What if people draw the landscape? An environmental psychology approach to urban identity.

Environmental psychology is a wide interdisciplinary research field, risen in the ’60, in which psychological issues, urban planning theories and ethnographical studies meet and create an original perspective on the cognitive and physical relationship between people and the space. According to researches developed by Bateson, Brunswik, Gibson, Kaplan & Kaplan, Ittelson and Lynch people, experiencing and inhabiting a place – produce a cognitive mapping of the space and build a shared image of it. This common images represent the social identity of the territory in which history sedimenta-tions, values and symbols are embedded, recognized and perpetuated. The paper proposes an experimental experience made in the Milano-Bicocca district. The re-search project, according to the Francescato & Mebane model, adopts qualitative research methods: a representative test and a spatial task-based user test to bring out the image that social groups have. People were asked to draw the space tuned up to their experience and memory. Drawing therefore become, on one hand, the research tool to investigate the spatial and social perception of the territory from a bottom-up point of view and the expressive and common language to represent the visual and symbolic identity of the urban space, on the other.