Post-Colonial Wayfinding to the Landmark: Turns, Angles, and Visibility Across Time

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6239-632-6_8How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Wayfinding; Space Syntax; Post-Colonial; Landmark; Transitional Space

Abstract

Colonialism in Indonesia leaves a profound mark on various aspects, including urban and spatial development. Many cities in Indonesia, such as Surabaya, evolve in accordance with the remnants of colonial city structure. The post-colonial urban development significantly affects how we navigate within the city, impacting our wayfinding performance, especially in transitional spaces. Of the many post-colonial marks, some landmarks remain, shaping the transitional space for wayfinding support. However, over the years, the city’s morphology has evolved in accordance with the social dynamics of post-colonial society. With regard to the spatial transformation, this study aims to investigate the influence of postcolonialism in landmark wayfinding support. The study was conducted by analysing the city’s morphology over three different timelines using the space syntax analysis method. The analysis covered several aspects, such as route decision, structural access, visual orientation, and landmark visibility. All the mentioned aspects are examined using various spatial datasets such as segment analysis, visibility graphs, and step depth. The result indicated that the colonial main structure persists among newly formed densities which are generated from the urban dynamic. Wayfinding support for accessing landmarks does shift due to the increase in density, which disrupts the landmark’s visibility. These findings were indicated from the increasing average value of Visual Graph Analysis (VGA) despite varying results of segment analysis across time.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Adibah Nurul Yunisya
AU  - Edward Verbree
AU  - Sisi Zlatanova
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/04/13
TI  - Post-Colonial Wayfinding to the Landmark: Turns, Angles, and Visibility Across Time
BT  - Proceedings of the International Conference on Architectural Research and Design (ARDC 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 102
EP  - 117
SN  - 2667-128X
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6239-632-6_8
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6239-632-6_8
ID  - Yunisya2026
ER  -