The Characteristics of Distinctive Urban Elements in Citizens’ Cognitive Maps (Case Study: The City of Isfahan)

Over the last few decades, some newly developed areas in the city of Isfahan have had serious problems in providing such urban design qualities as legibility, and this has led to various problems for the citizens like difficulty in way-finding, orientation or addressing. In order to solve this problem and enrich the legibility of newly developed areas, planners and designers should utilize appropriate principles extracted from the inhabitants' cognition and expectations. This paper attempts to understand how people form their cognitive maps in urban areas and find their way within urban places. Hence, it tries to identify and evaluate different kinds of urban elements (the most important elements which provides legibility) by using casual-comparative methods on the basis of such factors as the reason of being distinctive, the type, context, function, adjacency, heritage value and type of the adjacent route that residents of Isfahan have used in shaping their cognitive maps. The findings of this research showed that the most important characteristics which affect the distinctiveness of urban landmarks in the citizens cognitive maps include: having distinctive form in their surrounding environment; being located along the urban main streets or near the junctions; being established in a central area or having heritage value; having such urban functions or land uses as tourism, commercial, leisure, religious or transportation.