representation of the environment and the evolution of environment-based socialization are intriguing aspects in this context, that have been explored particularly by social science over the last decades (e.g., Sandercock, 1998). With the aim of supporting urban revitalization decisionmaking, the present study investigates on such issues. In particular, space-based cognitions perceived by residents in poor neighbourhoods in Bari, Italy, are examined and discussed in their changing aspects over time. Also, some expert-based considerations are drawn out from the viewpoints of famous architects who had some role in the transformation of Bari over years. In this expert-based context, in particular, either direct interviews or interviews taken from architecture magazines are analysed. In both investigation cases the dynamics of critical characters are investigated, through interviews carried out in different neighbourhoods, focusing on the evolution of key environment-based features of each agent. Analyses are developed rather qualitatively than quantitatively, due to the exploratory approach of the study. The rules of processes are investigated, trying to put out some suggestion for subsequent logical and/or mathematical formalizations, with the aim of better understanding agents’ perceptions of urban environments over space and time. The paper is structured as follows. After a first introductory chapter, a double expert/non-expert analysis is carried out as described before, then discussion and some concluding remarks are drawn out.

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2 THE COMPLEXITY OF SPATIAL COGNITION IN HUMAN BEINGS

Human beings are able to draw original, natural and instintctive interpretations of the space. Like other animals, we have biologically evolved in order to live in territories – parts of nature that we have adapted within the borders of our needs and possibilities – which we have learnt to represent and as humans able to carry out specific symbolic representation, to measure through manifold spatial geometries. We have legs and arms (and nerves and muscles) which we use to stay and comfortably move in the space, guided by a cerebral system able to elaborate sophisticatedly the signals that come from the five sensors of our senses, which are continuously into contact with that space. The learning related to the spatial interactions with our living environments, rather essential to consent us to live ordinarily in them without problems (e.g., avoiding both the risks for the integrity of our biological organism and the wearying research activities of spatial orientation), is continuous, and is carried out through the working of the memory components of our cerebral system. If even few components of our biological organism are damaged or not activated yet, then important pieces of our representations, measurements, spatial locations may be out of use, so putting us in great living difficulty in the space, and pushing us to search for helps and compensations. Some functional redundancies constituting our organic system have been built through evolutionary mechanisms, just to challenge some of our defects or malformations and to allow our life in the world. The basic elements of the system of orientation and movement in the space are present in the biological organism ab origine, and are further shaped through the development of spatial experience. Initial or final stages of life, related to respectively initial or final organic fragilities, naturally limit the spatial experience, without any damage, our ability of perceiving and moving in the space. The spatial experience to which we are exposed in the course of our life is multiform, as it depends, apart from some common basic characters (everybody has experience of his/her lodging, neighbourhood, village …), on the specificity of that life as to temporal ampleness and intensity of the biological relationship (the experience through the physical or intellectual movement…) with the space. In neighbourhoods and districts of villages and towns where we live or which we regularly frequent some of our major spatial experiences are almost identically repeated so being more and more steadily fixed in our memory and inducing us to perceptive and operative automatisms: a memorization of spatial experience which avails itself of our ability of simple abstraction (the creation of spatial schemes, models, through simple cerebral elaboration – presumably linear operation of addition and subtraction – of what we perceive through the five sensors which make us interact with the space outside us) or complex (spatial schematization, modelling through complex cerebral elaboration – presumably operations of integration and non-linear derivation and emotional computation – of sensorial perception) of the space that sorrounds us and obviously of a privileged capacity of identification and memorization (also through visual experience in the distance, within the limits of what our sight sensor allows us, and not only through contact experience) of noteworthy things, places, landmarks (for a city visual analysis and the role of markers in imagining and living the city see Lynch, 1960), in the amount of things and places to which for some reasons of even emotional kind we attribute ordinariness. We know and use the space that surrounds us through the concrete identification of this space with all the places specifically characterized by natural or artificial characters, which in

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general we preferably denote as an environment or territory to underline the material relationship with our life. To the humans and the other superior animals the abstract, virtual representation of space is fundamental to activate material representation: for example a kind of situational calculation allows us living in a certain space – which we immediately transform as we have said into life environment – not to lose ourselves in computations onerous and potential infinite and to consider only their elements useful to us. The experience of new spaces immediately makes us fear to lose ourselves (that is not to be able to find the starting point again or to find a new desired point of arrival once we have set up leaving from a certain point through them), inducing us to provide ourselves with a guide – either a person or a map – especially when the spaces are or appear to us too big for our natural experimenting possibilities, for some reasons we perceive them not ordinary, not clear , risky. The experience of well structured spaces is easier to us, while not so much structured or not at all structured spaces appear to us hostile to our life possibilities. Maybe that is why architecture, also as spontaneous knowledge, is a trade and an art which has always existed: villages and towns tend to organize and structure themselves in a clear eloquent way, so as to characterize the various parts and to impress the users of those life space, often admirably intertwining funcionality and esthetics; evident geometries make representations, mesurements and motions easier; the quest of beauty, generally present in the products of humane origin, here is a real quest for comprehensibility, funcionality, reasonableness, measure, of spatial organization, sometimes even oriented to the utopia of an ideal mystic spatiality (golden section, measurements of Solomon’s temple, cabalistics). The perception of exceptionality of a first meeting – either a real love meeting or a mystic one – with a new reality of spatial life is a diffuse human experience: authobiographies and travel stories or oral stories can widely witness that; in perceiving that reality the person casts on and integrate normal sensations (the fundamentals perceived by every other person) with the exceptional sensations (peculiar to a given person) made up by associations, memories, aspirations, gratifications, recoveries, even real contingencies, substantially idealizing that reality of spatial life. The studies on learning, representation, constructions, fruitions, idealizations, measurements and various other forms of the interaction between the humans and the space obviously are not numerable, placed as they are in the furrow of many analytical disciplines: psychology, semiology, architecture, engineering, anthropology, sociology, mathematics, geometry, medicine, neurophisiology, informatics, etc.; besides, literature and art have widely placed the humans in their theatres of spatial interaction. In the present notes the interest in the interaction between the humans and life space is addressed to a specific functional problem: to pick the cognitive dimension of the spatial relation between the persons and the environments in which they live ( their ‘lived spaces’…) (Lefebvre, 1991a) so as to promote what could be defined a spatial welfare of those persons deriving from their virtuous – or at least normal, devoid of traumas, lacerations, impediments – relation with the space, such as to favour their human development ( which is obviously an integrated development of the abilities conventionally categorized into physic and psychic). Such highly humanistic disciplines as history and anthropology, for example, have widely explained how the progressive adaptation of living humans to their life space leads to admirable integrated organizations, real ecosystems on dynamic balance whose traumatic alteration can prove ruinous: it is not the case of an ingenuous adhesion to the most known scientific positions of determinism or of ecology of the interaction between a human person and space but of the consciousness and the quest for the value of the so many aspects of that interaction, particularly important for spatial and environmental engineering. In fact

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we have numberless cases of recent or contemporary spatial uprootings or failed uprootings of individuals or social groups in the urban space of towns; they express bad politics and bad territorial engineering, while the idea of the absence of name and place in the lived space spreads more and more: to investigate the forms of spatial cognition and interaction relating to these processes – which in these notes is done both in a perspective of common sense (built up interviewing people living in quarters expressing social uneasiness) and of expertise (built up through the study of critic or autobiographic works relating to the works of great architects) – can so be useful for better engineering; on the other hand, the approach of a cognitive type to the relation between human person and space which is proposed here can help also to prepare policies and decisions more respectful of these ecological relations, for example in consenting to draw up evaluations and sceneries, in optimizing spatial configurations, in leading the Technological Change towards a more balanced ecology of the relationship between tradition and innovation in adapting space to the living people through artefacts (Severino, 2003), etc.; also mobility and its structures and infrastructures could be optimized through a more deep comprehension of the spatial characteristics and projections of life (for mobility, Avineri et al, 2000; Moktarian, Salomon, 1997). In particular the problems that we should intend to analyse are so many: for example, adequacy of Euclid’s geometry based upon a metric essentially cardinal to the integral analysis of the spatial relationship of the living beings and possible substitution of it and/or integration with non-Euclidean geometries (Frank, Campari, Formentini, 1992), nature of the organization and structuration of the cognitive processes relating to the interaction of living humans and space and in particular nature of the more or less structured qualification of life space in human perception with respect to spatial behaviour (for example comprehension and intelligence, memorization, mobility), nature of the mechanisms of creating forms (Johnson-Laird, 1993) in spatial artifacts and in the artificial adaptations of natural life space, characters of spatial emotions) (Minsky, 2006, or more, at last, quantitative and qualitative aspects of the processing of spatial information. Limiting for obvious reasons our study ambitions, here we shall dwell in particular upon the former two or three problems exploring as we have said from a point of view both of social common sense and of professional expertise representations and self-representations of ordinary life space and their ordinary cognitions (to live and work in space), keeping away from the figures and elaborations of an apparently superior order an belonging to a cognitive domain such as can be the ones constituting the metacognitions present in abstract narrations and conceptualizations (Calvino, 1972).Some semi-structured interviews extensively effected for a PhD research in a socially poor satellite neighbourhood on the extreme outskirts of Bari still in problematic growth since its origin in the 1950’s (see next chapter) consent a commonsense-based spatial profile of the life experience where we can see standing out (the following order is casual): (i) the place or the places of experience and of far memory, synthetically represented through landmarks (not only monumental but also of a micro type tied up to a place where human beings live and which they love) through their relationship with the development of their personality and usually connoted with emotional description; (ii) the place or the places of experience and near memory – work experience- represented in detail but always through landmarks (to be intended as aforesaid); (iii) the limited presence of considerations and evaluations to be immediately related to a cardinal metric of Euclidean type in front of imposing considerations and evaluations of a symbolic type, to be related rather to a nominal metric; (iv) passional and emotional characterization-qualification of places; (v) spatial-temporal logic of the classification of places; (vi) integration through function and sectors fo spatial experience (work, rest, diversion, idealities and belief, affections, …); (vii) the use of places such as landmarks formalized for spatial orientation; (viii) the definition of the form of places through macro- (types) and their micro-qualities (materials, colours, …); (ix) the limited presence of

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persons – single or in groups – different from the narrator in the narration of places; (x) the multiattribute (n-values) qualification of spatial recognition and memorization; (xi) the limited recourse to figures of spatial cognition assumed as relevant in the theory of spatial cognition such as the learning process or the structuration level); lastly, (xii) an apparent absence of meaningful and valuable hierarchy of the places and the processes through which they have been and are carried out, which instead are ideally built again on the base of an intentionality of the agent presumably depending in part on the circumstance and contingency of the tale and partly on aspects of those places memorized as fundamental. Critical and autocritical analyses of experiences of architectural projection related to some masters, effected in the sphere of a PhD on spatial creativity (see next chapter), consent an expertise-based spatial profile of life experience in which we can see standing out as novelty with respect to a commonsense profile (the following order is casual): (xiii) the role of benchmarking taken by directly or indirectly known spatial situations assumed as relevant for the project of spatial transformation, (xiv) reflexivity and evaluations concerning project experimentation and spatial cognition of the expert agent, and (xv) intentions of spatial transformations; on the other hand, spatial profiling of an expert type shares various attributes with spatial profiling of a common type (for example, (iii), (iv), (vii), (viii), (ix), (x), and (xi) whereas the former differs from the latter for the absence of others (for example, (i), (ii), (v), (vi), and (xii). It is, let us admit it, a rather summary analysis and to validate it a great deal of theoretical and experimental analysis would be necessary.

3 The cognitive building up of environment perception

3.1. The perception of lived space at the grassroots

A qualitative research was recently carried out in the urban periphery of the San Paolo quarter of Bari, within a PhD research program. The main question was to investigate on the processes of space production by agents interacting with space itself during their daily life. The research aims at understanding the ways how such agents get to provide a meaning to their own residential place, and to build up their own spatial knowledge. This investigation is based on the semi-directive interview approach, one of the most appropriate tool to collect opinions, representations, attitudes, behaviours toward own quarter, as well as conditions and stories of life. Better than other approaches, in fact, it allows the scanning of real life, the collection of the most hidden aspects, even by observing “with the eyes of the interviewed people” (Corbetta, 2003, p.39). In the end, 30 interviews were analyzed, which allowed the unusual possibility to document the ‘normal’ life of ‘normal’ peripheral citizens. Because of time and space limits, it was decided to analyze only one subject among others, namely the study of the cognitive paths of the perception of space in an urban periphery. This aspect is particularly oriented to the processes of space production, and therefore the discussion will address specifically the issue of the limited presence of considerations and evaluations related to cardinal, Euclidean metrics, as compared to the vast presence of symbolic considerations and evaluations, e.g., related to nominal metrics (Courrieu, 2005). This choice stems from the importance of the ‘symbolic meaning’ of a space in the larger field of research on dynamic processes of multi-agent knowledge building (Borri et al., 2005; Barbanente et al., 2007). It is a difficult subject, not only because of the intrinsically multiple nature of knowledge, made up of multiple forms of representation and learning of reality (Sandercock, 1998), but also because its multiplicity needs to be understood and managed.

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In this analysis, the vastness of symbolic considerations and evaluations attributed by San Paolo residents to their spaces of life, and of the ways how these agents produce the sense, the meaning and the spatial knowledge of such spaces, have led us to reflect on the concept of ‘lived space’. We will consider the Lefebvre’s theory of ‘space production’. Lefebvre (1991a) invited us to reflect on the distinction among ‘abstract’ and ‘lived’ space. Considering for example the urban space we are analysing, the idea of space as an ‘abstract’ entity comes out when a given urban space is considered only a grid or netting without soul, inexpressive. This is a space that is going to be demolished or rebuilt according to some abstraction, that is, the economic growth of a given neighbourhood, for example. On the contrary, the idea of space as a ‘lived’ space comes out only when we consider that it is firstly ‘lived’, that is, full of historical and cultural meanings, and used as a resource to put a particular way of living in practice. Furthermore, Lefebvre (1991a, 1991b, 1996) makes us reflect on the ‘rationalization’ that inexorably grips our spaces of daily life. In order to explain the dynamics leading of this rationalization, he makes reference to three basic concepts: (i) the representation of space, (ii) the spatial practice, and (iii) the spaces of representation. When dealing with the concept of ‘living space’, he speaks about the spaces of representation, i.e., of the experience full of meaning in the space. When dealing with ‘abstract’ space, with ‘non-lived’ space, Lefebvre speaks about ‘representations of the space’, that is, abstractions oriented to a particular aim, often built by bureaucratic and technical forces, under the interests of the capital system. In the antagonistic relationship that seems to exist between these two first conceptions of space, between these ‘lived’ and ‘imagined’ qualities of the spaces, there is the ‘spatial practice’ issue, connected with daily life. This issue implies that spatial practices are perceived as a common way of feeling, i.e., commonsense-based experiences and routines, that are by definition well above whatever logically rationalized city (Shield 1998). According to this semantic framework, it is possible to build up a synthetic picture of the features of the Euclidean and symbolic sense of space, as drawn out from the analysis of the protocols of interviews to San Paolo citizens (figure 1). First of all, the Euclidean dimension of the space seems to be mainly related to its daily uses. Shopping and leisure, for example, are univocally connected to particular places or neighbourhoods of the city, that are also perceived as more beautiful than the residential quarter. The symbolic dimension of space is instead mainly related to the meaning of ‘living space’. Many features are expression of such dimension, ranging from security issues (delinquency, vandalism, diffidence etc.) to the absence of social relationship, of common spaces, of institutional management. One of its degeneration is the creation of stigma on such spaces, that prevents other people from socializing with local residents. These perceptions end up enhancing a more domestic and poorly socialized way of living, as well as a stronger aspiration and claim for more qualitative space of living.

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Many suggestions come from ‘spaces of representation’ and from ‘daily spatial practices’, which are so intrinsically connected to them. By describing the relationship between agents and their daily spaces of living, we realize that it is not possible to build development strategies or planning on the social reality of a space if we disregard the close linkages among social issues and daily grassroots spaces of living. Therefore, we should make an effort to find possible connections between the dynamic processes of multi-agent knowledge building and this conception of space ‘lived’ by residential agents, particularly through their production of space of representation and their daily spatial practices. Therefore, such ‘spaces of representation’ should be forms of knowledge for our studies and policymaking. They are non-formal or less formal than traditional knowledge, but they are nonetheless very important and rather unique local-centred forms of knowledge.

3.2 The “expert” spatial perceptions and transformations of architects

Architects usually speculate and mould their own theoretical professional identity around some topics, that condition choices, projects, and the way of rearranging building elements.

Fig.1 - Concept map of statements

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Some of these elements my change according to the cognitive environment in which the architects have received their education, according to the political environment in which the planning requests are placed by. They may also change according to a detailed project problem as architecture object or place (which space, time, the aesthetic experienced and all the dynamics insist on) where said object exists or will exist. A methodical formulation of the problem subtend a pressing fullness of the planning process which suggests cognitive paths. A creativity of “copying ex novo to invent” and drawing near the odds permeate the process; it is a real method not just an elaboration made in a casual way or on the spot in the flowing of time. It is an essential choice activity about data and images the architects refer to. Architecture is never guiltless. Their creativity is expressed in a strong intentional context; it is the urgent will that orients choices and that same cognitive process which the planning action comes from Without such intention the intimate and intuitive elaboration gear can’t get activated in its recombining elements and possibilities in a certain situation. In this research concerning the space creativity, the expertise-based profilation (which this research proposes to build compared with the common sense profilation) is like a cognitive layer placed over the spatial experience or like an interfering lens in the subtle margins between a “automatic” interpretation of places and an “interrogative awareness” one that may modify perception and reading form. And it is here that reflectivity and valuations about project experimentation come in. The expert-agent’s spatial cognition before becoming an expert one was a common one. And the common agent being as he was a and his images and memories belonging to that time are an integral part of expert agent of what he would become later. Could peculiar subjects have a sort of ante litteram expert sensibility?The target is to deduce the thought that subtends architect work: until now the research has been carried out through reading statements and writing of some architects who characterized the way of reading and interpreting architecture with their works. The substances in this study are referred to the following masters: Peter Zumthor, Mario Botta, Oscar Mathias Ungers. Everyone of them gives us a cross-section of concepts, methodologies, approaches to the place, to the study and project problem conception. Everyone has different effects because their works are so far-off in the concept, in the space, in the time. But however there are some constants that everyone refers to, even if the theoretical language and the real language in architectural objects have a such a different inflexion. In this study we try to evict these thought constants by identifying the role that they play in their intentions of spatial transformation, and in their approach to space and territory as project problems. The masters’ statements we referred to support some neurofisiology studies conceptions: the creativity proceeds in the intimacy of extensive conscience, where we inspect the images to choice between different repertories. Each repertory represents different

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action options, different sceneries. The conscience which elaborates images is an essential ingredient for the human creative mind (Damasio,1999) Our visions about towns, our perceptions about places show traces of our judgement and our codification criteria layered in time. An architectural grammar consolidated in the centuries about building and perceiving. The beautiful and the aesthetic fruition come from the cultural and social history context. An example could be the traveller’s feeling of being lost in a new place (even in the natural physicalness) different from the place of origin. Memory images fixed in words fade away, the flowing images of memory are dynamic and are lived day by day even if they seem still. The concepts of habit condition our memory and our perception. ”In my mind I have built a model to deduce all possible cities” a rule to which one adds or takes away exceptions. “We would have cities too probable to be true”, the plan is not the city, the plan is a model without dynamics (Calvino,1972). Every master refers to remembrances of spaces he lived in childhood, which are architectural experiences deeply-rooted in his mind. These experiences continue to dwell in his project process as images, memories and remembrance perceptions. They remain as a continuous theme. The mental images are the memory objects setting the database, continuously evolving, which the expert agent refers to. Far away themes and memories are indispensable part in a cognitive structure that substantiate the master’s project process. According to Zumthor, inspiration precious instants become true during a patient work, after the sudden display of an inner image or the realization of a new stroke in the draw, the whole design frame seems to change in a split second. Architecture knows two fundamental ways of expression: the closed body that isolates a space inside, and an open body that contains a portion connected to infinite continuity. Making architecture has an archetype, a project a priori: closing a space.Given a project problem there is a research work, a memory work, where the expert agent is led by environment images and remembrances, trying to disclose what they mean, trying to learn how to produce such environments and forms so rich in images. The intuition develops around definite questions which a specific situation sets in a impertinent way. (Schon,1993) Producing interior images is a natural process common to the non expert agent, but throughout designing to think per images is always a thinking in a total way. The images real evidence supporting the project. Thinking in a associative way, in a wild way, freely, tidily, systematically per images, per architectural images, spatial, colorate, sensual images – this is my designing favourite definition. (Zumthor,1998)

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But not only the childhood memories are reference images, there are even the architectural images and perception of architectures themselves. Architectures in a signed territory, and that architect knows in his formation, in his continuous research, in his daily living, in his travelling. History architecture referring are places and spaces always been in the territory we live. Visual memory is a reference inexhaustible source, as in Mario Botta works, in his project he implements procedures about memory idea and her relationship with history: the different repetition As in Zumthor theorization, architecture is a patient attention exercise to used signs and their metamorph. The project wants to be an instrument for a critical redesigning about places that lost their own identity. It create a new memory by entering the landscape. Botta builds up the site through the volume solidity, the geometrical order, his mass is delineated by his volume geometry. His façade is elaborated and disciplined according to the view, it converse to the environment by affirming his presence. According to Mario Botta the light generate the architecture, in the images, in the memories, in the spaces, in the built places perceptions. Closing a space, is an archetype, to create a inside and an outside, but without light there’s not a space. And time is the instrument to read space. There is any new solution without the past. So that while elaborating the plan architect should know everything and be able to forget everything. Ungers says his buildings try to firmly link to the place truth and to his history; architecture is an existential problem, is not an episode, but everything gets integrated, jointed. The case become the event, joint to the design, the mesure. Observing situation and looking for the meaning behind things, this is one of Ungers foundation.And if you follow this rule nothing is immediate. Repeating creative act establish a self given role and always transgress in difference and widening practise. The history still, the individual history, the images. Ungers talks about reminiscence: it is impossible to think without a mental image. Memory is itself just a part of that soul the imagination belongs. Memory is images collection from sensorial impressions. The mind effort to find her own way mining in the memory contents by association and order principles, this is distinguish between memory and evoking. According to Ungers the project process must have his foundation on a individualized theme, the fundamental concept that one time fixed may be transformed. The idea must be found in what youever seen or studied, impressed in memory loci as volumes, spaces and proportions. He always observed the reality looking for a general content, a linked thought, complexive content to join all together: plan, landscape, history. With his childhood images impressed: a

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roman tower about which he begun to build his curiosity and his architecture questions about her symbolic value, with the architect travelling to search archetypes for his own architecture for that images luggage to substantiate the project process. The tangible world and our capability in knowing reality, interpreting it and transforming it generate ideas. To use shape’s world means reasoning through analogy and metaphor. The Aristotelian metaphor, intuition and imagination help to produce new shapes by seizing the homogenity in the heterogeneity. Shapes are symbolic spaces, he refers to “built ideas” examples the populate history space until today: ideas can resist all over time, they are eternal buildings, they don’t need to change. Lines, typologies, morphology variations: foundation concepts you can model to transform one thing in another one, to pass from an equilibrium to another one by transforming the real. I think of architectures you can sit and live, where you can age, something you can build up your own memories. (Ungers,2004)

4 Decision-support architectures in spatial perceptions

The representation of space is an essential, yet critical issue, particularly in decision-making processes applied to the management/transformation of the environment. The complexity of natural and social environments involves complex aspects of naturality but also articulated perceptions of living spaces. Yet, decision-makers need to draw from knowledge bases for policy planning and implementation. The expert knowledge of branch scientists and technicians has traditionally provided an important –at times pervasive- support. However, the sectoral and formal approach of experts increasingly claims for complements by non-expert and commonsense knowledge, in order to address the complex search for living quality in social and environmental spaces. Decision support systems (DSS) are then required to deal with different languages, forms of knowledge, as well as articulated perceptions and representations of the space among involved agents. In particular, as seen in previous chapters, spatial issues perceived with both Euclidean and symbolic, non-Euclidean geometries need different ad-hoc approaches to be effectively represented. Approaches, methods and instruments are not obvious nor easily developable in this context. In setting up the architecture of such systems, methodologies and tools should be multifarious and fine-tuned, in order to cope with inherent complexities and ensure effective support to decisions. Methodologies coming from Futures Studies, for example, often try to rebuild community biographies, in order to find out social/environmental resources and potentials useful for future developments. Both expert and non-expert agents are involved in interactions, in which spatial landmarks are singled out and play a major role in drawing scenario strategies (May

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1996). However, spatial memory induces spatial images that may vary with their time distance. In particular, long-term memory is taken as a reference point by commonsense agents (e.g., in nostalgic issues), whereas architects –expert agents- often use a short-term memory that derives from their studies (working memory) (Kluwe et al., 2003). Both image representations need to be stimulated during interaction sessions, but diverse approaches and/or tools need to be used in order to preserve their rich diversity. Also, taking into consideration that time affects the dimensions and the informational contents of spatial perceptions (Edwards, Ligozat, 2004, Day, Bartels, 2008), and that therefore appropriate interpretative corrections become important to avoid the propagation of semantic errors. In processes of cooperative building up of development scenarios, in particular, some case-studies report the effectiveness of ITC-based groupware instruments in finding out and characterize long-term spatial perceptions (Khakee et al., 2002), as well as in articulating in a more complex detail spatial images collected during the interactions (Borri et al., 2006). The temporal dimension becomes a subject relevant also for the process itself, during such interactive forums. In fact, in the search for multi-agent perceptive coordinates to represent spatial images, the diachronic displacement of agents who participate to forums from different locations and in different times is a relevant problem that needs to be addressed (Barbanente et al., 2007, Pouget et al., 2002). Another important issue in allowing multi-agent spatial representations is to build up architectures able to tackle with the recurrent non-Euclidean, symbolic nature of evaluations and considerations, even in dealing with physical spaces. Aspects of everyday life that construct urban spaces, such as fear, stigma, security, relational attitudes, as well as the metaphorical interpretation of some architects cannot be merely measured by traditional Euclidean metrics. The recent argumentative, communicative approach in DSS is helpful in this context, increasingly relying on qualitative methodologies and tools pivoted on the cognitive frames and concepts of agents, so retaining the complex richness of knowledge exchanged (Bosquet, Le Page, 2004). However, a problem of manageability of outcomes often results from this approach, whose claims for more quantitative methods, particularly helpful to provide final synthesis and manageability to human decisionmakers, are still difficult to be operationally addressed (Courrieu 2005). Also, the aspects of emotions and/or passions embedded in some spatial images come out clearly from the analyses in previous chapters. Yet, their presence is not prototypical but rather irregular and varying and difficult to be dealt with during the interaction of agents (Damasio 2003, P. 197). However, the emotional qualification of places is often important, at times crucial in the representation and transformation of environments. Urban migrants, for example, express their expectations for better environments by recalling the emotions connected with past neighbourhoods; the emotions produced by the architectural transformations of spaces are often considered by architects as the raison d’etre of buildings.

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The need of preserving such emotional features of spatial representations poses intriguing engineering problems in DSS architectures, tentatively addressed by ad-hoc sensors and machines able to grasp informal and even unconscious informational contributions by agents (figure 2) (Veloso et al., 2005). However, the difficulty of managing different multimedia data is still significant also in this case (Feyereisen, 2000; Jackendoff 1966).

Further, the qualification of spatial attributes depends on a great number of agents’ values and viewpoints, varying across expertise and formal competence/qualification, as well as across individual experience and personality. In this context, the management of multiple values by agents involved in an evaluative procedure is both qualitatively and quantitatively possible within the routines of DSS architectures (Lewis, Shakun, 1996). However, the extent to which such approach is open to the external control of inference quality is still questionable, and resulted multi-attribute evaluations are oftentimes hybridised by human control, in order to minimize black-box filtering by automated routines (Khakee, 2002). Attempts to implement formal models of optimization of value functions are being made in some fields of spatial transformation, such as transportation (Stepanov, 2006) or economic development (Voß, 2006), with the mentioned objective of allowing an more aware but easier management of data through synthetic indicators.

Fig.2 - Intelligent motion-detection device

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5 Brief conclusions

The complexity of the representation of space is nowadays increasingly recognized as an intrinsic and non-reducible character of the environment. Therefore, being perceived under several viewpoints, space is not identifiable as a single, static and a-priori snapshot for a whole community, as traditionally intended. In fact, it does vary greatly among community members, either expert or commonsense agents, and throughout a number of situational occurrences and viewpoints. It also varies with time, but with features that are not always so obvious as traditionally expected (Pouget et al., 2002; Day 2008). Fortunately, under a planning or decisionmaking perspective, this complex structure of space perception is increasingly considered by DSS as a richer framework to allow more aware decisions. Therefore, DSS architectures have started embedding approaches and methodologies, in order to grasp such multifaceted representation of spatial perceptions. Integrated attempts have been difficult and with mixed results, to date, in that they still fail to provide a rich but manageable synthesis to decisionmakers in need of support (Borri et al., 2006) However, several studies are being increasingly addressed to such issues, and the investigation efforts of many research groups will be devoted to more viable proposals in the next future.

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