A Walk in the Park: Affordance as Urban Design Tool for Creating Inhabitable Cities

Abstract

The relationship between humans and the material environment is straightforward in our experience of it. And yet, it is complex in its inner workings when we start looking at the making and design of spaces and buildings and how humans make use and sense of them. In the area of urban design, the notion of affordance has proved itself useful as both an analytical concept and an operational design tool. By looking at what the space makes possible (affords), we understand how urban designs construct habitable cities. In this chapter, we present the notion of affordance, and we illustrate how to apply it on a specific urban space. We want to show affordance as an urban design tool for creating habitable cities.