Phenomenological Heritage Master Thesis Abstract, Completed 2025

THESIS ABSTRACT

In four separate papers (two of which have been presented at conferences), this thesis introduces the terms ‘phenomenological heritage’ and ‘navigability’ and shows how these terms can help us develop new technologies towards addressing a blind spot in current scores and assessments of the livability of cities. This blind spot is the exclusion of first-person lived experience in our reliance on scores of third-person livability. Third-person scores are means or averages of first-person experience, and yet as of now there is no way for a person to directly contribute to this average from their unique position. Instead, third person scores are taken as if all third person experiences were homogenous. Clearly, however, they are not: Our affordances align with our unique developmental paths through life, and this results in unique experiences of shared regularities. While we can never model or measure the process of that developmental experience in full, we can increase reportability of affordances at the level of individual experience such that the individual experiencer can represent their experience for themselves and choose to share it rather than have it assumed to be in common with the representations of others. This deepens the need for heritage studies in city development. We now accept that cities have heritages or that heritages are parts of cities, but what we do not notice is that heritages are different according to each individual living them. In other words, heritage is tied to the developmental trajectory of a life and its affordances, and these unique heritages must be accounted for if we are, for example, to develop a more accurate score of a city’s livability. Cities are experienced differently according to the path through which they are accessed, not only geographically and materially, but also historically and psychologically. In other words, to assess the livability of a city, individuals require a way to assess the city and its heritage from their own vantage point and document their own trajectories of affordance from their position. Examples are provided and potential technologies are suggested for what this could mean and how it is possible.

NOTES ON SCOPE AND STRUCTURE

1.     It is stated often throughout this thesis and its papers, but it needs to be stated here at the forefront, too: This sort of assessment and the terms used here are not meant to be taken as descriptive or absolute of the ongoing subjects being assessed. Rather, navigabilities are models and maps created towards helping us increase our collective sharing and understanding of the many lived experiences that are living heritages and cities.

2.     Over the course of writing this thesis, some of these papers have been presented in different forms at different conferences around the world and are in the conference proceedings for those conferences towards the research I did for writing this master. These papers have not been submitted to any journals yet or published anywhere official. I do plan to submit them to journals soon. Therefore, I am preserving their different styles and formats.

3.     Importantly, these ideas are towards an ecological reorientation, even if that is not discussed in full here. The scope of this thesis is mainly on humans and the urban spaces they create, but I see this as pertaining to all beings in cities and believe this can be implemented towards better understanding cognitive heritages at not-only-human scales.

4.     There are many ways of defining phenomenology and there would be much more to say about postphenomenology as it relates here, but I’ve had to confine the discussion thus far to a simple rendering of this rich and ongoing tradition.

5. All references to ethnography here are auto-ethnographical except when stated explicitly.

One:  Phenomenological heritage: livability and the nested navigability of cities  

Two:  Beyond dichotomy: expanding walkability into navigability       

Three:  Reorienting ecologically: Towards assessing individual lived experience within urban and technological spaces  

Four:   Developing livability and green space within technological landscapes                                 

PHENOMENOLOGICAL HERITAGE

The Nested Navigability of Cities

Cities as lived experience.

Cities are usually seen as material spaces, but they are also phenomenological spaces—inherited spaces that, even while shared, are experienced in unique ways according to the developmental trajectory and embodied sensuality of the person encountering them. Until now, this has not been taken into direct consideration in urban planning. This paper offers the term phenomenological heritage to address this blind spot and sketches a framework for how we might include such heritages in city development practices. In so doing, it orients heritage as an important shaper of the future rather than something only in our past, and expands terms like ‘intangible heritage’ to include personal spaces of affordance—the mental, emotional, and historical trajectories inhabitants are born into, find and traverse due to their unique, ongoing, spatiotemporal and experiential position. After introducing phenomenological heritage and briefly sketching how this new term fits into its traditions, the paper introduces Navigability as a helpful phenomenological heuristic and shows how it complements and addresses a blind spot in how we understand the role of heritage in our cities and their livability. It also offers auto-ethnographic examples and potentials of what this could change in practice.