Both the atmosphere and the quality of cities have been receiving increasing attention these days. The cities of today are evaluated not only by what they have, but also by what they are—how they “feel.” However, the qualitative aspects that we feel in cities are so vague that they are difficult to quantify or visualize. To address this, the authors have been implementing studies related to “urban modality,” which indicates the total mode of a city. Urban modality manifests itself as not only as that which is visible—buildings, trees, people, traffic and so on; but also by that which is invisible—the sounds, smells, breezes, and general atmosphere and feel of a city.
In order to depict urban modality in a visual manner, we conducted a city walk. The walk was conducted on February 2, 2017 in Yaizu, Shizuoka Prefecture, with 40 participants. Each participant walked around the city with a smart phone to input and transmit onomatopoeia—their descriptions and their impressions at the time (on a five-point scale)—using an application named “100ninmap.” The data were transmitted to a server along with the locations obtained by the smart phone, and visualized on a map. We were thus able to obtain a total of 533 pieces of data. By classifying onomatopoeia based on the five senses, and preparing illustrations based on subject expression, we developed the “Yaizu Onomatopoeia Map.”
It was made clear by a questionnaire survey that the participants of the city walk enjoyed finding onomatopoeias. In addition, we verified what impressions people received from the onomatopoeia map in a comparison experiment with general sightseeing maps. The results revealed that the onomatopoeia map transmitted the atmosphere of the city very well and made people want to walk around the city, even though the onomatopoeia map was less detailed than existing sightseeing maps. This indicated that our goal of developing a new sightseeing map through visualization of urban modality was basically met.
Next, we analyzed the obtained text data itself and showed that the data were quantifiable and that they offered information about urban modality. First, we categorized data by which sense the participants grasped urban modality and by what kind of representation they used—such as imitative words and mimetic words. It transpired that more information about sounds is captured by using onomatopoeia than by using free words. Next, we classified the subjects indicated by onomatopoeic words. Categories obtained by the classification reflect the characteristics of Yaizu city. Then we calculated a correlation coefficient between use and impression evaluations for each category. Categories related to foods are positively correlated with impressions, while categories related to noise are negatively correlated with it.
The research method used in this study to make maps based on city walks using onomatopoeia can be adapted to other cities for depicting and analyzing urban modality.
