From urban facilities to territorial infrastructures through their methods of representation

Abstract

Considering the importance of mobility in large contemporary cities, the study of their representation in two-dimensional plans is essential in order to design any intervention within them. The visibility of figures in motion or figures that cannot be seen at a glance is pictorially represented by the arrow sign. The reference models used here to explore urban mobility begin with the text The image of the City (1960) by Kevin Lynch and its signs on roads, edges, districts, nodes and landmarks in Boston, New Jersey and Los Angeles, and culminate with Urban infrastructure (1962) by Team X, in which a fragmented guide-text, opiniontext, illustration-text and fact-sheet about Louis I Kahn´s Philadelphia Plan (1953-1957) shows the arrow as a building material. Nowadays, these arrows are used in territorial infrastructures, particularly in the energy sector to indicate the generation, transportation and consumption of invisible resources transmitted via cables, as is the case with electricity, or waves in data transmission. Arrows also indicate protection, pollution and supply radii for these landscape interventions.