What determines a boundary for navigating a complex street network: evidence from London taxi drivers

Spatial boundaries play an important role in defining spaces, structuring memory and supporting planning during navigation. Recent models of hierarchical route planning use boundaries to plan efficiently first across regions and then within regions. However, it remains unclear which structures (e.g. parks, rivers, major streets, etc.) will form salient boundaries in real-world cities. This study tested licensed London taxi drivers, who are unique in their ability to navigate London flexibly without physical navigation aids. They were asked to indicate streets they considered as boundaries for London districts or dividing areas. It was found that agreement on boundary streets varied considerably, from some boundaries providing almost no consensus to some boundaries consistently noted as boundaries. Examining the properties of the streets revealed that a key factor in the consistent boundaries was the near rectilinear nature of the designated region (e.g. Mayfair and Soho) and the distinctiveness of parks (e.g. Regent's Park). Surprisingly, the River Thames was not consistently considered as a boundary. These findings provide insight into types of environmental features that lead to the perception of explicit boundaries in large-scale urban space. Because route planning models assume that boundaries are used to segregate the space for efficient planning, these results help make predictions of the likely planning demands of different routes in such complex large-scale street networks. Such predictions could be used to highlight information used for navigation guidance applications to enable more efficient hierarchical planning and learning of large-scale environments.

London Transformed: John Nash e l'ibrido progettuale

Nella prima metà dell'Ottocento i ‘London Improvements' realizzano trasformazioni urbanistiche che testimoniano un nuovo atteggiamento rispetto alla città in Europa, all'indomani del trauma delle guerre napoleoniche, nel confronto col nuovo assestamento post-bellico. Questi progetti sono da attribuire alle abilità creative di John Nash, cui dobbiamo i pioneristici lavori di Regent's Park e Regent Street, che lo consacrano come ‘architect of the Picturesque'. Qui, il Pittoresco travalica la definizione di categoria estetica, si concretizza nell'espressione architettonica e trova scenografica applicazione nella progettazione urbanistica. In quale modo e in quale fase John Nash adotta il Pittoresco e, soprattutto, quali sono le ragioni di tale scelta?

China Miéville

China Miéville is a British author and a significant writer of Fantastika fiction in the 21st century, his work showcasing a desire to write across a variety of different forms and genres. Miéville is associated with the writing of the New Weird movement, although he does not describe his work in this manner anymore. Born on 6 September 1972 in Norwich, UK, Miéville was brought up and has lived in London for much of his life. Miéville taught English in Egypt for a year before attending university. Here Miéville developed an interest in politics, especially Marxism and socialism, which continues to influence his academic life and creative work. After studying social anthropology at Cambridge, Miéville gained a master’s in 1995 and a PhD in international relations from the London School for Economics in 2001. Miéville found his own political viewpoint being drawn firmly toward Marxism due to feeling dissatisfied with the postmodern theories he was exposed to during his studies. Miéville’s first novel, King Rat, was published in 1998, but it was the following Bas-Lag trilogy (Perdido Street Station, The Scar, and Iron Council) that cemented his reputation as a writer. Miéville wrote Perdido Street Station alongside his PhD studies. His work has won many awards, including the Hugo Award for The City & The City, the Arthur C. Clarke Award an unprecedented three times, the British Fantasy Award twice, and Locus Awards four times across different categories. Miéville has been the guest of honor at multiple conventions and conferences, was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fiction in 2018, and has held positions in both politics and creative writing in UK and US higher education institutions. Socialist politics is a constant theme throughout Miéville’s biography and creative work. Miéville was previously a member of the Socialist Workers Party in the United Kingdom, leaving the party in 2013 in disgust at the leadership’s attempted suppression and refusal to deal with rape allegations against a party member. He stood for election as a candidate for the Socialist Alliance in the 2001 general election for the constituency of Regent’s Park and Kensington North. Alive with creative world-building and experimental representations of monstrous bodies, Miéville’s work challenges the borders between categorization and presents genres as literary spaces that can be both politically engaging and socially relevant.

“On Deposit”: animal acquisition at the Zoological Society of London, 1870–1910 (Patron's review)

When the zoological gardens in Regent's Park opened to the public in 1847, they immediately became very popular, providing a source of both entertainment and instruction for visitors and a vital stream of revenue for the Zoological Society of London. However, the ongoing popularity of the gardens was endangered by the consistently high mortality rates which afflicted the Society's animals throughout the course of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. This paper examines how the Society's efforts to combat this challenge led them to foster and sustain relationships which centred on the act of animal “deposit”. Often a temporary arrangement, somewhat like a loan, depositing involved a range of individuals involved in the animal trade, including commercial animal dealers and the naturalist Lionel Walter Rothschild. Through the system of depositing, the Zoological Society became the custodians of a wide range of animals which they could exhibit. However, their lack of ownership of these animals, combined with a lack of knowledge about how to care for them, ultimately constrained the Society's management of them and impeded its longer-term goals of reducing both animal mortality and the impact of high mortality rates on the menagerie's ability to attract visitors and sustain its economy.

Aldous Huxley and the “Brave New World” of Architectural Modernism

Using Aldous Huxley’s prolific body of architectural criticism, this chapter argues that Huxley evaluated political concepts—individualism, liberalism, uniformity—through analyzing the creations and rhetoric of the modern movement. While his brother Julian sponsored modernist animal housing at the Regent’s Park and Whipsnade Zoos as part of his efforts to imagine a more egalitarian Britain, Aldous reconfigured the structuring role of the household in the novel. His foundational dystopian narrative, Brave New World, merges fiction and criticism, as Huxley stages debates between literary advocates and a World Controller. What emerges is a politics of medium, whereby literature serves as a vehicle for liberalism. Against the uniformity and “over-organization” of architectural modernism, Huxley demonstrates the capaciousness and flexibility of the novel as a genre.