Urban environmental color: experience, sense and identity in the contemporary city

Abstract

In the contemporary world, the recent urban transformations represent new material and contextual conditions, therefore, there are new ways to use the urban space that presume a change in the concept and appreciation of these manners and for this reason, of the city as well. The present urban conditions confronted in a game of tensions focus on the nature of the urban experience with the purpose of recovering it in a broad sense, and more specifically, as an essential place for urban life. In this context, the role of environmental color is vital since it suggests environments that promote ways of understanding and experiencing the space being this a primary element in the strengthening of urban life and the idea of the city as a collective space to inhabit. The city as a collective place, public event or social life environment expresses evident changes in the urban space which reinforce the idea that this space matches the ideas of the ?city? according to different times. Moreover, the idea of inhabiting keeps its meaning since the urban experience is mainly the combination of physical and mental facts not only material but imaginary as well.The feeling of color and the chromatic environment are part of the urban experience and take part in the everyday city life, being at the same time an aspect of its history. In the last decades, the environmental color, that unique and general chromatic impression of the urban environment, has shared and taken part actively in the changes of societies that become evident in different ways in the city and its places.The original function of colors is to represent concepts so as to establish a communicative relationship between the individual and the physical environment. As a consequence, the chromatic experience depends on the quantitative and qualitative interaction of the diverse components and contexts that take part in it. The environmental color, as a psycho-physical phenomenon, is perceived together with other variables such as textures, chromatic contrasts, cesías, the material and aspect of limits, the position of the observer and the manner and speed of movement among others.Thus, color in the city appears as essential information that stimulates the perceptive channels that lead to action, recognition and visual tours that promote different behaviors. In the chromatic field this takes on foundation when color is considered to serve different functions since it identifies and locates in space and time, describes the properties that define its character and possible uses and categorizes characteristics among other actions. In addition, cities are dynamic organisms which do not change or update and transform themselves. Moreover, their environmental color is the reflection of a single moment and can change with time according to the different variables that influence those changes. This unique and typical dynamics is the source of its polysemy and attraction.Within this framework, the performance of environmental color with its iconic-linguistic potential is essential since it has been enhanced by new production ways and physical and digital resolution systems. These, in turn, increase the capacity of environmental color to inform, suggest and develop synaesthetic associations and create environments bringing about the experience of the city and the promotion of urban life which are vital for its identity, design and construction.