The Identity Survey: Side Notes on a Holistic Model of Knowledge of Urban Contexts

Abstract

If on the one hand the legibility of a place is a shared collective ability, on the other the sensorial domain is an inevitable individual prerogative that each person experiences daily in the close connection between the micro-environmental conditions (sounds, smells, the light and chromatic atmosphere etc.) that environment presents in so particular moment and the subjective image that we form of that place, often with an indelible memory. The intent to read both these dimensions therefore implies that the urban Survey attempts to repertoire, alongside the disciplinarily shared level of “objective” descriptions based on multiscalar images and the hyperrealistic representations of the visible elements, the second level of intangible micro-environmental conditions -the atmosphere of the place- placing the objective and the subjective side by side in a holistic understanding of the ontologies of the contexts. The article summarizes an excursus on the methodology of the Identity Survey, developed since 2015, which was born to consciously bring out the “genius loci” and represent its complexity in the integral, syncretic and multisensorial experience of the corporeal dimension.