Communication Through Visualization: The Purpose, Role and Style of Visualizations in Urban Planning

Abstract

Visualization is used to convey information to communicate a message and in its all-different forms they help us to understand our cities and make it available for analysis. They increase our capacity of comprehension by making useful conceptual shortcuts in our understanding to have a glimpse of “what’s happening” in our cities. The article analyses the use of visualization in planning discipline, how it was used and perceived throughout the planning tradition. The objective is to analyse the role of visualizations, how they are used to establish dialog, at what stage it is useful and effective to introduce them into the dialog. It further investigates the style of visualizations by analysing the basic design principles and as well as visual perception and cognition fundamentals to clarify what effects the efficacy of the visualization in traditional and digital visualization.