principles of gestalt laws and everyday urbanism
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The International Journal of the
Constructed Environment
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VOLUME 5 ISSUE 3-4
ABEER ELSHATER
__________________________________________________________________________
The Principles of Gestalt Laws and Everyday
Urbanism A Visual Tactic of City Potentialities
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The Principles of Gestalt Laws and Everyday
Urbanism: A Visual Tactic of City Potentialities
Abeer Elshater, Ain Shams University, Egypt
Abstract: Since the 1950s, designers of metropolitan cities have become master participants in the field of architecture.
Today, in Egyptian communities, the conditions of the built environment need to reflect a deeper understanding of the principles of urban design—the art of the city. Urban design is tangent to the new global movements toward quality of
life and significant visual qualities. This paper offers an elaborated introduction to the research justification; visual
chaos. It focuses on the trend of urban visualization appropriateness toward a good city form in the urban sprawl in Cairo, Egypt. It concentrates on the interactions between visual perception and everyday urbanism as a new approach in
developing countries. It emphasizes the interactions between geometry and meaning in the art of the city as tool to
analysis visual context in Cairo.
Keywords: Urban Design Paradigms, Gestalt School, Everyday Urbanism
Introduction: Research Justification and Seven Pivotal Questions
oday, particularly in Cairo’s built environmental conditions that resemble the most
respected, traditional, ancient, and contemporary suburban sprawl in cities, Egyptian
communities need a deeper and more enhanced understanding of design principles for the
art of the city. These principles are tangential with new global movements toward quality of life,
which are the root of character (English Partnerships 2007, 41) and are embedded in the history
of thought of the different urban design paradigms that involve various schools, movements,
approaches, theories, trends, and methods (Alexander, Ishikawa and Silverstein 1977); (Trancik
1986, 97-120); (Watson, Plattus and Shibley 2003, 3.1-3.10); (Sigley 2003, 98). The crucial
question is, “What may be expected from these paradigms’ legacies for the traditional Egyptian
city?” In Greater Cairo, 62 percent of households live in informal settlements (United Nations
Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat) 2012, 55). This informality affects negatively on
the visual appearance of Cairo, the capital of Egypt (Nagati and Stryker 2013, 5). A
contemporary report mentioned that: “in order to reinvigorate the role of streets in the economic,
social and environmental functions of the city, there is a need to redesign public space to make it
more vibrant” (United Nations Human Settlements Programme 2013, 35, 36). The results
expected from these interventions are better visual quality of the city and increased social
cohesion and efficiency.
The conditions of the Egyptian constructed environment need to reflect a deeper
understanding of how to enhance the principles of Urban Design—the art of the city (Mumford
2009); (Landry 2006, 7, 8). Urban design is tangent to new global movements towards quality of
life. This article provides an elaborated introduction to the research justification. It focuses on the
trends of urban visualization appropriateness toward a good city form in the urban sprawl of a
residential community in Cairo, the capital of Egypt. The article concentrates on the interactions
between visual dimensions, specifically referring to Everyday Urbanism as a new approach in
developing countries. Finally, the article emphasizes interactions between geometry, as in the
Gestalt school, and meaning in the art of the city. This study focuses on the impact of “the art of
relation” (Cullen 1971, 7-9, 58) that emerged in urban design during the 1950s by Sert (Mumford
and Sarkis 2008). This art of relationship can be viewed through Everyday Urbanism (EU) and
Gestalt Laws, the main interest being to design an approach to mix the principles of everyday
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urbanism. The article extends to a design matrix to test the viability of the proposed method in a
case in Cairo, Egypt.
The motivation of the research justification was the chaos of visual appearance that Cairo-
the Capital of Egypt- has. This visual chaos is regarded in (Figure 1). Thus, the research presents
the hypothesis that respecting the art of relationship can be reflected directly in the responsive
users’ attitudes toward the constructed environment. For verifying the hypnosis, the researcher
follows a descriptive- analytical methodology. The research structure consists of four parts. First
is the theoretical background, focusing on the description of urban design paradigm, specifically
the perceptual/visual dimension. Second, the study reviews the Gestalt Laws and EU principles
as a tactic of arousing city potentialities. Third, the study proposes a comprehensive approach
from the viewpoint of the visual dimension. Finally, the proposed analytical approach is tested in
a neighborhood in Cairo.
Source: (United Nations Human Settlements Programme
2011, ii) Source: (United Nations Human Settlements Programme
2011, 38)
Source: (United Nations Human Settlements Programme 2011, 4)
Source: (United Nations Human Settlements Programme 2011, 129)
Source: (MR 2013) (Zaher 2014)
Figure 1: The visual chaos in Cairo
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ELSHATER: THE PRINCIPLES OF GESTALT LAWS AND EVERYDAY URBANISM
The research objective is to present a new tool regarding to the contemporary trend in urban
design paradigm to analysis the visual context in metropolitan cities in developing countries. It
extends to develop a tactic method fit the Cairen context. This tactic approach depends on the
relationships between the geometry and meaning in the art of the city. The entire paper discusses
the remarkable changes in the contemporary urban design. This study related to the other fields
of specialization, especially the gradual transformation of the urbanization concept, focusing on
EU trends. Through the current research, this new trend tries answers seven key questions. How
do experts deal with the theoretical discipline in the art of the city? What does the space mean to
people? Who does prepare the place for public life? How do people feel toward the site? When
do the users act in public life? Where do they participate in different types of activities? Why
does the designer create attractive places and spaces?
The Notion of Meanings in Urban Design: A Review on Urban Visualization
Historically, urban design has been known as the art of the city (Cullen 1971, 7-9); (Carmona
and Tiesdell 2007), but it has seriously resonated only since the mid-1960s when it was emerging
as a scientific art taught at European and American universities, for instance at Harvard, Cornell
and University of Pennsylvania. Subsequently, urban design has attained a high level of
professional practice aimed not only at reclaiming historical centers in deteriorated areas but also
at creating new development projects, particularly in built environments. Furthermore, urban
design has been linked to cities’ public realms, identifying the most significant urban design
theories. Urban design displays the thoughts of its most respected pioneers addressing the
problems of cities. Figure 2 presents some of the most respected pioneers, whose analyses,
theories, and writings influenced and laid the groundwork for EU.
Figure 2: The most popular pioneers in urban design, who discuss issues of visual dimension
Source: The author
According to Camillo Sitte (1945), the year 1898 marked the beginning of a transformation
toward focusing on the cities’ urban form (Sitte 1945). Urban Design has become known as the
art of the city, but Sert and Sigfried Giedion first introduced the term at Harvard University in the
early 1950s. It was first publicly used in 1953, in a lecture by Sert (Krieger 2009, 17) and
appeared in the curriculum of the Graduate School of Design (GSD) in 1954, in Giedion’s class
on “History of Urban Design” and another class on “Urban Design,” taught by Sert, Hideo
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Sasaki, and Jean-Paul Carlhian (Mumford and Sarkis, Josep Lluís Sert: The Architect of Urban
Design, 1953-1969 2008). The first Urban Design Conference was held at the GSD in 1956, with
determining the aim of urban design (Krieger 2009, 44). This conference also provided a
platform for launching Harvard’s “Urban Design Program” in 1959-60. The following Urban
Design Conference was held at the University of Pennsylvania in 1958; it was titled “Conference
on Urban Design Criticism” and aimed to initiate a new urban design discipline (Laurence 2006,
146); (Pavesi 2012, 3-5).
The approaches to Urbanism gradually transformed into new theoretical paradigms: New
Urbanism (1980), EU (1999), Post Urbanism (2004), and Tactical Urbanism (2011). Most
urbanization theories derive from these approaches were proposed to solve cities’ urbanization
problems and provide solutions to the many environmental problems through ground analyses.
Urban Design theories became an essential component for a thorough study concerning the future
of architecture.
In physical reality, people cannot perceive an area’s characteristics as separated elements.
They perceive sites as complete entities, interacting to create the sense of place, as identified by
Schulz, who addresses place, based on this approach, as Genius Loci (Norberg-Schulz 1980, 5).
At the end of the 19th century, Figure-Ground theory emerged in Germany and Austria, derived
from mind theory and based on psychological thought according to the Berlin school of
psychology. The term pronounced ge-shtalt, which loosely translated means configuration,
emerged as an important concept (Graham 2008, 1). Gestalt has no direct translation in English,
but refers to “the way the thing has been gestalt, i.e., ‘placed,’ or ‘put together.’” The common
translations include the words form and shape. It has also been known as “an essence or shape of
an entity’s complete form” (Krieger 2009). The theory of the Gestalt school is to use Figure-
Ground theory as a tool in urban design, not only to discover obvious meanings but also to create
new meanings (Trancik 1986, 112). This theory provided a systematic process for describing
human perception, focusing on how changes in the city’s relational components dramatically
change its meaning.
Figure 3 proposes a design process of urban design based on visualization, beginning from
the built environment as a set ending to the Gestalt rules that help the designer make sense of
place. The process focuses on four core items of urban form illustrated in (Figure 4). Figure 5
represents these six urban design dimensions. The Gestalt theory is inseparable from the
perceptual dimension, considering the visual and cognitive scopes. Four main criteria—meaning,
identity, quality, and aesthetics—are pivotal in assessing the scope by applying six principles:
sense of place, image experience, legibility, variety, uniqueness, and appropriateness (Figure 6).
The meaning of a particular place varies from one person to another, and a person’s senses
vary for different forms. For Alexander, design is “the process of inventing physical things,
which display physical order, organization, forms …” (Alexander, Ishikawa and Silverstein
1977, 1216). In the context of urban design, geometry especially causes city forms to respond to
a particular meaning (Koffka 1935, 2); (Gunay 2007, 94, 96). In light of these two statements, the
next section addresses the Gestalt school’s theory as a viable, powerful tool used in urban design.
Apparently, city designers should be interested in the Gestalt laws of perception because Figure-
Ground theory provides a systematic method of explaining human perception. The theory focuses
on any changes in the components of city relationships that dramatically change its meaning. The
theory appears as an initial attempt to answer the following questions: What are the main
differences among shape, form, and figure? How do experts create the shapes and form of the
city? How can the Gestalt rules be applied to urban design? The answers to these questions
explore the idea of the urban design that takes account of visual perception of urban form—an
approach of form and pattern of perception, which discovers patterns of spatial distribution of
meanings.
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ELSHATER: THE PRINCIPLES OF GESTALT LAWS AND EVERYDAY URBANISM
.Figure 3: Urban visualization in design process
Source: The author
Figure 4: The four core items; dimensions scopes, criteria, and principles
Source: The author
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Figure 5: The six urban design dimensions
Source: The author
Figure 6: In the process of urban design visualization, there are six dimensions, four criteria, and six principles
Source: The author
If urban design is the art of the city, the elements and principles of design are its language
(Landry 2006, 228). The elements require a good design, applied in all the visual arts, from the
graphic into the spatial and, consequently, in architecture (Ignatius 2014). The principles of
design organize or control the design elements. In the literature, the design elements vary,
ranging typically from seven to ten, starting from dots (small or large) and ending with the
direction or orientation of the elements (Rombough 2013). The elements are dots, lines, shapes,
spaces, sizes, values, colors, textures, forms, and directions. Furthermore, the principles also vary
from seven to fourteen: Pattern, contrast, emphasis, balance, proportion, harmony,
rhythm/movement, dominance, composition, repetition, variation, unity, gradation, and order
may all be included.
and criteria
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ELSHATER: THE PRINCIPLES OF GESTALT LAWS AND EVERYDAY URBANISM
In the elements of design, lines are linear marks of varying widths—vertical, straight, or
angled—ending in an organic form or a form with three dimensions. This element seems to form
a shape or an appearance with dimension. Variation in line direction defines the contour or edge
of an object, creating the illusion of space and form, and when repeated, a pattern (The Kennedy
Center 2014). Lines used in design for such considerations as organizing, directing, or separating
suggest an emotion or creation of a rhythm (Rombough 2013). Lines separating parts in the
design are similar to separating the aspects of a master plan. Additionally, Rombough mentions
that oblique lines suggest movement, action, or change, while curved lines portray peace and
calm. Under normal circumstances, horizontal lines imply stability, while vertical lines imply
strength (Kristi and Duncan 2010). When overlapped in a jarring fashion or tilted to create
intersecting diagonals, lines naturally create tension. Lines transformed to planes and different
planes seem to increase volume, and lines may be organized to create visual effects that arouse
emotions.
Shape, a two-dimensional element, is the appearance of something, especially its outline, to
another object or to the surface. It is limited by a single edge, plane geometry (architectural
shapes, manufactured or inorganic), or organic (natural) and abstract types defined by lines and
areas of space. In terms of an object located in some space, shape is a geometrical description of
that space occupied by the object, as determined by its external boundary—abstracted from its
location and orientation in space, size, and other properties such as color, content, and material
composition (Geometry– AAA Math 2013). Shape creates pattern when repeated—organic or
geometric, positive or negative, objective or non-objective, and distorted or extended. Shape
creates rhythm when repeated, attention when varied in size, balance when changed in
placement. Space may be two or three dimensional—the area around, in between, within, or part
of an area; it is used in placement of elements to create relationships, focal points, and centers of
interest. Space can convey a variety of meanings: quality, solitude, loneliness, purity, spirituality,
openness, distance, infinity, and calm. Size is the varying proportions of shapes and lines. Size
can create a contrast to attract attention or organize the layout, with the most vital element being
large, and the least crucial element being small. In addition, value (the amount of lightness or
darkness) and color (warm or cold, combinations of hues) work together to create mood:
separation between light and dark creates a calm, quiet mood; extreme variations between light
and dark create drama or excitement (Rombough 2013). Value is created by manipulating media,
its lightness or darkness. Expression of the value through a variety of media creates movement,
the illusion of depth, and separates surfaces. Texture conveys mood and feeling, creating an
illusion of distance. Texture is the physical and optical feature of an object’s surface—whether
natural or manufactured, actual or simulated—and texture creates a “look up” surface, arouses
attention, influences lighting conditions, as well as adds richness and dimension.
Pattern is a regular arrangement of repeated elements. Emphasis is the focus of attention in
the composition, the special attention given to one part by color, size, and repetition. Contrast
implies a distinguishable difference between objects; it highlights differences in opposing
elements when they are placed adjacent to one another (Ignatius 2014). Balance—symmetrical or
asymmetrical is the weighted relationship between visual elements; it provides a sense of
equality, or a lack thereof. Proportion/scale is the ratio of one part of the composition to another,
the relationship between objects, and also between parts of a whole. Rhythm is the repetition of
an element to achieve movement in a composition; it creates interest through the repletion of
elements and a sense of movement or emphasis on an object. Harmony is the unity of all the
visual elements in a composition; it utilizes similar elements to create a pleasing design (Price
2013). Dominance draws the viewer’s focus to an area of interest. Composition is the
organization of the design elements into a unified whole. Repetition is the use of an element or
elements multiple times in a single composition. Variation is the differences among and between
elements in a composition. Unity is the grouping of elements and principles into a whole;
however, from a viewer’s perspective, unity lacks chaos and discomfort. The gradation of size or
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value creates a sense of direction and movement (Ignatius 2014). Recognizable from the
principles of design (or composition) as related to the organization of the whole is as harmony is
recognizable from correspondence, contrast distinguishable from different, balance distinct from
stability, order recognizable from the design of the organization, and unity as distinguishable
from collecting (Koberg, Bagnall and Bagnall 1974, 86).
Gestalt Laws and Principles of Everyday Urbanism
The Gestalt school’s Figure-Ground theory accommodates a standardized procedure for
enhancing the urban designer’s visual skills that focus on built environment while achieving a
good city form that satisfies its users. Particularly, the theory is able to face the relation between
groups of structures and, as a consequence, provide a sense of belonging to residents. The theory
looks at the urban environment as an entire object, not as separate parts; its rules, based on design
principles, support problem-solving methods. EU searches out not only the mythic aspect of the
ordinary and the ugly, but also helps stress the behavioral aspects in outdoor areas. The following
section develops a tactic to merge the urban visual rules from the Gestalt theory and the
principles of EU. These tactics assess the potential of some of the most common abnormal areas
in the Cairo metropolitan city, from the perspective of deformation as well as visual and
behavioral dissociative interactions.
Gestalt Laws
Generally, Gestalt can be understood as a dynamic perceptual process. The situation either
consists of various forms, organizations, and an entirety of form, or it separates catalysts into
figure elements (mostly in the center of attraction) and ground elements (the less perceptible
background). The underlying purpose of any exploration is in the consequence of the form being
whichever object meaningfully stands away from its background (Trancik 1986, 98-100). The
Gestalt theory’s concepts of visual perception are a form. The psycho-biological field forces on
the parallelism between the underlying neurological processes’ form and the perceptual
experience’s form (isomorphism) becoming the law or the rules of visual organization. Table 1
illustrates these laws (Gregory 1978, 161, 162); (Goldstein 1981, 193-195); (Gunay 2007, 97).
Everyday Urbanism Principles in the “Third Place”
“Third Place” is a term coined to express regular public meeting places, for instance, coffee
shops and general stores (Oldenburg 1991, xxix, 14); (Brunn, Williams and Zeigler 2003, 63).
The third place is considered a place for informal activities, considering that the first place is
home and the second is work. In addition, third places can be squares or plazas, pedestrian
sidewalks, gardens, and “leftover” spaces. For the community and social life to sustain local
democracy and a communal spirit, gathering places are essential, whether individually or beyond
the realms of home (first place) and work (second place). On one hand, this is all to
accommodate everyday city life, that is, the “practice of everyday life” in the public realm
(Crawford, Speaks and Mehrotra 2005); (Certeau 1984). On the other hand, the public realm is a
place admitting human rights, differences, variety, and city democracy (Sandercock 2003); (H.
Lefebvre 2007); (Lefebvre and Levich 1987).
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Table 1: Laws of the Gestalt School
Gestalt Laws Description
Proximity Elements that are close together, and the degree of distance
between sensations
Similarity Elements that look alike, describe the degree of sameness
to each other
Continuity Elements that show good continuance although interrupted
Closeness Area, Symmetry,
Common Fate/Region
Parts displaying the same compositional patterns
Connectedness A connecting element for two dissimilar objects or patterns
Closure Parts enclosing a void, the tendency to interpret closed
forms as pure shapes; people perceive the whole by filling
in the missing information
Closed forms A complete whole even if there are missing elements
Symmetry Providing for coherence of a composition
Alignment Lining up elements to form groups or wholes
Simplicity Legible parts and wholes Source: Author, based on (Reyes 2010)
In the first decade of the third millennium, EU emerged as radical empirical research, rather
than as normative (Crawford, Speaks and Mehrotra 2005). EU introduced a new accumulative
approach, but not an overarching design philosophy. It represents users’ attitudes toward the city,
in many different conditions, in existing urban areas as well as in remote areas. Moreover, EU
represents a trend for developing people’s attitudes in public spaces and places than an
orientation parallel with the public realm and the New Urbanism movement. It explores the
meaning of place in everyday life and experiences, where the power of a place becomes
embedded in everyday stories belonging to those whose lives continuously happen there,
including both work and events (Whyte 1980, 16); (Hayden 1995).
Everyday Urbanism is a shape shifting that changes in response to circumstances. It enables
use of the poorest areas in developing countries, where informal settlements mushroom, without
having any responsibilities of state management, either social or economic. EU tends to explore
the behavior of the most popular people in outdoor places. As Crawford asserts, everyday urban
design is situational and individual, responding to actual circumstances. While everyday space is
often described as generic (comprehensive and generalized), once closely monitored, it becomes
highly specific (Crawford, Speaks and Mehrotra 2005, 19). EU works from a bottom-up
approach, not planning decisions; EU intervenes. The people’s contribution is pivotal to the
success of the metropolitan city according to urban design dimensions: perceptual,
morphological, temporal, and functional (Crawford, Speaks and Mehrotra 2005). Otherwise
(Kelbaugh 2010, 18) describes EU as ubiquitous in informal settlements, in metropolitan cities
where the lower classes seek to attach residents to the higher classes and to economic or national
resources. Such settlements hardly exist in Europe.
Although EU is a method for considering the value of public places, it focuses on exploring
often unnoticed activities that occur in everyday life and that transform across time (H. Lefebvre
2007), (Crawford 2013). The four key principles of EU are:
“Re-Familiarize Urban Environments”; “making strange” unique experience
(Koolhaas 2013).
“Looking Around and Paying Attention” versus visual heteroglossia. The second
term means that everywhere one looks, there are startling juxtapositions of scale,
image, building types, and styles (Crawford, Speaks and Mehrotra 2005).
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“Public Time and Publicness”: Public time means everyday life with temporal
dimensions, highly structured by time: night and day, the cycles of the year, the
seasons, daily work, the weekend, the vacation, and holidays (Crawford 2013,
28,30, Oldenburg 1991). Publicness refers to the relevance of everyday life in the
public realm (Habermas 1962, 51,52).
“Experiential Qualities”; sensory, that is, successful urban places combine with the
physical attributes of their users (Montgomery 1998, 93).
Tactical Approach for Raising City Potentialities
There is a well-established relationship between the geometries of urban spaces for meeting
visual quality and what is happening in the space (Figure 7). Regularly, events have meanings
arising from the nature of the users’ daily lives in urban spaces. Both urban geometry and public
life express the emerging, underlying meanings of the puzzling connection between them. In this
sense, the study denotes the following to examine the relationships between the principles of both
designated and displayed possible meanings (coherent/contradictory) in any urban environment.
These meanings are compiled based on the criteria of “visual quality” and “street for people”
through the Gestalt laws. The complied principles can be presented in three axes, as displayed in
Figure 8.
Figure 7: The proposed approach
Source: The author
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ELSHATER: THE PRINCIPLES OF GESTALT LAWS AND EVERYDAY URBANISM
Figure 8: The three axes of analysis
Source: The author
The Egyptian Context: The Problem of Visualization
This research was conducted on a selected a district in Cairo, where the author resides. The
author’s residency there provides clear discovery of the district’s context over seven years.
Generally, the district serves various functions: residential, educational, administrative, and for
cemeteries. In addition, the site is surrounded by military uses to the south and southwest (Figure
9 and Figure 10Figure 3). The site’s boundaries were set within walking distance (300 m). Some
photos were recently taken to depict the chaotic elements of visualization in the district’s built
environment (Figure 10).
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Figure 9: The case study site Source: The author
Figure 10: Chaotic visualization at the site. The symbols in (Figure 9) refer to the location and direction of the
photographer’s position.
Students’ Hostel-Ain Shams University
Common Wealth Cemeteries
Ain Shams University “Girls’ Branch”
Residential Area+ Administrative Area
Residential Area+ Commercial Area
0
50 100
Meters North
4
2
3
1
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The Analytical Study
For testing the proposed approach in a real context, this section presents an analytical study.
Figure 11 displays the Figure-Ground status of the environment. Based on Figure 7, the research
proposes a module for assessing the impact of the design elements’ geometry on the site’s
evoked meaning. For this purpose, the research design is a matrix/module. The matrix discovers
the relationship between EU, columns A and B, and the principles of Figure-Ground Theory:
Row A, extending to that relationship’s effect on the site’s meaning received by its users.
Figure 11: Figure-Ground of the site
Source: The author
Outcomes and Discussion
At this stage, the author collected all the remarks based on site observation and the author’s
residency. The extracted characteristics remarks fill the matrix illustrated in (Figure 12). The
three axes of the proposed matrix are based on Column A, Row A, and Row B in Figures 8 and
9. These remarks can be summarized as follows:
The principle of good geometry has a direct relationship with some principles of
EU. This relationship can be regarded in, for example, Pattern with Pay attention
and Dominance with Re-familiarization. This direct relationship appears, also, in
the geometrical principles with the meanings evoked at the site. Once a good
pattern occurred, eight positive meanings and three controversial relationships
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emerged. The principle of Re-familiarization achieved full relationship with all the
principles of geometry.
Figure 12: The proposed matrix
Source: The author
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The principles, for instance, Social interaction and Re-familiarization, have a direct
relationship with all geometrical principles.
The geometrical principles in Row A have a semi-direct relationship with some
principles of EU. Both gradation and public time have a semi-direct relationship
because gradation is not considered in establishing the constructed environment. In
addition, this is a relationship caused by the missing linkage of urban areas, which
plays an important role in the gradation principle.
Although the meaning evoked in any designed place should reflect a direct
relationship with gestalt principles, a feeling of safety has a semi-direct relationship
with the main principles of, for example, dominance, composition, and repetition.
Conversely, the principles of EU, for example, legibility and experience quality,
have the same semi-direct relationship with an initial meaning for good city form.
Quality of experience and knowledge depend on the typologies of people illustrated
in the matrix, Column B. In re-habilitation or new development projects, the green
points on the matrix should be classified for each target group.
The principles of good geometry and EU have some controversial relationships
because of proximity versus legibility. The more proximity for several elements of
good city form is achieved, the less legible the features (node, landmark, path, and
edge) in the case study site. Generally, users create verification of proximity to
achieve maximum land value.
Conclusion: Lessons Learned
In the present era, the Egyptian urban population grows exponentially and synchronously with
increasing urban policies that affect development. In Cairo’s development, there is ambiguity
between Planning and Urban Design. An Urban Designer needs to undertake a stronger role in
the city’s construction, more necessarily in the first stage of specialization in city design. The
specialization has expected to isolate buildings more from the surroundings, even with all the
regulations imposed by city planners and designers. Those designers reclaim outdoor spaces as
unused or “leftover” spaces. From this point of view, the urban designer must deal with the urban
environment, and, while doing so, face several different challenges. First, urban design
professional practice is subject to the scientific method required to meet minimum standards.
These standards attempt to view urban spaces between buildings as spaces that can be shaped
into “urban rooms” with urban character. In addition, in the public realm, streets are vital. The
fields of interest encompass several issues beginning with the following: a) rehabilitating and
reclaiming existing urban communities: historic preservation in cities, favorite places, and
cultural areas, as well as development of new urban growth areas that have interest in
formulating development guidelines; b) the control of urbanity meets the principles of
sustainability effects in the urban areas over time, in light of the determinants of urban character
and architectural characteristics toward urban aesthetics. In addition, the control of urbanity sets
up the use of urban design principles for creating livable cities.
Several places, especially Cairo, Egypt, are missing out on the opportunity of being
beautiful. The principles of EU can be compatible with geometrical principles to create new
value in the Egyptian context. This relationship gives direct/semi-direct relationships to the
meanings of places that host users and their activities. Additionally, the most important issue in
urban design is public life in outdoor spaces. Some research literature deals with public life in
developed countries, while also considering that public life holds many experiences in
developing countries as well. Specifically, in the local experience of both informal and planned
communities reflect the context of a uniquely Egyptian public life. Furthermore, in Egypt, most
actions for developing informal settlements take place at the level of urban planning, not urban
design. As a fact mentioned in several studies, good geometry in public space adds value to
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people’s attitudes in outdoor spaces. Thus, this article contributes by examining the relationship
between the geometrical analyses of the Gestalt School and daily public life. This relationship
directly impacts the meaning of places that users gain in their public life. Using this relationship,
the researcher attempted to provide methods of raising city potentialities in a residential area of
Cairo, Egypt.
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ELSHATER: THE PRINCIPLES OF GESTALT LAWS AND EVERYDAY URBANISM
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dr. Abeer Elshater: Assistant Professor, Department of Urban Planning, Ain Shams University,
Cairo, Egypt
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The International Journal of the Constructed Environment explores, in a broad-ranging and interdisciplinary way, human configurations of the environment and the interactions between the constructed, social and natural environments. The journal brings together the work of practitioners, researchers, and teachers in the architectonic and landscape arts. The resulting articles weave between the empirical and the theoretical, research and its application, the ideal and the pragmatic. They document and reflection upon spaces which are in their orientations private, public, or commercial.
As well as papers of a traditional scholarly type, this journal invites presentations of practice—including experimental forms of documentation and exegeses that can with equal validity be interrogated through a process of academic peer review. This, for instance, might take the form of a series of images and plans, with explanatory notes that articulate with other, significantly similar or different and explicitly referenced places, sites or material objects.
The International Journal of the Constructed Environment is a peer-reviewed scholarly journal.
ISSN 2154-8587