Making Isovists Syntactic: Isovist Integration Analysis

Abstract

Isovists and isovist fields are of interest to space syntax in that they offer a way of addressing the relationship between the viewer and their immediate spatial environment, however, in the form described by Benedikt (Benedikt, 1979) they are essentially non-syntactic. All the measures he proposes and then plots as fields are locally defined, and are independent of the state of the field in other locations. This paper presents a method for integrating isovists, based on the connectivities of a set of isovists represented as a graph, and allows global relational measures to be developed which are attributable to each viewer location, but which are essentially relational and so syntactic in their definition. We make a comparison of axial line and convex space integration analysis with the isovist integration analysis using case studies of both building and urban configurations. We show that isovist integration displays an excellent correlation with observed people movement, including a more detailed illustration of space usage than conventional space syntax analysis. 1