Map Design of Street Network for Urban Planning Based on User Centered-Designed

Abstract

This paper, first time presented at the 26th International Cartographic Conference in Dresden, describes the first step of
a research project that aims to establish a standard set of symbols for the cartographic representations of urban regions.
The first step was a case study focused on the street network of Pinhais municipality, Paraná, Brazil. To achieve our
research goals we had defined methodological steps such as: (1) studying and learning how urban planners develop the
analysis of the streets network; (2) understanding the geographic knowledge the users need in order to verify how is the
function of each street in the network; (3) defining the geographic information about the urban area that is necessary
for the analysis of the street network hierarchy; (4) designing the maps that will represent this geographic information
defined on step 3; and (5) defining and applying user test. The test is based on tasks related to scenarios that are defined
as the methodological steps the urban planners accomplish when they analyze the function of the streets in the network.
The users performed the tasks using maps generated with the proposed standard set of symbols. A ‘focus group’ was
set based on the results of the user’s test. One important conclusion of this work was the understanding of how the
users acquired their spatial knowledge, which served as a base to form their decisions. We got to this conclusion based
on our research results as a premise for every cartographic solution design, that is, every design decision demands to
take into account the users’ needs and requirements.